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

Posted: May 23rd, 2025, 12:33 pm
by 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.

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

Posted: May 23rd, 2025, 7:43 pm
by 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..

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

Posted: May 23rd, 2025, 10:51 pm
by 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.

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

Posted: May 24th, 2025, 12:11 am
by 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.

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

Posted: May 27th, 2025, 1:23 am
by 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.

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

Posted: June 5th, 2025, 3:10 am
by 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.