Great times, the 3dfx name will always raise a smile for me.
It's wild how hazy those memories are becoming. Getting old is weird.
That brings back some memories.
And then I wanted a GeForce so bad. But I only got £10 a week from my paper round.
If I’d invested just one week of my paper round in Nvidia shares though, it would be worth over £10 million today.
Surely a modern hypervisor should be able to emulate a retro Voodoo 3D card.
Had also been thinking about asking Codex to boil the oceans in an attempt to fully decompile or reverse engineer that OG of 1990s 4X games, 'Stars!'*, which I have a copy of, so I could have something modern and native for MacOS that kept all the mechanics. Maybe I should just do this instead, will have to investigate.
Memories of the ISO mounting program I had; so nice for all the disks to live on the server and just be mounted when needed.
Alternatively: eBay. Encarta 96 CD-ROMs are available for about $20 in the US, delivered.
Even the prior two games had an extremely tasteful use of textures and geometry that just felt right and realistic enough to not break immersion despite the hardware limitations. This era of gaming rightfully and correctly recognized that any form of "realism" is ultimately an impression rather than an objective truth.
Once the Mac mini M8 is released, will we be able to emulate a Pentium III which runs PlayStation emulation?
While they claim "accuracy" as one of the goals for 86Box, I believe accuracy is overrated in PC emus (you don't really need that much accuracy due to the variety of PC clones, and emus are not that accurate anyway). For me the biggest point for using 86Box over other PC emulators/virtualizers is the large selection of virtual hardware available to emulate, not performance.
If you don't care and just want to go faster on a modern x86 CPU, you can replace the CPU emulation part of 86Box with a hypervisor. I tried running a Socket 7 motherboard firmware on Linux's KVM - given the chipset emulation is correct, it works: it amusingly identifies an AMD Zen5 running at 3GHz as "Unknown-S CPU at M60MHz" and boots to a DOS prompt.
Also, sounds like I should work on upstreaming my Rage Fury 128 emulation...and the EPoX SMP emulation...(the perils of too much ADHD and too few tokens)
Amazing times. I actually upgraded to that from a Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 which had dual Pentium Pro 180s in it. Ran NT and occasionally FreeBSD. Cost me a small fortune at the time. Backups here were to a SCSI DLT (can't remember capacity) that was chucked in the trash at work. All it needed was a minor repair.