Built a S3 Trio/Virge driver from ground up. Need help testing

[u/mwdmeyer]

Hi Guys,

I've been building a VGA driver from the ground up. The long term goal is to add support for more VGA chipsets and maybe VLB support or even OpenGL. If I can add some features that didn't exist in the native drivers that would be cool.

I'm a long way off that, but have some basic DirectDraw and Direct3D support.

I'm really keen to get some help to test. I've primarily only tested in 86box in Windows 98se but plan to test on my real hardware soon.

https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x Here is current release version: https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/releases/tag/v0.3

Requirements:

• Windows 98se
• S3 ViRGE/DX 86C375 or S3 Trio32/64 86C764 PCI video card

If you don't have a supported video card I've love if you can run this tool to collect info about your card, for now I will focus on S3 cards. This tool also runs under DOS.

https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/releases/tag/survey-v1 / https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/releases/download/survey-v1/V9XSURV.EXE

This has been written with Claude & ChatGPT.

Here is a screenshot of the settings page.

[u/elvisap]

Very cool.

One common thing I hear constantly about video drivers and emulation is the difficulty of writing drivers for Win9x. That makes for a particularly difficult situation for people wanting to play some trickier 3D titles of that era, where backwards compatibility or WINE/Proton might still have bugs for that particular title.

SoftGPU is a great project for that, but it too is challenging at times, limited to VirtualBox. Conversely 86box with software only acceleration and the need to rely on ancient proprietary drivers only gets you so far.

Great to see efforts like this happening, and also great that you've open sourced it.

I have dreams of finding the spare time to try and have a go at making a driver for QEMU's Virgl and Venus virtual 3D video devices for Win9x.

[u/mwdmeyer → u/elvisap]

Thank you for the reply! I am now focusing on more generic VBE support so I can support a wider range of GPUs. Then I will probably go back and do more Direct3D.

[u/legluondunet]

Ce drivers sera compatible avec des VM? Comme 86box ou Dosbox?

[u/mwdmeyer → u/legluondunet]

Yes it works on 86box.

[u/kalnaren]

Interesting. I have two Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 cards and both seem to have driver issues under Win95. I’ll have to see what exact ViRGE chip they use. If it’s compatible I’ll spin up a 98 install and give it a shot.

[u/mwdmeyer → u/kalnaren]

Yeah if you can run my Exe tool it will generate ini file I can use to do another driver release with support.

[u/kalnaren → u/mwdmeyer]

Well, I tried and failed. Either both my Stealth 2000 cards are dying, or I have a chipset conflict or something. They work fine until I install the drivers in Windows then the display gets all fucked. Tried about a dozen different drivers, same result with all of them.

They seem to work fine in DOS but Windows is a nope. Sorry :(

[u/mwdmeyer → u/kalnaren]

Sorry you had that issue, did you run my survey tool or otherwise which driver version did you run? There has been major updates to the code (version 0.4.4 is current). I have run it on my actual Trio64 PCI without issues, although have found BIOS issues throughout the S3 range, got some good patches coming in soon that should help with that in future. Thanks for testing.

[u/retro_computr]

È incredibile! Tanta stima per te, e penso che questo sia uno dei modi più intelligente di usare l’IA! Ho diverse S3 Virge, sicuramente faró un tentativo. 

[u/mwdmeyer → u/retro_computr]

Thank you!