Any chance to support Windows NT4 for retro gaming, its limited to DirectX3/5, OpenGL is working fine?

[William]

I'm having trouble getting my retro PC working correctly; my 6200 is the wrong kind for the 77.72 drivers. I'm going to resort to virtualization and Mesa drivers to test.

[ruthan]

What problem you have exactly? Are older drivers working fine?
You can always ask here: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=103915
Virtualization is not great for NT4, i mean not real 3D drivers written and there are some successful reports for old mesa - there are links for details in thread above.

Much better than virtualization (well except speed) is full emulation with https://86box.net/ Pentium 2 + Voodoo 3 or Banshee, but yeah if im not wrong it means only OpenGL 1.1 and higher only through CPU, but its probably the same as in case of mesa.

Other choice would be Linux and KVM hell with Nvidia card passthrough, but if you have not experience if it.. it has steep learning curve and you need to learn quite and lot of thing to make it working, unless you are lucky and not hit some wall, its sort of minefield..
i could recommended Heiko Sierger tutorials:
https://www.heiko-sieger.info/installin ... ssthrough/ // Are are quite a few tutorials for different use cases.
https://github.com/bryansteiner/gpu-pas ... h-tutorial

Well these annoying things could be source of fun as i wrote Windows NT is the most and the last on unconquered retro land, we can still be pioneers..

[William]

In this case virtualization is better than emulation because my CPU can better brute force software Mesa virtualized than emulated.

Voodoo3 will not be supported because as you admit it is only OpenGL 1.x and the architecture is far more limited and doesn't support GLSL.

[William]

I just modified my code to support psapi.dll however a dependency called MinHook still depends on the Toolhelp32 API.
I might have to modify the code to work with the Windows NT Native API (ntdll.dll) directly in this situation.

I have created a new fork of MinHook to ikmplement the changes needed to support Windows NT 4.0.

[William]

I did everything I can with the Visual C++ 2005 compiler, but it appears that the runtime has a hard dependency on Windows 98 or 2000, or later.
Now I'm going to make a Visual C++ 2003 project file, see if that works.

[William]

I just managed to make a Windows NT 4.0 compatible build, but as I have yet to get my retro PC to work correctly, I will have to consider it experimental.

[William]

As a heads-up, if you posted a reply in the past 2 days or so, I just had a database corruption issue and have rolled back to my most recent backup. In that case, please reply again.

[ruthan]

Hi, sorry i was busy, its someone some version to download and test?

[MicahMoo11]

Hi this is MicahMoo11, does this work with GDI (opengl 2.1) software rendering. as I am testing mostly TLC games. some examples https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... drive_link, to my understanding 3d processing rendering and 2d processing rendering are different. is DXGL hardcoded for GL 2.1 hardware or can this work with VMware as long as it reads features from the instructions GDI 2.1 (although it will be slow on FPS). another example 2 days ago by mistake. https://github.com/FunkyFr3sh/cnc-ddraw ... 3011096984. yes, it's showing windows 7 (software rendering 4.3) even NT 4-2000 is working thru GDI 2.1.

https://github.com/FunkyFr3sh/cnc-ddraw/issues/327
https://github.com/FunkyFr3sh/cnc-ddraw ... 3011744223 (NT4dx9.zip update)

even mean project https://github.com/FunkyFr3sh/cnc-ddraw/issues/316. the games are being backported to windows NT 4. cnc-ddraw does support OpenGL 1.0 - 1.5 although FunkyFr3sh has to make separate branches (not public yet) and Direct3d is not supported although some were ported for my game applications. can you clarify the difference between FunkyFr3sh / cnc-ddraw vs William's / DXGL. (your project)
some calcification is needed as I'm testing about 650 educational games mostly and kids' games from the late 90's and early 2000s.

[William]

Hi, sorry i was busy, its someone some version to download and test?

I'll be putting out a new release shortly, but it does seem a bit grumpy with software Mesa.

By the way, if the website or forum are down, just try again after a bit. I currently have a glitch with my database server that sometimes causes the drive to fill up and crash the site. I mentioned a slight bit of data loss in a previous reply because the most recent crash broke some of the databases in my forum and I had to restore from a backup.