Windows 95/98 3D Hardware Acceleration Is Finally Back On Virtual Machines (VirtualBox,VMWare,QEMU)

#3DGraphics #virtualization

Support For Accellerated 3D Graphics Has Been Missing From Virtual Machines Running Windows9x For Quite Some Time. But Now It’s Back!

For quite some time 3D hardware graphics acceleration on Windows9x running within a Virtual Machine was possible in virtual machines like VMWare, Virtualbox. Running games within these virtualized systems worked well. Basically because the systems running Windows9x and games and the systems running the virtualization software were actually largely similar.

Then time went on and the hardware evolved and both hard and software moved away from the systems originally capable of running Windows9x and this resulted in these hardware virtualization apps losing the ability to have accelerated (3D) hardware available on Windows9x. Also 3D graphics weren’t a priority in these applications as they cater more to ‘serious office/ICT implementations’ with relatively simple demands on the video hardware and a simple non accelerated framebuffer GPU implementations became the norm. There was no benefit into retrofitting a 3D GPU that actually was capable of providing this. Today’s virtualization software often is capable of providing 3D GPU virtualization in more modern virtualized Windows OSes like 7/8/10 but like Windows9x support for WindowsXP is waning.

Virtualization provides the fasted implementation of a ‘virtual environment’ running software and games but it bascially is very similar to the host machine. Emulation can provide a complete emulated environment with 3D video hardware included. But this all (low level, slow but very compatible) needs to be emulated/recreated in software. It is possible to have parts of these implemented by HLE which interfaces to more modern hardware and software components (which can speed things up).

PCEm being an emulator with only small parts using HLE (basically the Voodoo2 and 3 parts are using similar to the 3Dfx wrapper people with other GPUs than 3Dfx GPUs used to run 3Dfx games) is quite different from VirtualBox or VMWare, but there are similarities in the way these programs actually interfaces with the host-OS. Q-Emu somewhere sits in between virtualization and full emulation, it’s more of a hybrid.

It’s BACK! SOFTGPU!

Recently using techniques from Wine-DirectX parts, MESA & OpenGL implementations JHRobotics actually did manage to retrofit a ‘softwareGPU’ for various Virtual Machines running Windows9x. It basically does a hybrid between hardware acceleration and HLE software emulation providing something that is much more than the simple video default options for Windows9x GPUs found in today’s Hypervizor virtual machines and it adds back what was lost and does so quite well.

Link found here:
https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu

Chapters:
00:00:00 – Introduction, explaining and showing virtualization & emulation
00:06:20 – the Github pageJHRobotics (how to’s are found there)
00:17:44 – Virtualbox 6.x on Linux Mint VM Config
00:20:14 – Booting Windows9x (GPU, Sound, Files, Network)
00:26:15 – Soundblaster through AC97 SB and MIDI limits
00:27:35 – Heretic soundblaster & general midi runs well
00:28:44 – Doom – soundblaster & general midi runs meh… (why?)
00:30:25 – Windows9x hangs runnig Doom, a reboot
00:31:11 – Limitations SB16 detecting games can fail like the Champ games
00:31:51 – Is any of SB16 support available on MS-DOS?
00:32:20 – Exit to DOS makes Windows98 reboot? Explenation why.
00:33:45 – Exit to DOS, does Heretichave sound? .
00:37:00 – Quake95 actually runs too fast – downside when throttling speed for older programs doesn’t work well on new hardware.
00:39:57 – Introduction of the non narrated more elaborate part of the video demonstrating DXDiag, 3DMark 99,20,21 (DirectX)
00:44:00 – Explanation on what happens if DMA is used with HD (turning it off prevents sound stuttering found in this video)
00:58:38 – Full Tilt! Pinball, Hover
01:02:51 – the SET BLASTER environment variable, running DOS-Games
01:09:12 – Phil’s Computerlab DOSBench CPU being this fast throws off some benchmarks
01:16:52 – PCEm running DOSBench and it works as intended.
01:28:16 – Full Tilt! Pinball, Hexen, Quake95 on PCEm
01:32:57 – PCEm bumping op from Pentium 90 to Pentium 166MMX running Quake95
01:44:20 – DOSBox-X as earlier
01:47:11 – FS-UAE Amiga & Quake running well
01:49:57 – Scene Demo on VIC-20 (Vice)

More to come in the next video. Enjoy & thanks for watching,
Mark V. aka LactobacillusPrime

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