What's a 3DFX? or: Fixing Old Games To Work On Modern Systems

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > What's a 3DFX? or: Fixing Old Games To Work On Modern Systems

The Kins: Oct 2, 2004

Sometimes old PC games don't work properly on modern systems, no matter what official sources like GOG do (or are allowed to do - some games are condemned to never be re-released due to licensing issues). As suggested in the GOG thread, here's a thread for assembling common fixes and asking for help getting old games to run properly on your 64-bit Windows 10 pro-gamer box with all the LEDs and such. I'll add more stuff as it pops up.

GENERAL RESOURCES:

PCGamingWiki has tons of instructions and information on getting troublesome games working again. It should be your first stop whenever an old PC game gives you guff!
DOSbox lets you run DOS games (and Windows 3.1, if you're willing to mess around a bit) on modern platforms. You may also want to use a fork instead, like DOSbox ECE or DOSbox X. Embedded in most re-releases of DOS games.
dgVoodoo is a wrapper for emulating 3DFX/Glide and several old and problematic versions of DirectX and Direct3D on Vista onwards. Your antivirus will probably scream like a banshee about the initial download, but it's a false positive.
nGlide is similar to dgVoodoo, but it has less features (it only does the 3DFX stuff for example) and works on older machines. Embedded in many GOG releases.

GAME-SPECIFIC FIXES/PATCHES/MODS ETC.

Widescreen Fixes Pack provides per-game patches that adds proper widescreen support to a host of games, often also fixing FMV playback etc. in the process.
SilentPatch provides bugfixes and improvements to the PS2-era GTA games, Bully, EA's The Godfather, FarCry 1 and Colin McRae Rally 2.0, allowing them to run properly on modern machines with some broken features from the original PC ports un-broken.
Silent Hill 2 Enhanced Edition is a better HD Edition than the official one.
Tomb Raider 1 ATI 3D Rage Patch + GLRage lets you play Tomb Raider 1 natively under Windows, in widescreen, as opposed to the DOSbox included with the current digital releases.
Tomb Raider on Vista and XP Multi-Patch provides fixes for Tomb Raider 2 and 3.
My guide to fixing Star Wars: Jedi Knight and Mysteries of the Sith.
HoMM3 HD adds windowed mode, bug fixes and other tweaks to Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Complete. I think there's a whole Eastern European eSports scene surrounding this patch...

COMPLETE GAME RE-IMPLEMENTATIONS

The Retro FPS Thread's OP covers all the gory details for source ports and such.
ScummVM is adventure games. And the occasional dungeon crawler for some reason. Embedded in some recent GOG releases, like Myst and Blade Runner.
OpenXCOM brings UFO Enemy Unknown and Terror From The Deep to modern platforms with bugfixes, graphics enhancements and even mod support!

# ? Jan 3, 2020 10:09

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# ? May 18, 2024 00:13

Suspect A: Jan 1, 2015; Nap Ghost

You should also check out PCem. A full IBM compatible PC emulator. It can (reasonably) emulate up to a maximum of Pentium 233 with a S3 Virge and SLI Voodoo 2s. Granted you'll need a good host system to emulate all this. A high clock speed host CPU for pentiums and multiple cores help with Voodoo and graphics card emulation.

http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/

And a list of currently emulated systems. (BIOSs will be needed)
http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/status.html

# ? Jan 3, 2020 11:52

mateo360: Mar 20, 2012; TOO MANY PEOPLE MERLOCK!
ONLY ONE DIJON!

The Kins posted:

[*]My guide to fixing Star Wars: Jedi Knight and Mysteries of the Sith.

Holy poo poo, I was literally just using this yesterday.

# ? Jan 3, 2020 15:24

Guillermus: Dec 28, 2009

Now that more people are revisiting old Star Wars games, there's gem named Star Wars Republic Commando and here's a fix for widescreen support and various crashes: https://www.moddb.com/mods/star-wars-republic-commando-graphics-fix

# ? Jan 3, 2020 18:36

Twobirds: Oct 17, 2000; The only talking mouse in all of Britannia.

mateo360 posted:

Holy poo poo, I was literally just using this yesterday.

Urgh, I wish I knew about it a few weeks ago.

# ? Jan 3, 2020 18:50

doctorfrog: Mar 14, 2007; Great.

I'll be making use of this thread when I upgrade to W10 later this month. Already got a few widescreen patches I'd never heard of from the link in the OP. Thanks!

# ? Jan 4, 2020 02:43

Cat Mattress: Jul 14, 2012; by Cyrano4747

Also, there's an entire forum out there that's about running Very Old Games On New Systems.

# ? Jan 4, 2020 12:04

MysticalMachineGun: Apr 5, 2005

Does getting modernising patches to work fit the remit of this thread? I can play Knights of the Old Republic on my laptop in glorious fatto-vision but trying to get the widescreen patches to work just ends with sound but no picture.

# ? Jan 23, 2020 23:28

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# ? May 18, 2024 00:13

SCheeseman: Apr 23, 2003

I've been playing with PCem. Fiddling with config.sys and autoexec.bat to reduce conventional memory usage brings back memories, it's actually kind of fun!

# ? Jan 27, 2020 18:19

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > What's a 3DFX? or: Fixing Old Games To Work On Modern Systems