Speed Problem in Motobike and chocobo races in FF7 Solved

[Cyberman]

HOWEVER, "modern" (Voodoo3 and later) 3Dfx drivers do NOT use Glide to emulate D3D or OpenGL calls, like what was apparantly done for the V1/V2 OpenGL support.

For example, in the current driver set I'm using (called the "Amigamerlin 2.9"; win9x version of course ), the OpenGL ICD is a file called "3dfxogl.dll"; and from what I can tell, it shouldn't need the assistance of the Glide2x or Glide3x dlls to function; as the file's properties (under the "version tab") give it a description as being the 3Dfx OpenGL ICD, version 1.1.

Actually this isn't true. 3dfxogl ICD requires GLIDE3x DLL's it uses these for handling many of the screen functions.  KoolSmokey made an initial direct OGL 1.3 driver that didn't require it (3dhq is no longer around though).  Any 'stock' 3dfx driver uses the GLIDE driver, even if it is just to set up the screen (which it's not), it's slow because it takes OGL functions and translates them to GLIDE and translates GLIDE too whatever was native with the 3dfx cards.  

Here is a link to a DIRECT OGL ICD 1.2 using MESA on windows the directions are that you place this in the directory of the game NOT in your windows system directory (the reason for this is clear as it will load the 3dfx driver instead of the OGL driver by KoolSmokey.. it looks in the current directory first for DLL's).

There aren't really any 'modern' driver sets mostly hacked 3dfx drivers that are repackaged.  The source code for there drivers is now widely available so it's really not a big deal. Koolsmokey though did a GREAT job of making his Win2K and XP drivers.  These are what you see stuffed in a lot of those 'driver' sets.  If it says 3dhq it's real otherwise it's pretty much what I said.. repacked stuff with some hacked fixes generally.

I've tried 8 different sets, of them the only ones that didn't give me the blue screen of death was 3dhq's

Cyb

[Mofokubik]

You are all wrong!
Ive decided that Voodoo3 renders in 64bit. All you have to do is run a 3d game or program, 4 times at the same time.
32 + 32 - 32 - 16 = 16 + 8 - 40 + 16 x 2 = 32 x 32 = 64
Not only that, but base times height I win!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous]

Message

[Rubicant]

I just added a semicolon to the original "shell=" line and put in my own thing. But I'll try it now without big path names/use of quotes. Before I would try to run it with quotes and it would do okay, but the paths would still be screwed.

[EDIT - much later]

I figured out how to do it right, but it is all in vain. What worked for me is copying all the program files needed to run the game into the windows root directory. Then it ran fine. But, there seems to be no improvement in performance in..well..anything! I ran 3dmarks with explorer.exe as the shell, and 3dmarks as the "shell", and there was no difference in the score. And YES, I made sure I had the same settings and everything.

[EDIT - after the edit]

Ugh...I hate how someone posts before you get done editing

[Goku7]

Actually this isn't true. 3dfxogl ICD requires GLIDE3x DLL's it uses these for handling many of the screen functions.  KoolSmokey made an initial direct OGL 1.3 driver that didn't require it (3dhq is no longer around though).  Any 'stock' 3dfx driver uses the GLIDE driver, even if it is just to set up the screen (which it's not), it's slow because it takes OGL functions and translates them to GLIDE and translates GLIDE too whatever was native with the 3dfx cards.

Yeah, I know about Koolsmokey.  Brilliant guy, I tell you; when it comes to understanding how Glide/OpenGL seems to work on 3Dfx cards.  Back when I was tryin' to figure out why FF9 had major framerate drops when several character models were on screen (the exception was for battle scenes), someone suggested I use his Glide3x update, and when I tried it with his new Glide3x, the framerate drops disappeared.  Not to mention, his hosting of the Glide source code was what allowed Lewpy to figure out why the VSA-100 option under "Draw Method" wasn't working correctly.

Here is a link to a DIRECT OGL ICD 1.2 using MESA on windows the directions are that you place this in the directory of the game NOT in your windows system directory (the reason for this is clear as it will load the 3dfx driver instead of the OGL driver by KoolSmokey.. it looks in the current directory first for DLL's).

A WORKING 1.2 ICD for 3Dfx cards?!  This I gotta see.

There aren't really any 'modern' driver sets mostly hacked 3dfx drivers that are repackaged.  The source code for there drivers is now widely available so it's really not a big deal. Koolsmokey though did a GREAT job of making his Win2K and XP drivers.  These are what you see stuffed in a lot of those 'driver' sets.  If it says 3dhq it's real otherwise it's pretty much what I said.. repacked stuff with some hacked fixes generally.

