Thanks for telling landgenoot 😀
Perhaps I'll reinstall xp with everything and see if the problem still occurs (I bet it will 😒 )
Well, what do you know, I could have sworn? The working partition is indeed running Catalyst 4.6! Good catch, Vigilante58. So how are we supposed to find out what ATI changed between 4.6 and 4.7 to make it no longer work as dg doesn't have an ATI? Windbg blames Ati3duag.dll, but I'm not sure that's any help. To be continued?
Groeten,
Aldo Bleeker
Ok sorry for spamming, but I've just driver cleaner to completely clean windows from any previous catalyst driver versions and done a fresh install of 4.8 and the problem still occurs...
Switched back to 4.6 again... found 1 more issue, which is that the behind mirror in cockpit view is not visible. I've uploaded a pic of it and a log file of when the game works to my webspace in case you'd like it: http://home.tiscali.nl/vigilante/dgvoodoo/
As for the white fog, I'm gonna install an old voodoo 2 card now and see if it's normal (along with the behind view and crashing in some races).
Couldn't get the Voodoo 2 to run any dos programs in XP, so I tried the latest Glidos version on Carmageddon to see how it compares to dgVoodoo.
I'm getting only 5 frames per second ever since I tried Glidos some months ago on my 9700pro, regardless of which driver version I use.
The interesting stuff is that Glidos has the same cockpit issues as dgVoodoo: no rear mirror and the player camera is also not on top, so I guess there won't be an easy fix to this.
What surprised me though is that Glidos doesn't show the white fog that dgVoodoo has. Perhaps this is another undocumented feature? Or it could of course be a faulty dgVoodoo setting by me. If anyone has an ATI card and knows how to get rid of the white fog, please let me know 😉
The interesting stuff is that Glidos has the same cockpit issues as dgVoodoo: no rear mirror and the player camera is also not on top, so I guess there won't be an easy fix to this.
This is a problem I wrote about before. This cannot be fixed 🙁 (at least if we want to keep the game fast).
What surprised me though is that Glidos doesn't show the white fog that dgVoodoo has. Perhaps this is another undocumented feature? Or it could of course be a faulty dgVoodoo setting by me. If anyone has an ATI card and knows how to get rid of the white fog, please let me know
You can disable fog in Carmageddon somewhere in the graphics options. What I don't understand is that why the background texture isn't in fog, if fog is enabled. Once I did a big debugging on the wrapper whether it's a state-caching bug in it or not, but I found that it worked properly. It's interesting that I get "full" fog in certain cases. 😕
About ATI-reboot: I have no ideas why it is. I'm going to check it out myself on a PC with an ATI card, but, I still don't know exactly when. I'm afraid it will take a while...
Finally I was managed to get to a PC with ATI R9600 and Catalyst 4.9beta (or alpha or something like that). I tried dgv on that PC, and indeed, there were problems in VDD mode. There were different cases, once it worked fine, once again it just dropped me back to the desktop, and also I could experince those wonderful reboots, when an invalid page exception occured in ATI3DUAG.DLL (I don't know that exactly what this component is responsible for). 😖
However, I had no problems with server mode!
Frankly, when I was about to port dos part of dgv to XP, I wasn't sure at all, if it is "healthy" or not to use DirectX inside the NTVDM process. Since NTVDM has its own virtual screen, the display driver may take care this process in an other way than a normal win32 process (I think of that you can switch to full scr text or mode when GDI doesn't work, etc.). So, I was afraid of that DirectX would do a crash somewhere in the videodriver along with handling console of NTVDM. I was searching some docs about it on the net, but all I found was that somebody wrote a VDD that provided VESA support via DirectDraw, however that wasn't enough for me, I would have liked to read an "official" doc from Microsoft, or something like that.
All in all, this is the only reason why I support server mode under XP. At the moment I have the feeling that this problem is brought in ATI's newest drivers, but, of course, maybe I'm totally wrong. It's only a guess. 😖
wrote:I was searching some docs about it on the net, but all I found was that somebody wrote a VDD that provided VESA support via DirectDraw
That sounds interesting. Did you find a link for download?
