No Neomagic device is Direct3D capable.

Indeed. I can attest to having been hampered by this.

The best you can do is fake it with something like swiftshader, as a fully CPU based Direct3D renderer. (I say this, as many CLEARLY 2D games use Direct3D APIs, and cannot otherwise be played.)

Software rendering on a vintage CPU is going to be all kinds of painful for anything other than very very simple 2D-On-Triangles type things though.

Putas wrote on 2025-01-03, 11:28:

No Neomagic device is Direct3D capable.

Thank you very much. I kind of expected that, but it still leaves me wondering what was the purpose of 6MB of Video RAM, a huge amount for that video card. By comparison, in the Pentium III era just about every manufacturer was experimenting with 3D Acceleration, with more or less awful results for those on the budget. I remember the Trident, SiS offering. Trident was notable for being the worst of them all, an infamous position, mostly as a result of awful drivers.

wierd_w wrote on 2025-01-03, 13:06:

Indeed. I can attest to having been hampered by this.

The best you can do is fake it with something like swiftshader, as a fully CPU based Direct3D renderer. (I say this, as many CLEARLY 2D games use Direct3D APIs, and cannot otherwise be played.)

Software rendering on a vintage CPU is going to be all kinds of painful for anything other than very very simple 2D-On-Triangles type things though.

Funnily enough, I remember the perils of SGI's OpenGL 1.1 software mode. It could barely render less than 1 FPS in 640x480x16 bit colour in Quake 1 on a AMD K6-2 at 450 MHz. I remember that even in 320x200 the performance was not that much improved.

Thank you very much for swiftshader! I did not know about it and learned a bit more about it. However, as stated here (https://www.andrewnile.co.uk/blog/swiftshader-on-windows-98/), it may not support older graphics interfaces such as Direct3D 6 and 7. Lots of games built between 1996 and 1998 run using these interfaces and a Pentium III at 450 MHz could have interesting to emulate something in 320x200 resolution.

So, yes, in short, it is not reasonable to expect a workaround in Windows 98SE. I remember there was a way to use the Direct3D Reference software emulation, but it was extremely slow and unoptimized. Funnily enough, it seemed to have been even slower than the SGI OpenGL 1.1 software emulation... 😀

Sadly, DGVOODOO 2 targets directx 11 api. Maybe older versions of it might target DX9.

It might be possible (but silly?) to chain DGVoodoo2 with Swiftshader DX9.

EDIT:

The VERY FIRST VERSION of DGVoodoo2 with DX 5, 6, and 7 support only provides the D3DIMM and DDRAW libraries, and appears to depend entirely on system D3D9/D3D8 libraries otherwise. (that is to say, it does not try to provide these APIs)

Deep link:
https://dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/bin/dgVoodoo2_41.zip

It might be possible to shoehorn it into service here. Just be apprised that this is going to be VERY suboptimal.

Nope, the readme specifically states that DX11 is required, even on 2.01 🙁

Consider instead, DXWrapper

https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper

It can wrap the DX 5, 6, and 7 APIs to D3D9 API, and might work with swiftshader.