PCem

Out of curiosity, may I humbly ask if there any news you can share, about any new feature you're working on?
Thank you and keep up the good work.

Go on then...
3D at 1600x1200 is fun.

That's great news! Thanks for sharing.
Please keep us updated on further developments, when you get the chance.

The Banshee was my first 3D card that I purchased sometime in 1999. I remember flipping through magazines as to whether buy the Diamond Fusion or the Creative one

I had a Creative Banshee, but that was in late 2000 when it was obsolete and it cost £10. And I had to source the drivers of an old coverdisc. And my P120 bottlenecked every game I ran on it. Those were the days...

Mine was a Eon Lilith (supposedly the earliest Banshee to market). I haven't used it in nearly two decades (late 2006 was when i've put it away for good) and do know it has driver feature limitations and weird bugs (like corrupted lightmaps in Serious Sam) and never got as much driver polish as the V3 did. (or marketing. V3 was formerly Banshee2, then the STB thing happened, and Banshee never joined the refreshed 3dfx product lineup - just V2 "1000" and variants of V3s)

Banshee will be a nice addition.
May I ask if you've hooked a 2D engine to the Voodoo renderer or you did a complete overhaul ?

Personaly, I jumped from Voodoo2 to Voodoo3

Same 3D renderer; why reinvent the wheel?

It's also a little visually different than V1/V2.

Mainly Banshee defaults to 2x2 dither for a lot of Glide stuff in lower resolutions, and by that, you don't get to see most of the dither subtraction V1/V2 would do (on real hardware) and there's the new smaller filter so it looks a little cleaner. There's no easy way to change this with stock drivers, but there's some env vars and third-party tools (V Control) that can force it similarly to V3's 3dfx Tools.

There's also no multitexture support of course, so a couple of games (Unreal, Half-Life) should look a little brighter by not dropping to a subtraction blend for a combine path.

I'm a bit late here, but I'm ecstatic to see progress on the Banshee. After I read the initial list, that was the card I was hoping for and low n behold, here it is. The Banshee was the first 3D card my family bought for Christmas '98 and so I have some fond memories with it.

Never owned any 3DFX product, even today I always wanted one but even today they're all pricey. Got a P100 system waiting for a Voodoo 1 to throw in.

Went from ATI EGA, Trident 8900D, I think a Cirrus Logic?, Rage 128 Ultra, 9000 Pro, 9600XT and up from there.

gen_angry wrote: ↑Sun 04 Oct, 2020 1:09 am Never owned any 3DFX product, even today I always wanted one but even today they're all pricey. Got a P100 system waiting for a Voodoo 1 to throw in.

Went from ATI EGA, Trident 8900D, I think a Cirrus Logic?, Rage 128 Ultra, 9000 Pro, 9600XT and up from there.

I'm using the original 9000 in my current '98 rig, and honestly, it is extremely compatible with most games I throw at it from the Win9x era. Not too new for those late DOS/early Win95 games, but not too old for those late Win98/early WinXP games.

Xanarki wrote: ↑Sun 04 Oct, 2020 3:10 am

gen_angry wrote: ↑Sun 04 Oct, 2020 1:09 am Never owned any 3DFX product, even today I always wanted one but even today they're all pricey. Got a P100 system waiting for a Voodoo 1 to throw in.

Went from ATI EGA, Trident 8900D, I think a Cirrus Logic?, Rage 128 Ultra, 9000 Pro, 9600XT and up from there.

I'm using the original 9000 in my current '98 rig, and honestly, it is extremely compatible with most games I throw at it from the Win9x era. Not too new for those late DOS/early Win95 games, but not too old for those late Win98/early WinXP games.

Yea, those things shred. The whole 9000 series line is great for that era. It's not an MX piece of trash and doesn't seem to have that expensive GeForce Ti/Voodoo ebay tax. I just built a Northwood P4 2.0 with a AIW 9800 Pro from ebay haggling/local deals. Hard drives are a little fucky (two 80GBs, they've suffered through a lot of shit over the years, multiple PSU failures, bumps, being moved across Canada twice, and surprisingly no bad sectors yet) but it runs everything I've thrown at it that actually runs on Win98 at 1280x1024 res.

As a side note: do not defrag a nearly-full 80GB harddrive (images of all my games) with a P4 in Win98 and actually expect it to finish quickly. it's just passing it's 6th hour and at 51%....