I found this article: http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/antidetect/. It mentions ati3duag.dll, and says it's "a uniform Direct3D driver for chips based on the R300 core and higher". I'm not sure that's helpful, though...
It's definately a driver issue, but does that bring us closer to the solution of the problem? 😐
dgVoodoo seems to work fine on my Radeon 9800XT with Catalyst 4.8 on Screamer2 and Screamer Rally.
I haven't tried any other DOS Glide games though.
Ice
I really hate to change topics in a thread but like batracio, I'm interested in something you said Dege. You mentioned a project of some kind to emulate VESA in DirectDraw. I should think that would help a TON of folks here at VOGONS. Let us know what you found about it. Thanks.
That sounds interesting. Did you find a link for download?
Sorry, I'm afraid I can't give you any link. 🙁 That searching was more than one year before, I searched in google by several keywords, I can't remember exactly how I found that vesa-thing. I've tried to find it again but with no success. I also can't remember if that vesa-vdd was downloadable or not, or it was just a document about it. Actually, it is probably an old thing, it was for Win NT.
What only was interesting for me was that somebody used DirectDraw in NTVDM.
It's definately a driver issue, but does that bring us closer to the solution of the problem?
Unfortunately it doesn't.
BTW, I tested that ATI card with Screamer 2.
Dege,
I've been trying out Tombraider 1 with dgVoodoo 1.30c without the VDD option. As we know by now, VDD crashes on ATI's with Catalyst 4.8. When I switched this option off the first time, all textures and colors disappeared (a bit like wireframe), but when I went back to the default settings (except for W-buffer, because of my ATI video card), that went away.
It now seems to run fine, except for some transparent squares. These appear on the very first screen (the options screen with the ring of options), Lara's passport shows a number of transparent squares. And when I load a game and start to play, I notice transparent or black squares everywhere.
I've included a screenshot. I hope it's clear, the walls opposite from where Lara is standing shows some black patterns. I'm sure there not supposed to be there. Are these missing textures?
Has anybody else seen this effect? Is there a setting I can change to get rid of the squares?
AMD 1.33 GHz, 512 MB RAM, ATI 9600 Pro, Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 4.8.
Yes, I too have seen this effect. Try to use alpha based colorkeying. This artifact comes in when I use native colorkeying with multiple level mipmaps (AFAIK native colorkeying is not defined for multitexturing, maybe it also isn't defined for mipmaps with trilinear filtering).
Thanks, Dege, that did the trick!
Isn't it weird that VDD mode doesn't work anymore in Catalyst 4.8, while it worked in 4.6? I understand VDD mode is actually preferable for some technical reason, but as long as we can use non-VDD mode, it's not a big deal. And who knows, somebody may find out what's causing it, and fix it.
Anyway, after tweaking dgVoodoo and VDMS, I've got TR1 running fine now at the moment. Man, I've really got to write down these settings one day! Great job, Dege!
HI! It's me again! Sorry to be a pain in the ass but I think the problem that I am referring to really needs a solution or an explanation at least.
Though it seems that I am the only one here trying to run dgVooDoo on win98se, I think support for the win98se is important as it does run the old dos games with sound, and a really fast and expensive PC isn't required to run a 10 years old game in win98se. I know that since dege is doing this for free I cannot expect too much and I really do appreciate all his work. But the fact is that the latest dgVoodoo v1.30c DOES NOT RUN on win98se but it seems that this is not the biggest problem as it also crashes it so that it is not able to start properly again. You see I am not the kind of stupid guy that cannot really use a PC and just clicks on the pictures on the screen using the mouse. I have made a large number of tests hoping to prove that the problem is in myself setting up the windows installation and not dgVooDoo. I have reinstalled windows 98 se more than 20 times using different configurations and the conclusion is that dgVooDoo does not run on win98se. Let me explain one of the tests that I do:
I make a small primary partition on my hard drive like 2 Gb for example. Then I make a clean install of windows 98 second edition choosing no additional options (i.e. selecting custom install and disabling all additional options). Then I install the latest needed drivers for the motherboard, video and sound including updating the directx version (tried with several versions like 8.0, 8.1, 9.0 etc.). After having everything setup properly I run a random direct3d game to test if everthing is OK. Then I proceed to testing dgVooDoo. I use Carmageddon Splat Pack for the tests. I install it in a separate directory and then extract the dgVooDoo file there, too. Then the fun part comes. No matter if I start the dgVooDoo configuration utility or the dos server process itself the beautifull BSOD (aka Blue Screen of Death) greets me with a vxd error. After that the windows 98 se installation itself is doomed as it never starts up again after restart. This means that everytime you try to run dgVooDoo you need to reinstall windows and unfortunately I am unaware of the cause.
