This is the home of latest and greatest release of zeckensack's Glide wrapper. It implements and emulates the 3dfx Voodoo cards' native Glide2 and Glide3 APIs on top of OpenGL, and supports a lot of games written for Glide. Download here.
This is a small bugfix release. Radeon 8500 to 9200 owners now get proper fog in Glide3 games. That's about the biggest change.
Unless someone reports something serious, this will form the basis for me finally venturing toward full TEXTUREBUFFER support for Glide64. And
I might just fix the pink menu in Outlaws along the way.
As usual, you can have a look at the documentation (which includes the full
changelog) without having to install anything. It's the same thing that's included in the download package.
If you want an earlier version, you can get some here.
In case you've missed it, since 0.84b my wrapper finally supports some amount of chroma keying emulation on Radeon 7xxx and Geforce 4MX cards and it also properly supports the new "depth buffer render" option found in Glide64 v0.8 "Wonder".
I've been playing around with my DeltaChrome S8 card a bit, and implemented workarounds for some of its driver bugs to get me past
the early initialization stages with my wrapper. Still no real success. Crashes galore. But something strange happened during my
testing. After several failed attempts, including attaching the debugger to crashed apps, all of a sudden the thing started to work.
After getting over my initial disbelief I actually managed to get Ultima IX running with just minor texture corruption. Then I tried Heli Heroes,
and that one worked, too. Then I tried Diablo 2 and it was just flawless. Then I fired up Dethkarz ... and it hung in the menu.
So I had to reboot. Afterwards, none of these games worked anymore, even though I didn't change anything at all. I figure I somehow must
have managed to pummel the driver into submission for the rest of the session by using the debugger, but it is now a mystery to me how
exactly I've done that.
I couldn't get it work again yet. But I'm quite pleased that, once the init phase has been passed, the current drivers seem to cope just fine. It looks as if there are only a few tiny fixes required to make DeltaChrome a fine target for the wrapper. I'll investigate this further.
Internet access! My new phone company managed earlier than expected.
A new version is out, too. Grab it while it's hot.
Support for the Glide3 TEXTUREBUFFER extension was supposed to be in this time, to better support Project64 with Gonetz' Glide64 plugin. This has been deactivated for the release because for some reason the emulator hangs when stopping emulation if this extension is exposed to the plugin. I'm trying to work this out with Gonetz and maybe draw in the Project64 developers.
In related news, I recently built a second rig with Intel stuff, including integrated graphics so I can work on supporting that, and Windows XP.
That's how I found out how badly broken my installer is on XP Pro with regular user accounts. XP doesn't have the Windows 2000 "Power user" group anymore, which I somewhat assumed everyone would use for their user accounts.
Bad news ... as some of you already know, I'm moving house, which came rather unexpected. Moving is difficult and slow if you don't have a car ...
Now the real bad news: I ordered phone and DSL service for the new place, from a different provider, a month ago. I quickly received a letter which stated that I could expect service right about now. I hadn't heard back since then. Today I called them up to ask them what's going on and they told me that they are getting more orders than they can handle and ... "worst case" it's going to be another six weeks before I get service.
Make that mid-June until I get internet access from my new home.
I'm going to move the last remains of my stuff (and myself) over on Saturday. Then begins the quiet period. I hope I can somehow get full FTP access for a new version, but expect emails to go unanswered from now on.
I'll make an announcement as soon as the line goes live. See ya then.