3dfx glide wrapper installation?

[vengeancerr1]

Hi, I am a long time Warzone 2100 fan. I bought it back when it first came out, I still have the original box, cd's, paper cd holder, and strategy guide. I even have the playstation version. I recently got the urge to play it again after years. I downloaded the 3.1 beta 8 and played through the campaign. It was pretty fun. I started wondering even though the graphics look good its still missing that 3dfx glide look that the game was to me in my opinion made to run on. I remember different mouse cursor looks, smoke and particle effects, and maybe a few other things. I used to play it on a voodoo 3 3500 card, I loved it so much I even bought a voodoo 5 5500 I think the model was, on ebay, and I still have it. I currently have a amd 6950.

So having said that I began some googling and noticed that there are what they call glide wrappers for the older 3dfx games. I was wondering how I would go about installing one of those to use for warzone 2100? I noticed there was been extensive work done with the newer code in the betas and stuff so i dont know if its possible to get a wrapper to work, I would be willing to try an older version if that was an option, I just want to once again see WZ 2100 in all its glory at the 1920x1080 res I currently game at. I remember the older game code had the options of starting in 3dfx or direct3d mode.

heres a link I found to the glide wrappers.

http://www.sierrahelp.com/Utilities/Dis ... ppers.html

[Draco Nihil]

I'd recommend nGlide if you're on windows as it seems to handle alot of games really well, but GPL WZ2100 does not use Glide it uses OpenGL. You can enabled coloured cursors in 2.3.9 under mouse options but not in any of the 3.1 beta's.

As for particle effects, what exactly do you mean? There's smoke and explosions as well as coloured lights. I'm not sure if I know what you mean by what it looked like in the 3dfx retail version.

Here's a link to nGlide: http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide

It uses Direct3D 9. Be sure you have a good video card that supports D3D 9 to it's fullest for it to work well.

[vengeancerr1]

Thanks for the info. By particle effects I mean for example, when units are built and come out of the factory there is smoke and effects immediately after. I see some of that already in the regular opengl version but I thought I remembered there being more to it, maybe im wrong, I haven't played the game on the old hardware in a long time.

So by you saying the nglide uses drect3d, does that mean i wont really be seeing the original 3dfx effects, everything is converted over to the d3d version as if I was running on that mode?

[Draco Nihil]

Yes, nGlide wraps 3DFX Glide API calls to Direct3D 9, it relies on some shader functionality too so that's why I recommend you have a perfectly supported D3D 9 device to ensure nothing goes wrong. But not all wrappers are perfect due to how the whole thing works in the first place.

In general though, it shouldn't look any different than if you were to run an actual Glide card on the game. The only way it'd look different is if you force a 32-bit colour depth on the program. (Glide was 16-bit only)

As for the particle effects, those are indeed present in WZ2100 GPL but are hard to see. In the PSX version they seem to be ridiculously over done so I guess that's what prompted your question. But as far as my memory goes, the particle effects looked no different between Glide and D3D on the retail game, and between that and the GPL version we have now.

[vexed]

Not worth it, running a glide wrapper has trivial differences.
The blue in the menus cycles, and the radar is a bit different, but pretty much everything else is the same.