Development screenshots

[SarahWalker]

Can you guess what's going on here? (other than JPEG artifacts obviously)

pcem_mystery.jpg (166.19 KiB) Viewed 30115 times

[leilei]

You're debugging the LOD calculation on Rage Pro emulation?

Squishing one of my old ATI Rage Pro Quake2 screenshots shows a similar dither pattern/color reduction (however gamma was applied manually here, i don't know where my ungamma'd ragepro shot went)

[SarahWalker]

No, not that exciting sadly. Another clue :

pcem_mystery2.jpg (130.19 KiB) Viewed 29990 times

[omarsis81]

No, not that exciting sadly. Another clue :
pcem_mystery2.jpg

There are some scanlines in the upper part of the screen.
Looks like a high res screen, hmm, maybe Voodoo3?

[iwasaperson]

3DFX SLI?

[omarsis81]

3DFX SLI?

Oh my god if it is! But with a Pentium 233 the difference would be negligible

[leilei]

Sure it will. Two cards on two different PCI slots helps overcome some of the bottleneck. There's also the 1024x768 res to play with with the additional memory available.

However I just hope there's support for 3 or 4 CPU threads for this kind of thing...

Voodoo3 doesn't have an interleaving effect (and its registers clash with V2's so emulating that would be a bit complicated at this point)

[SarahWalker]

iwasaperson wins.

pcem_voodoo2_sli.jpg (156.77 KiB) Viewed 29921 times

pcem_obsidian100db.png (44.98 KiB) Viewed 29921 times

The render thread count is per-card, so you can have 4 render threads in total (plus 2 FIFO threads). So you will need at least a Core i7 to run it flat out.

If you just want the resolution though, setting 1 render thread per card is often fast enough on quad core systems.

I did look at Banshee/V3 a couple of months ago, but concluded it was probably too much work for v13. Maybe for v15...

[omarsis81]

Wow, I'm very impressed with Voodoo2 SLI. The day we have the Pentium II we will have plenty of retrogaming to play with!
Tell me, how similar or not the Banshee and the Voodoo3 are? I know they have different chips (Banshee and Avenger), but not very much beyond that.

PS. Thanks for sharing those screenshots with us

[SarahWalker]

The 3D section of Banshee/V3 (the two are mostly the same) is very similar to V2. The 2D section would require quite a bit of work.

[ecksemmess]

The render thread count is per-card, so you can have 4 render threads in total (plus 2 FIFO threads). So you will need at least a Core i7 to run it flat out.

If you just want the resolution though, setting 1 render thread per card is often fast enough on quad core systems.

I'm a bit confused by the implied conflation of quad-core with 4-thread systems here. My i7 is quad-core, 8-thread, via Hyperthreading. For purposes of this SLI emulation, can I expect to get away with using 2 render threads per card, with the help of the Hyperthreading?

[SarahWalker]

Probably! I don't have a system with HyperThreading so I don't know how well it performs.

[leilei]

On my quad I haven't noticed a difference between 1 and 2 threads on SLI... probably need to try something fillrate-eating first. The CPU monitor definitely shows all 4 cores getting their use

EDIT: Hmm there's performance differences in the emulation for V2 SLI's if the thread's changed. 2 threads are definitely faster than 1 and shows off the scanlines even more. 3DMark2001 Pro Fillrate test @ 640x480x16 tested (I hit 70-90%s there on P200MMX, 144.2 MTexels/s). SLI is still detected with 1 thread, but doesn't seem to be much faster than a solo V2 there guest-wise...

[gen_angry]

Probably! I don't have a system with HyperThreading so I don't know how well it performs.

If you're up for it: can PM me a build and I can test it on my 6700K if you'd like, or if you know of a working guide to compile this in windows?

Otherwise, I'm not 100% sure how to compile this as I'm a scrub that's only ever worked with Visual Studio.

[JosepMa]

I am attaching some screenshots of the SLI in action.
Image quality of the screenshots is reduced due to jpeg artifacts due to attachment size limits.

The game is GPolice being run at 1024x768 without issues.

On the task manager, the different threads can be seen. Note that since PCEm does not attach application threads to cpu threads, the whole cpu usage is distributed between all threads, even though they are mostly keep on the same one. (And also note that this CPU is 4 cores, 8 threads).

PCem Video mode is OpenGL. Graphics card is a Geforce GTX 1060. Screen dpi increased to 125% (high resolution display).

[SarahWalker]

Oh no! We're in teh Matrox

[SarahWalker]

More...

[SarahWalker]

Still some bugs, like the player rendering here :

[SarahWalker]

Yet more...

[omarsis81]

Ohhhh boy I missed those dev pics! Thanks for sharing Sarah! What Matrox card are you working on? The Mystique?

[leilei]

Looks like Mystique yeah. Wonder if it could run Sento/Creep Clash (for the Impression)


I've never had a Mystique so this'll be interesting to try... I have "brute-forcing the Techland MSI MiniGL on all GL games" ideas in mind, imagining the alpha stippled lightmaps...

[A. Naim]

Except for a few minor graphical glitches, it looks perfectly working - Although I never had a Matrox. Really cool.

[SarahWalker]

Worked on the Mystique a bit more, so here are some more screenshots. I have to admit I'm getting slightly fond of this weird stipply card, which is probably a sign of major illness or something.

mystique_croc.png (101.65 KiB) Viewed 25527 times

mystique_gpolice.png (140.47 KiB) Viewed 25527 times

mystique_incoming.png (187.15 KiB) Viewed 25527 times

mystique_turok.png (367.23 KiB) Viewed 25527 times

[omarsis81]

beautiful shots! thanks for sharing them

[Xanarki]

Pretty cool! There's a game called Motorhead that was heavily recommended to use the Mystique. It'd be interesting to see how that runs one day.

[leilei]

Given the graphics and timeframe, Motorhead's probably more for G200 and not Mystique. I also hope you're not confusing Motorhead's SGL backend for the Matrox M3D which was a PowerVR card (and there, it substituted blending functions for premultiplied alpha blends).

Wonder if that the Keen4 jerkiness and some MGA windows driver features (pixel-doubled mouse cursor etc) are emulated too

Noticed the fog looks solid. All I know is that the G100A does support fog with fading (but still stipples texture alpha)

[Xanarki]

I actually came back here to edit my post but too late lol.

Motorhead was actually advertised along with the Millennium G200 and not the Mystique. Got them Ms mixed up there.

[SA1988]

Pardon my question, but does the currently in development mystique (on Sarah's end) work on win2k or something outside DOS? I know it's a bit early to talk about this.

[omarsis81]

Pardon my question, but does the currently in development mystique (on Sarah's end) work on win2k or something outside DOS? I know it's a bit early to talk about this.

turok, gpolice, incoming and croc are windows 9x games, so yes

[SA1988]

And I hope it won't have that annoying glitch like the mach64 and virge have in win2000. Pheraps I should open a bug report in the appropriate section about this.
Edit: Bug report done.