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[Neville]

When dealing with post-1990 games, options will be usually more restricted. Usually those games will only run in VGA and SVGA modes.

Examples of these hybrid VGA-SVGA games are a lot of mid-1990s First Person Shooters, such as "Duke Nukem 3D", "Blood" or "Quake".

Now let's see one of those games, "NASCAR Racing" (1994) from Papyrus:





Ideally, one would set up the game to run in SVGA mode (second picture), but in its time people with older computers had to stick to VGA mode, which was less demanding. This was before accelerated 3D cards became usual, mind you.

Speaking of which, towards 1995 a ton of different 3D accelerator cards flooded the gaming market: Matrox Millennium / Mystique, PowerVR, S3 ViRGE... The only ones currently emulated are the 3Dfx Voodoo, which became the first standard until 2002, when 3Dfx Inc. filled for bankrupcy. Since their departure, the 3D card market has become mostly a fight between NVIDIA and ATI - AMD.

If you have a game that supports 3Dfx acceleration, there are several options in order to enable it:

- If the game runs under DOS, try DOSBox ECE or the DOSBox build by Yhkwong.

- If the game runs under Windows, you will need a Glide Wrapper, a program that "translates" the Voodoo instructions into modern APIs like DirectX or OpenGL. nGlide or dgVoodoo are two good choices.

Note that a Glide Wrapper won't necessarily make your game compatible with the version of Windows you are running. You may need to fiddle with the compatibility options or update your game in order to play.

- A third option is to create a Windows 9X installation under PCem. This will require a very powerful computer and to install the necessary Voodoo drivers.



PCem running "Quake 2". Picture taken from its website.