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PowerVR PCX2

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First post, by leileilol

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Anyone else had this? I retired this card in 1998 because it couldn't blend any more than a funky 4-bit alpha blend, and bad driver support. It also has no support for Win2K/XP. Latest drivers I could find are from early 98, and tracking down pvr_half.zip on google is impossible

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long live PCem

Reply 1 of 20, by WolverineDK

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You are correct that it is impossible (at least for me too) to get the file, and I even tried to get the file from some Japanese site for you. But sadly it looks like, we need somebody here who has the file. So they can upload to you some where.

Reply 2 of 20, by leileilol

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i'll probably need to scrap up a decent direct3d gl wrapper too for the games the powervr extreme minigl dll can't reach like Quake3. AltoGL sort of worked, but it had serious texture management issues (and doesn't subsitute blend modes like the sgl minigl). GLDirect doesn't work with the card.

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Reply 7 of 20, by leileilol

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WIP "post-1998" compatibility list of games that 'run' on the card released from past its last driver release in March '98:

Works great (runs as intended):
Half-Life
Unreal
Rogue Squadron
Battlezone (sometimes it can glitch and try to accellerate the game in 640x480x8 (YES 8BIT direct3d hardware))
Klingon Honor Guard

Works sort of great (not designed for this card, but works mostly great):
TomazQuake (GLQuake derivative. using Half-Life's MiniGL driver)
Midtown Madness
Mario64 via Corn 0.2 (just some broken shading)
Tumiki Fighters (via AltoGL)

Sort of works (runs and gets ingame at a playable framerate, but looks like crap):
Quake III Arena (around 25fps, using AltoGL wrapper)
Alien vs Predator 2 (7fps, missing additives)

Just crap (Doesn't start although it is technically promising to start):
Alien vs Predator Gold
Star Wars Episode I: Racer (a shame, since it would technically look like it should as it was a n64 game with only alpha blends)
Tread Marks
MDK2 (ALMOST starts with GLDirect 1.0x, but freezes after loading)

Last edited by leileilol on 2008-11-23, 06:11. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 11 of 20, by GL1zdA

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leileilol wrote:
swaaye wrote:

UT should work too.

It doesn't. Direct3D driver crashes, OpenGL driver crashes, and SGL driver (from uncommenting) doesn't initialize, falls back to software.
I also tried Deus Ex.

UT and Deus Ex work only on the PowerVR Neon250 (readme explicitly states that).

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Reply 12 of 20, by leileilol

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Hmm, that's weird because KHG dropped support for it too (in a patch) before the neon250 was released, ditto for Unreal as well I think.

Interesting screenshots of Quake3 using the Half-Life MiniGL driver (1.0.2.1 is the only one that works)
shot0003.jpg
shot0007.jpg
shot0006.jpg

Note that to draw ANYTHING AT ALL I had to use r_primitives 3. Sorting is also very bad.
It'd be looking a lot better if Quake3 had a glquake/quake2 style poly rendering option for compatibility, either through editing the q3a source (renderer/) or a more universal, correction wrapper that translates triangle strips into something more appropriate for the old SGL MiniGL (Is this even possible?)

The framerates may seem low, but that's probably just my processor. It's surprisingly playable on this thing, in terms of actual performance.

Also I think it's a bit of a shame when this very forum topic is at the top of Google matches. The internet is shrinksing 🙁

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long live PCem

Reply 13 of 20, by WolverineDK

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leileilol: damn girl, you are one heck of a girl. Who likes big toys, and know how to use them. What I mean is, you remind me of a girl I fell in love with, who was an awesome computer geek girl too, and wow. She was a hot redblond girl.

Reply 14 of 20, by DosFreak

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leileilol wrote:

It'd be looking a lot better if Quake3 had a glquake/quake2 style poly rendering option for compatibility, either through editing the q3a source (renderer/) or a more universal, correction wrapper that translates triangle strips into something more appropriate for the old SGL MiniGL (Is this even possible?)

The framerates may seem low, but that's probably just my processor. It's surprisingly playable on this thing, in terms of actual performance.

Also I think it's a bit of a shame when this very forum topic is at the top of Google matches. The internet is shrinksing 🙁

Could always ask the ioQuake3 folks.

The internet isn't shrinking it's just that good information is being drowned out by junk. 😀 (or google is getting crappier.....)

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Reply 16 of 20, by leileilol

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For getting PowerVR to look good in Q3/OA i'm making an effects/shaders pk3 that has just a bunch of alpha blend shader subsitutes, so the effects would look more 'proper' (not to mention saving video memory)

alphaflarefailure.jpg
*this is not a PCX2 screenshot. my pcx2 rig is dismantled

Nothing done about the triangles bug though, that one is essential to fix and I don't know where to beign with that one

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long live PCem

Reply 17 of 20, by bushwack

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I have a PowerVR PCX2 in my win95 machine and it's fun to tinker with with other hardware\software from the same era. I also had one in my Win98 rig at one time but gave up due to driver/software issues and performance wise just useless compared to a pair of Voodoo2 cards or a TNT/TNT2 card.

Reply 18 of 20, by leileilol

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My use for the PCX2 is to test compatiblity for the poorest computers I know. If I target PCX2 for my games, then i'll hit everything.

Designing stuff for this card is similar to making 3d stuff for the N64, but with a tad much more texture memory available.

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Reply 19 of 20, by keropi

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I just tried a PCX2 under DOS, with TombRaider. It just sucks on a p200mmx system.

edit: just tried a Diamond voodoo1 card, it runs circles around pcx2... 😵

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