Yes, that is true.  However, I think I have a problem with the language of my post when I said "modern".  What I meant by "modern", are the driver sets that didn't need to rely on a game-dependent Mini-GL driver due to a complete lack of an ICD in ANY licensed form.  Now, not much may have changed, but at least its improved to where you don't have to select "3Dfx OpenGL" to even get hardware accelerated OGL.

I've tried 8 different sets, of them the only ones that didn't give me the blue screen of death was 3dhq's

Ouch.  You know, I heard that the Amigamerlin drivers are using the most stable builds of the 3Dhq stuff (and the set seems to have 3Dhq's blessing which may not be surprising, because Amigamerlin was one of the members of 3Dhq anyway).  But still, BSOD's were THAT common? What OS are you using; WinXP?!

True and yet untrue. It will do 2d rendering in 32-bit, but the 3d pathway won't allow it. Just had to revise that. OpenGL screensavers, if the desktop is in 32-bit mode, will slow to a crawl as they will use Microsoft's 'software' OpenGL rendering.

Exactly, Lord Kane.  The "odd" screensaver behaviour was one of the first things that tipped me off that the V3 is incapable of 32-bit 3D rendering.

And, I suppose I had yet another problem with language there, as well.  I have very rarely heard "rendering" used to refer to a 2D drawing operation, so when I said "rendering" I thought people would assume I was refering to 3D drawing operations as done with Glide/D3D/OGL.  However, you are correct, as far as DirectDraw seems to be concerned, 2D "rendering" at 32-bit color is possible, otherwise it'd be impossible to run the windows desktop at 32-bit in the first place!

You are all wrong!
Ive decided that Voodoo3 renders in 64bit. All you have to do is run a 3d game or program, 4 times at the same time.
32 + 32 - 32 - 16 = 16 + 8 - 40 + 16 x 2 = 32 x 32 = 64
Not only that, but base times height I win!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ROFLAMO!!!!!

Thanks, I needed that.  Seriously.

-edit-
In case you're wondering where I got the smilie, I "borrowed" it from the x-3dfx forums, in the forum of an image link, LOL.  I don't think this would be a problem, but if there's some policy that this is running up against, I'll understand it being taken down.

</disclaimer mode off>

[Anonymous]

Message

[Cyberman]

Yeah, I know about Koolsmokey.  Brilliant guy, I tell you; when it comes to understanding how Glide/OpenGL seems to work on 3Dfx cards.  Back when I was tryin' to figure out why FF9 had major framerate drops when several character models were on screen (the exception was for battle scenes), someone suggested I use his Glide3x update, and when I tried it with his new Glide3x, the framerate drops disappeared.  Not to mention, his hosting of the Glide source code was what allowed Lewpy to figure out why the VSA-100 option under "Draw Method" wasn't working correctly.

Well apparently Pete got a clue as to why 3dfx cards had slow downs a lot too there are a lot of redundant repetitious and over done operations in the ICD that 3dfx made for OGL <note repetition and redundancy >

A WORKING 1.2 ICD for 3Dfx cards?!  This I gotta see.

Well it's not a pancacia.. it still suffers from rendering to a window problems 3dfx created from there card design. So what happens is if your program only renders to a window (see Biowares Aurora toolset for NWN module editing). It shrinks the screen to a tiny itty bitty spec (320x240) and you think your screen is blank but it's not you have to kill the program to get out, it will work with Quake ]I[ though!

Too bad he didn't release his mesa based drivers Mesa is now 1.3 compliant.. shouldn't be too much of a hassel (ok maybe it's a lot  but hey I can dream ).

Yes, that is true.  However, I think I have a problem with the language of my post when I said "modern".  What I meant by "modern", are the driver sets that didn't need to rely on a game-dependent Mini-GL driver due to a complete lack of an ICD in ANY licensed form.  Now, not much may have changed, but at least its improved to where you don't have to select "3Dfx OpenGL" to even get hardware accelerated OGL.

Ahhh! hehehe miniGL (continued laughing) sorry. ahemm..
Yeah the miniGL uses Glide2x.dll (hence the laughing). Yeah nightmare city indeed (sigh).

Ouch.  You know, I heard that the Amigamerlin drivers are using the most stable builds of the 3Dhq stuff (and the set seems to have 3Dhq's blessing which may not be surprising, because Amigamerlin was one of the members of 3Dhq anyway).  But still, BSOD's were THAT common? What OS are you using; WinXP?!

I am using win98SE now.. (sniff) lost my developement machien WAHHH! (Sorry still bummed). Need Win2k upgrade (hate XP such a PITA).

Exactly, Lord Kane.  The "odd" screensaver behaviour was one of the first things that tipped me off that the V3 is incapable of 32-bit 3D rendering.