The 9000 falls into the 'haha no' unlikelyness for being too fast for today's CPUs to emulate decently though (even if it's a watered down 8500 and not actually part of the nVidia-busting R300 line)

There probably isn't a lot in that era which could be reasonably emulated for performance reasons, though maybe the SiS IGPs since they can perform worse than a PCX2 and have the most interestingly bad texture filtering involving multitexture combines...

leilei wrote: ↑Sun 04 Oct, 2020 3:29 am The 9000 falls into the 'haha no' unlikelyness for being too fast for today's CPUs to emulate decently though (even if it's a watered down 8500 and not actually part of the nVidia-busting R300 line)

There probably isn't a lot in that era which could be reasonably emulated for performance reasons, though maybe the SiS IGPs since they can perform worse than a PCX2 and have the most interestingly bad texture filtering involving multitexture combines...

Oh I know, I wouldn't even expect a 7000 to be a possibility for a very very long time, if ever. The complexity is just incredible at that point and just beyond past it. Just... reminiscing a bit I guess

I'm just attaching a picture of the SiS filter because I know it's a guilty pleasure for somebody (the multitexture is enabled in the middle section)

Maybe some fun Voodoo interpreter patches (not committed upstream for accuracy reasons) playing with other GPU's filtering could be a thing...

gen_angry wrote: ↑Sun 04 Oct, 2020 3:25 am

Xanarki wrote: ↑Sun 04 Oct, 2020 3:10 am

gen_angry wrote: ↑Sun 04 Oct, 2020 1:09 am Never owned any 3DFX product, even today I always wanted one but even today they're all pricey. Got a P100 system waiting for a Voodoo 1 to throw in.

Went from ATI EGA, Trident 8900D, I think a Cirrus Logic?, Rage 128 Ultra, 9000 Pro, 9600XT and up from there.

I'm using the original 9000 in my current '98 rig, and honestly, it is extremely compatible with most games I throw at it from the Win9x era. Not too new for those late DOS/early Win95 games, but not too old for those late Win98/early WinXP games.

Yea, those things shred. The whole 9000 series line is great for that era. It's not an MX piece of trash and doesn't seem to have that expensive GeForce Ti/Voodoo ebay tax. I just built a Northwood P4 2.0 with a AIW 9800 Pro from ebay haggling/local deals. Hard drives are a little fucky (two 80GBs, they've suffered through a lot of shit over the years, multiple PSU failures, bumps, being moved across Canada twice, and surprisingly no bad sectors yet) but it runs everything I've thrown at it that actually runs on Win98 at 1280x1024 res.

As a side note: do not defrag a nearly-full 80GB harddrive (images of all my games) with a P4 in Win98 and actually expect it to finish quickly. it's just passing it's 6th hour and at 51%....

I've been using the same hard drive for 11 months and fingers crossed, no problems yet. I did have a problem with slight stuttering in games (the hard drive would have a weird "power save" mode in which it shuts off when not used). Someone suggested that I use HDAT to shut off the feature, and that fixed it. Apparently it uses slightly more energy when plugged in, but, doesn't reduce the life on the hard drive. I'm hoping since it isn't constantly powering down, it'll actually increase the life expectancy.

I figured the 9800 would be too "new", I might have to look into that. But I prefer the P3 CPUs as opposed to P4 and not sure how that'd match up. But yeah, there's no point in emulating such a late series. It's perfect for physical builds as is.

Xanarki wrote: ↑Fri 09 Oct, 2020 4:21 pm

gen_angry wrote: ↑Sun 04 Oct, 2020 3:25 am

Xanarki wrote: ↑Sun 04 Oct, 2020 3:10 am

I'm using the original 9000 in my current '98 rig, and honestly, it is extremely compatible with most games I throw at it from the Win9x era. Not too new for those late DOS/early Win95 games, but not too old for those late Win98/early WinXP games.

Yea, those things shred. The whole 9000 series line is great for that era. It's not an MX piece of trash and doesn't seem to have that expensive GeForce Ti/Voodoo ebay tax. I just built a Northwood P4 2.0 with a AIW 9800 Pro from ebay haggling/local deals. Hard drives are a little fucky (two 80GBs, they've suffered through a lot of shit over the years, multiple PSU failures, bumps, being moved across Canada twice, and surprisingly no bad sectors yet) but it runs everything I've thrown at it that actually runs on Win98 at 1280x1024 res.

As a side note: do not defrag a nearly-full 80GB harddrive (images of all my games) with a P4 in Win98 and actually expect it to finish quickly. it's just passing it's 6th hour and at 51%....

I've been using the same hard drive for 11 months and fingers crossed, no problems yet. I did have a problem with slight stuttering in games (the hard drive would have a weird "power save" mode in which it shuts off when not used). Someone suggested that I use HDAT to shut off the feature, and that fixed it. Apparently it uses slightly more energy when plugged in, but, doesn't reduce the life on the hard drive. I'm hoping since it isn't constantly powering down, it'll actually increase the life expectancy.