I am using a Gygabyte VIA KT266A chipset with an Athlon Thunderbird @ 1200, a Geforce2 MX 400 card with 64 MB of Ram and dgVooDoo runs fine on windows 2000/XP.
wrote:Though it seems that I am the only one here trying to run dgVooDoo on win98se
Don't worry, you're not the only one, me too.
wrote:The fact is that the latest dgVoodoo v1.30c DOES NOT RUN on win98se but it seems that this is not the biggest problem as it also crashes it so that it is not able to start properly again. (...) No matter if I start the dgVooDoo configuration utility or the dos server process itself the beautifull BSOD (aka Blue Screen of Death) greets me with a vxd error. After that the windows 98 se installation itself is doomed as it never starts up again after restart. This means that everytime you try to run dgVooDoo you need to reinstall windows and unfortunately I am unaware of the cause.
Yep, I agree that something really weird will happen if you try to use dgVoodoo 1.30c on Windows 98(SE). I don't get the BSOD when I run dgVoodoo.exe or dgVoodooSetup.exe, both programs seem to work fine until I start Tomb Raider. Initial cinematics are played without problems, but just when you are about to enter the main menu, DOS4GW.EXE crashes with a page fault exception. There's nothing I can do to get dgVoodoo working, and I've trying almost everything (changing setup options, windowed/full screen, updating DOS4GW 1.97 to DOS4G 2.01, and so on), but that's not the biggest problem, as barev said. A few minutes after giving up, the computer suddenly hanged and I couldn't reboot it, neither with reset switch nor with Power On/Off button. It was failing the POST with one long and three short beeps. Then I unplugged the video card, plugged another one and the computer booted up without problems, so I thought that dgVoodoo had killed my GeForce4 😵 Fortunately, I plugged again the GF4 after a while and it was still alive and working fine, phew!
As I said before... something really weird.
HI batracio! Thanks for posting about your experience here.
I have done some more testing (i.e some more installing and reinstalling windows 😢)
Here is what I have found out:
... but just when you are about to enter the main menu, DOS4GW.EXE crashes with a page fault exception. There's nothing I can do to get dgVoodoo working, and I've trying almost everything (changing setup options, windowed/full screen, updating DOS4GW 1.97 to DOS4G 2.01, and so on)
This ONLY happens if you have installed IE 6.0 or later after installing windows 98 se. If you do not do this then the BSOD greets you. I do not understand what the hell does IE have in common with dgVooDoo and since I use the 98 installation for games and dos only I do not install IE but even remove it at all. I have also tried installing the unoffficial service pack for 98 that updates the system compoments to the latest ones available for 9x/me but this does not help at all. And now I am totally sure that there is really a problem since other people experience that, too.
Hmm...
I think this is the point where I can't say anything... 😖 🙁
And, do older versions work? (say, 1.23)
When I will get home, I will test it again. What I really doesn't understand is why 1.30c craches, I haven't done any major change in the VxD since 1.23, but I will look at it again, and, the other, why it crashes your computer when you don't even run the server? VxD gets installed only when you start that.
It seems there are more and more seriuos problems with dgv (ATI Catalyst, and so on), finally I may get to the point when it only works on my computer. 😐 The best would be to ditch its developing. 😐