It always amazed me WHY they were still stuck in 16 bits per pixel even at the begining of the year 2000. They are dead but sometimes I still wonder if we can learn what not to do from now defunct companies (better than doing it yourself and remain humble!)

I've found it interesting that both Nvidia and ATI are no longer JUST a graphics company I thought, had 3dfx assisted Nintendo with the GBA video system they actually might still be in business today. I guess they weren't diverse enough.

Cyb

[Goku7]

Well it's not a pancacia.. it still suffers from rendering to a window problems 3dfx created from there card design. So what happens is if your program only renders to a window (see Biowares Aurora toolset for NWN module editing). It shrinks the screen to a tiny itty bitty spec (320x240) and you think your screen is blank but it's not you have to kill the program to get out, it will work with Quake ]I[ though!

Too bad he didn't release his mesa based drivers Mesa is now 1.3 compliant.. shouldn't be too much of a hassel (ok maybe it's a lot  but hey I can dream )

Actually, I _heard_ that 3rd party OpenGL 3Dfx ICD devolopment would start hitting a brick wall for version1.3 compliancy, due to the lack of hardware TnL on the cards.  Of course, if it was possible to use the same HW TnL emulation routines that the D3D section (read: the Geometry Assist option)has, then such a problem could at least be worked around.  Of course, by no means is Geometry Assist perfect, but at least its a start.

As for window-based rendering, I've never really needed to do that, so at the moment it looks like I'll be able to avoid that problem with it.

Ahhh! hehehe miniGL (continued laughing) sorry. ahemm..
Yeah the miniGL uses Glide2x.dll (hence the laughing). Yeah nightmare city indeed (sigh).

Did I say something stupid?!  Or were you more laughing at the miniGL aspect of the drivers themselves?

Personally, I think it wasn't a good idea to come out with a miniGL driver, they should have bit the bullet and paid  the license fees so they could use a proper ICD like everyone else did.

I am using win98SE now.. (sniff) lost my developement machien WAHHH! (Sorry still bummed). Need Win2k upgrade (hate XP such a PITA).

Eh, that might not be a good idea if you're trying to use the Voodoo to play games that require HW TnL capability (or at least the reporting of it in the drivers); As I have also heard that Geometry Assist doesn't work AT ALL; in that respect you're better off with Win9x.  But, other than that, there shouldn't be much of a problem...

It always amazed me WHY they were still stuck in 16 bits per pixel even at the begining of the year 2000. They are dead but sometimes I still wonder if we can learn what not to do from now defunct companies (better than doing it yourself and remain humble!)

IIRC, the performance-to-image-quality ratio wasn't balanced enough in 3Dfx's mind (points to the performance hits of the TNT and maybe TNT2 as an example), to warrant it based on the performance yields of cards in the pre-geforce generation.  Of course, the V4/V5 is perfectly capable of it; though we all know the appearance of the Geforce 256 was probably the "kick in the pants" that 3Dfx needed to add those features.

I've found it interesting that both Nvidia and ATI are no longer JUST a graphics company I thought, had 3dfx assisted Nintendo with the GBA video system they actually might still be in business today. I guess they weren't diverse enough.

_Supposedly_, VSA-100 chips were used in the HUD displays of certain fighter jets like the F-16, however I don't remember the particular source that statement came from, so I'm considering this more "rumour" than "fact".  Still, if it was true, that could be considered as diversifying.  Of course, it still sounds like a stretch.

And, AFAIK, 3Dfx was in negotiations with Sega (who later turned them down in favor of PowerVR's solution), not Nintendo; but then again I never heard anything about Nintendo working with 3Dfx for GBA system development....

Cyb[/quote]

[Lord Kane]

And, AFAIK, 3Dfx was in negotiations with Sega (who later turned them down in favor of PowerVR's solution), not Nintendo; but then again I never heard anything about Nintendo working with 3Dfx for GBA system development....

True. SEGA of America was working on the Blackbelt system with 3dfx, based on Voodoo 2s. SEGA Japan decided to go with the NEC system even after SoA had signed the contract with 3dfx. This was one os SEGA's many cataclysmic errors before it almost died, as 3dfxsued their a$$es off for breach of contract. This coupled with the loss of money from the 32x (Who honestly thinks that 2 different architectures from the same company can co-exist when they are incompatible. The PSX/PS2 manage it by virtue of the PS2's backwards compatibility), the Saturn (I know, we'll release the console 4 months early at E3 when there are no games for it at $399. Oh shit, Sony just announced thier console at $299), and the Dreamcast itself (I know, we'll make a really nice console, and we'll make loads of great games for it, but we won't bother advertising it Oo)..... getting slighty off topic here.... nevermind.

[Goku7]

I have a new question about FF7 and registry tweaking:

Under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Square Soft, Inc.\Final Fantasy VII", there is a key labled "DiskNo", and right now it's value is 0...I think it may be causing me problems.

