Hello all,

I've recently been digging into revenant for pc. (Once loved, started a mod to finish it out then...adulthood).
At any rate, I've been digging around to see if there was a way to emulate a machine that would let me install my 98se or me disk with dx7 support, and a real d3d 16-64 meg card as well. For example

Emulate an AMD Thunderbid 900 single core - (core 0) - 192-1024 megs ram / HDD 0-2 up to 2 gig fat16/32
Emulate an Nvidia or Similar Direct 3d Capable Video card with 16-64 Megs - (core 1)
Emulate sb 16/512 or similar.

Then I can install what I need.

While digging in the pain of modern dosbox and such, it occured to me.

Wouldn't it be nice if GOG would either whip up a configurable machine emulator via Wine or something, so the games automagically got the hardware/directx/voodoo/glide/etc they needed? Or heck, even if their wonderful engineers would grab a fast branch of DosBox or something and get us a pre setup machine emulator to install a host OS on.

I would love for the community to let it be known if GOG wants this, especially enough to bribe the developers into coding it up.

I would, but my skills aren't there just yet.

Don't hold your breath. GOG has been "looking into" fixing some critical flaws in their forum for about six years now, and all they need for that is someone to spend a couple weekends with their server backend, locked in a room with a keyboard, filtered internet access, and whatever the Polish equivalent of Cheetos is.

If GOG coded up an emulator, they'd also have to support that emulator. Across many operating systems and updates. Then they'd have to hire approximately all the lawyers, because running emulated software isn't the same, legally speaking, as running a program natively. Because lawyers. Yay. So there'd be right issues on top of rights issues.

And what would be the best approach? Compatibility layers? Emulation? Full virtualization? A lot of games from the 90s and 00s really don't like having a layer between their feet and the sand. I haven't even kept up with how it works these days; if it's easier, then, awesome.

Your best bet, by far, is going to be to roll up those sleeves and get some emulation or VMs and weld it all together for your particular use case.

VMWare. Read the docs. If someone as dumb as myself could get it to run DOS and Windows 95/98, you can too.

...Oh.

I was expecting something along the lines of emulating a mainframe or an IBM AT.

Not, "Here's a midline 90s computer."

Why emulsify old systems?

For instance, I just found a way to do what I needed, and as a result, revenant has minimap in d3d mode, with all the extra stuff happening visually, such as RT lights.

Care to share how you have done this?

I want to look into emulating Window 98 games, but I haven't yet investigated what is achievable.

Zeus software has an application called nGlide, which seems to be helping.

As it was some years back, DosBox with a video card is all but impossible and games like MechWarrior 2 don't seem to run right.

Bummer. But at least this NGlide provides some help.

I'm still leaning toward a set state machine emulator...

Thanks for the reply and the info!

For a second I thought this was going to be another Win XP thread...

Xp is already doable for what it does. I have running Xp hardware in the back of the business. Even with an agp video card, I don't get 100% of the DX 5/6/7 hooks present in 98se.
It's kind of a small bummer tbh.

Have you tried virtualbox? I don't know if you need gpu passthrough for old directx or not though.

If you just want the games to work and they don't already work on Windows 7+ due to GDI/ddraw/d3d then look into dgvoodoo2.

You could also try PCem. I'm not sure about its limits, though.