I figured the 9800 would be too "new", I might have to look into that. But I prefer the P3 CPUs as opposed to P4 and not sure how that'd match up. But yeah, there's no point in emulating such a late series. It's perfect for physical builds as is.

Yea, a 9800 Pro would be bottlenecked severely by a P-III. Even this P4 bottlenecks it pretty heavily, I've got a 2.4C (with HT) coming to replace it which should be a little bit better. Ended up dual booting 98SE and XP since many of the 2002-2005 games run better on XP and it's a way around the 137GB barrier without relying on a patch (this system doesn't like file system patches for some reason, they all make it unstable).

But na, it's not too new for a 98SE rig. It has working drivers, doesn't have that weird PCI-e to AGP bridge that always caused issues, and as long as you get a 256bit version of the card (most 256MB cards are 128bit) - it'll wreck anything that 98 can legit throw at it. Might be wonky for DOS/Win 3.1 if you've got that on there though - there is zero support for anything above like a Mach64 or thereabouts.

In any case, to get back on topic - that Banshee support looks pretty awesome.

On the rarely tapped software-rendered PowerVR front, WashingtonDC (Dreamcast emulator, 3-clause BSD) has something happening now. PVR2 CLX2 yes, but all early PowerVR chips have similar architecture anyway

Hahaha very clever that Washington DC name for a DreamCast emulator

Any stuff/info about the Rage XL? It's allegedly a better Rage Pro with better alpha blending...

Would love to see this emulated one day in the future. Was my first agp GPU:

That's a RIVA128-based card and that core is mentioned in the OP. Main issue I see with getting those cards into PCem is the lack of good register-level documentation - nVidia was always very secretive about how their stuff works. My first nVidia card was a GeForce2 MX400 that replaced my Diamond Monster Fusion (Voodoo Banshee) card.

To add something a little bit more realistic to the abundance of wishful thinking in this thread, I would like to suggest to revisit the graphics cards from the early to mid 80s.

For instance, it would make a lot of sense to decouple the monitor type selection (RGBI, green, amber, etc.) from the supported sync frequencies, because

• The earliest MDA cards actually had the RGBI lines wired up and could display a 16 color text mode on RGBI monitors that could sync to the signal. Not supporting that in an emulator sounds like an artificial limitation.
• A Multisync monitor that supports EGA frequencies might still be limited to the 16 RGBI colors. (I'm not quite sure about this one. Chances are that it already works if you select a CGA screen and switch to a high-res EGA mode via direct programming.)
• Combining an EGA card with a monochrome screen currently implies MDA frequencies, which prevents the emulation of an IBM 5155 portable (amber CGA screen) with an EGA card. Actual monochrome EGA screens existed, as well, e.g. for the Amstrad PC1640.
• The currently unsupported HGC+ (Hercules card with RAM fonts) is essentially a superset of the HGC and a subset of the InColor, both of which are supported. Emulating it would boil down to using the InColor emulation with an MDA screen while locking a few registers.

omarsis81 wrote: ↑Thu 06 Aug, 2020 10:18 pm

PentiumMMX wrote: ↑Thu 06 Aug, 2020 2:05 am how about the Number Nine Imagine 128 or the Video 7 VGA 1024i. How hard would it be to add either of those graphics cards?

The Nine Imagine 128 is for editing and CAD I believe and those cards are more difficult to implement, and really worthless. Besides, we all want PCem to play old games, right? If you want image editing or CAD you would go with modern software

I had one of these cards for my first PC build. It was a 586 133MHZ and the Imagine 128 card. It was Windows 3.11 machine, and the marketing snagged me. It was ok card, but was so tight on my mobo that it would pop out of the VL-B port.

Benedikt wrote: ↑Sat 06 Mar, 2021 11:55 am To add something a little bit more realistic to the abundance of wishful thinking in this thread, I would like to suggest to revisit the graphics cards from the early to mid 80s.

The 80s card I'd have liked to implement is the ATI Graphics Solution (aka Small Wonder), but when I tried I found the refresh rate emulation wasn't accurate enough for the supplied utility to detect the monitor type.

JohnElliott wrote: ↑Wed 10 Mar, 2021 12:43 pm The 80s card I'd have liked to implement is the ATI Graphics Solution (aka Small Wonder), but when I tried I found the refresh rate emulation wasn't accurate enough for the supplied utility to detect the monitor type.

The ATI Graphics Solution – I have a "Small Wonder" v.1 – is a card that I am interested in, as well, but I think that getting the emulation right would already be quite complicated.
I am particularly interested in how it does the 132-column text mode with the narrower font, how exactly it does the CGA emulation – presumably with some sort of PWM – and whether there are any "secret" video modes.

Can I suggest NeoMagic adapters and the S3 Trio3D adapter?

No you may not

Thanks for the reply. Very inciteful.