Congrats
Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 7:25 pm
Congratulations on the development of a new Glide wrapper, especially one that will support both Glide 2.x and Glide 3.x. (Yeah, I only just found out about it.)
As far as I'm concerned, I would love to see you focus on compatibility support (between graphics cards, working around 3D driver bugs, between games, between DirectX versions) foremost and then add gamer-friendly features in the future (windowed modes, high resolution, texture replacement, 3D glasses support, custom extensions like in Glide64, etc.)
Once nGlide reaches 1.00 or 2.00 or some other point of satisfaction, I hope you'll consider going open-source, GPL or otherwise. The only Direct3D open-source Glide wrapper that immediately jumps to mind is psvoodoo: http://psvoodoo.sourceforge.net/
I used to do a lot of wrapper testing in the past, as anyone would tell you. I may someday yet return to it.
My own requests/suggestions for the wrapper and emulator development community still stand:
- add full Glide 2.1.1 support whenever you can
- when you feel you're "done" with Glide wrapping, consider wrapping other old 3D APIs, like RRedline, NV1, ATI CIF, etc. This is almost completely untraveled territory, you could break new ground. The only non-Glide wrappers out there are OpenGL-to-Direct3D, Direct3D-to-OpenGL. There's also BigRRed (possibly the world's first Glide wrapper, wrapped Glide-to-RRedline). The hardest part is acquiring SDKs.
- find a way to hack the very first Glide programs that were "statically compiled" with the Glide libraries so that they can be "wrapped". Essentially, Glide 1.x. This would require a DOS emulation environment like DOSBox for testing.
- consider taking MAME's Voodoo emulation and turning it into a "virtual video card" as a device in Device Manager, or in a reliable PC emulator - with permission from MAMEDEV first of course - any bugs found could actually help the MAME/MESS projects as well.
- a DirectX 6.0-7.0 wrapper to DirectX 9.0 or higher, or to OpenGL, for Windows or otherwise. Many old Windows games cannot be supported on modern OS's until someone works on this.
FYI: You might want to say if you support 32-bit and 64-bit on your website, it looks like you do from the forum but it wasn't visible on the website.
BTW: Some education on the project history would be cool. Is this a spinoff project from the emuxhaven forums, or anything? Or just something you decided to work on? I don't get around to the other emulation community websites as much as I'd like anymore...
- Stiletto
As far as I'm concerned, I would love to see you focus on compatibility support (between graphics cards, working around 3D driver bugs, between games, between DirectX versions) foremost and then add gamer-friendly features in the future (windowed modes, high resolution, texture replacement, 3D glasses support, custom extensions like in Glide64, etc.)
Once nGlide reaches 1.00 or 2.00 or some other point of satisfaction, I hope you'll consider going open-source, GPL or otherwise. The only Direct3D open-source Glide wrapper that immediately jumps to mind is psvoodoo: http://psvoodoo.sourceforge.net/
I used to do a lot of wrapper testing in the past, as anyone would tell you. I may someday yet return to it.
My own requests/suggestions for the wrapper and emulator development community still stand:
- add full Glide 2.1.1 support whenever you can
- when you feel you're "done" with Glide wrapping, consider wrapping other old 3D APIs, like RRedline, NV1, ATI CIF, etc. This is almost completely untraveled territory, you could break new ground. The only non-Glide wrappers out there are OpenGL-to-Direct3D, Direct3D-to-OpenGL. There's also BigRRed (possibly the world's first Glide wrapper, wrapped Glide-to-RRedline). The hardest part is acquiring SDKs.
- find a way to hack the very first Glide programs that were "statically compiled" with the Glide libraries so that they can be "wrapped". Essentially, Glide 1.x. This would require a DOS emulation environment like DOSBox for testing.
- consider taking MAME's Voodoo emulation and turning it into a "virtual video card" as a device in Device Manager, or in a reliable PC emulator - with permission from MAMEDEV first of course - any bugs found could actually help the MAME/MESS projects as well.
- a DirectX 6.0-7.0 wrapper to DirectX 9.0 or higher, or to OpenGL, for Windows or otherwise. Many old Windows games cannot be supported on modern OS's until someone works on this.
FYI: You might want to say if you support 32-bit and 64-bit on your website, it looks like you do from the forum but it wasn't visible on the website.
BTW: Some education on the project history would be cool. Is this a spinoff project from the emuxhaven forums, or anything? Or just something you decided to work on? I don't get around to the other emulation community websites as much as I'd like anymore...
- Stiletto