Currently I'm having problems in which I can't get past the opening movie in the game (probably due to the fact that somewhere along the line, the TrueMotion codec got deleted or something).  The "DataDrive" key and all that is fine, though curiously enough I still only get sound and no video playback.

So, figuring it was just a case of missing codecs, I install TrueMotion off the FF7 install cd and try it out.  Of course, I had forgotten that the "driver" option was still set for OpenGL, and so now that caused the movie to not run, and also resulted in my comp locking up, to the point where I needed to do a hard reboot.

I'm about to try it again, this time with the registry set to use D3D, but I wonder.... is there any possibility the "DiskNo" key's value (currently "0", like I said earlier) is telling the game that there's no disk in the drive, thus resulting in my problems?

Or is this a key that's changed by the game during run-time, when a save file is loaded, so that it requests the right disc?  Something tells me that there's a connection here between this key and "cdcheck.exe"....

Of course, if this is possible, then that could just open up all sorts of stuff similar to the old "swap disc to have game play a random movie" trick for FF7 PSX....

[Anonymous]

Message

[Goku7]

It would seem that DWORD value known as 'DiskNo' ([nitpick]it's not a key, keys look like folders in regedit[/nitpick]) _never_ gets read, so I doubt that it's causing you problems. Mine seems to be set at '0' also, and works.

Oh, right.  Looks like I need to pay more attention to registry terminology.  

I dunno if the value was used in some unreleased build, and is obsolete, or if it gets read in extremely rare circumstances, but it looks pretty useless based on a 5 minute test.

Hmm.... I wonder if running CDcheck.exe (outside of the game, obviously) with one of the FF7 cds in the drive would cause the value to change...?

[iceydamo]

I found out what I done to make them run at the right speed so I think it might only work on geforce cards all I done was as follows:
1. I put the anti analising all the way up to 4X
2. enabled texture sharping
3. have anisotropic filtering all the way up 2X
4. (optonal) have a a tv connected and set to clone.

well that all I done to make the bike and cockbo races work someone plz try it out to see if it works for them plz

[Rubicant]

Cockbo? Oh dear god...

I believe that THIS is what many others suggested would have worked...a LONG time ago. Keep in mind that from now on the text will be blurry.

Underclock your video card. You can find a way to do it at http://www.guru3d.com

[iceydamo]

soz about the spelling mistake but my text doesn't go blurry when I do that and im running a geforce 2 mx 400 with 64 meg of memory on it so why isnt it blurry if it spose to.

[Rubicant]

Are you sure you're not running it in....software?!

[iceydamo]

no im not useing   software rendering i am useing direct 3d i don't know if the pic will show[/img]

[Rubicant]

We can't see shite that's on your desktop, mate.

[iceydamo]

ho w can I put images up on here which are on my computer and not on the net

[Srethron Askvelhtnod]

...this is quickly degenerating into a troll situation.

I'll assume you *really* don't know, just this once.

ho w can I put images up on here which are on my computer and not on the net

You can't. To show us a picture, you *have* to put it somewhere on the net.

-Srethron

[Threesixty]

What's your IP (internet provider) most of them, if not all of them; reserve a set amount of server space for your use as an optional web page, that you can create.

Most people, just use that space to upload pictures...to the net. You'll have to do some digging in you account. And learn about FTP loaders and such (The IP will usually have them for Download, and instructions in how to configure it for their server...it'll be simular to configuring outlook to download email of the IP server.). Or use whatever they have online for creating a default, web page. And find the section that will upload pictures and remember the path.

4 years ago I would have told you to enroll in Yahoo's Geocities.com, but they've gotten strict in the uploading of junk for hot links, recently. I haven't bothered finding others.....just not into it anymore.

[Mofokubik]

You can email that picture to me, I will upload it to my totally awesome angelfire account. Or you can use mirexs bin...

[Nori]

ho w can I put images up on here which are on my computer and not on the net

You will not be able to upload images (Qhimm.com)

1.  ff7setup.jpg
2.  Upload - http://bin.mypage.sk (C:\My Documents\My Pictures\ff7setup.jpg)
3.  Link - h**p://bin.mypage.sk/FILES/ff7setup.jpg (Copy & Paste)
4.  

[iceydamo]

here it is:

[Rubicant]

Well you didn't have to show it...I mean I believed you but I was just making sure. The "glitter settings" (anti-aliasing, aniso, text sharp) turned up all the ways is a viable way to reduce the framerate...but it seriously does make things look somewhat fuzzy. Which basically makes it look like it does on the tv screen. So it all evens out.

But, for those of us who like a sharper picture, I think underclocking is your best choice.