What's this?

This is the 'alternative' version of my wrapper. that fixes flickering
issues with some extremely misbehaved games. It does so by also misbehaving.
THIS CAN LEAD TO SYSTEM CRASHES WHILE PLAYING OR AFTER PLAYING.

For most uses the 'regular' version is still right.

This version is _only_ meant to allow you to play games that exhibit the
flickering issue, which are to my knowlede Tarzan and NFS2, possibly others.

Use at your own risk, as always.




!!!ATI Radeon only!!!

*** Zeckensack's unbelievable Glide wrapper, a Radeon exclusive ***

DISCLAIMER:
This software is provided 'as is' without any explicit or implied warranties.
I accept no responsibility for any harm, loss, damage or general change to the universe as a whole
or any part of it, be it in your possesion or otherwise, that may occur while having any sort
of access to this software.
Use at your own risk.

This software is free. You get what you pay for.
Feel free to redistribute. All I'm asking for is that the containing archive has to be kept
unaltered.

Contents:
1)Description
1b)Techno stuff
2)Usage
3)Status
4)Latest version and contact
5)Another disclaimer

**** 1)Description
This is a Glide wrapper, ie a library that emulates the programming interface for 3dfx Voodoo
hardware and in turn allows games specifically coded for it to run on other vendors' graphics
cards. Specifically, this wrapper emulates the Glide 2.4 API and a Voodoo I card with 4 megs
of texture memory and 2 megs frame buffer.
At the moment it will only work on the ATI Radeon range of graphics cards but I just might
lift that restriction sometime. It also requires an MMX capable processor from your preferred vendor.
Note: The old 'partial SSE' requirement has been lifted.

The reason for this one being Radeon exclusive - for now - is that there are already lots of Glide
wrappers out there that work reasonably well on NVIDIA graphics cards, but often not so well on
competing products. I decided to fill part of this gap.

**** 1b)Techno stuff
I've added this section because of a couple of EMails I've received.
Most important one: This wrapper is _not_ based on 3dfx source code. Sure, I've had a look at the glide SDK
documentation and used the public glide headers as a template. But the remaining code was created completely
from scratch.

And now something completely different:
In case you wondered, this wrapper works by translating Glide calls to OpenGL calls, not Direct3D. That's
the primary reason for LFB stuff still being somewhat slow, and for some weird issues with window management.
(NFS2 is the only game I know of that suffers from this but I thought I'd mention it anyway)

The main technical bullet points of this wrapper in short
-fully general chroma keying/alpha testing/blending emulation (yes, that means all combinations)
-full emulation of all possible color/alpha combiner configurations
-nice LFB emulation (almost there, almost there ...)
-it runs mini-GL games like Quake 2. No other wrapper I know of does this
-full texture memory simulation. Whatever bogus a game may decide to write to texture memory, this will work exactly like 'the real thing'. Writing multiple textures at once and other nasty stuff.

**** 2)Usage
First of all, make sure you have a current driver for your Radeon installed.
Copy the file named "glide2x.dll" from this archive into the directory where the game executable
resides.
To make life even easier you can also drop it into your Windows\System folder where it will automatically be found by all games. This should however not be done if you have a 'real' Voodoo card and wish to keep it functional :-)

There's currently no configuration utility, so you're basically already good to go. There
are some issues with the basic configuration of your graphics card though. Stencil buffering must
be allowed in the OpenGL settings tab (more recent drivers don't have this option anymore, they
always leave it enabled). Automatic texture conversion to 16 bit should be disabled for best
results. Forcing a 16 bit depth buffer is probably not a good idea either.

If your games play too fast (eg Gex3D and Rayman 2 tend to), they're likely relying on VSync for their
timing needs. Newer ATI drivers have the OpenGL VSync control set to 'always off' upon installation. You need to switch it to 'default' or 'application control' (YMMV depending on your language settings).

**** 3)Status
It's nifty. It runs a lot of stuff. It's also pretty fast. And, may I say so, almost feature complete.
I'm testing it on Windows 98SE exclusively so this would be your best bet for stable operation.
I've had positive reports from Win2k and WinXP users, so I guess it'll do fine but don't shout at me :-)

The ever expanding compatibility list has been moved to its own file 'compatibility.txt', which
should be included in this archive.

Alas, there are games that won't run at all, most of these fall into one of these categories:
a)Games for Glide3x, eg Diablo2. These are generally new enough to natively support either OpenGL
or Direct3D. Short answer: I won't do it. 
b)Games for early versions of Glide 2, eg Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. These use some functions which
have been kicked out of the API over time. I'd like to work on it but it's pretty near impossible
to get decent documentation about these obsolete functions.
c)Games for DOS-Glide, eg Tomb Raider I. It won't happen. I need OpenGL which is not available in pure DOS.

**** 4)Latest version
Grab it at http://home.t-online.de/~zsack/

Due to my ever capable ISP webmail (which won't let me store mail locally and won't keep it for more than a few weeks), I've lost a lot of valuable feedback. If you've sent me mail and I didn't reply, I apologize. Try sending it again :-)
But please don't use the old contact address anymore. It's dead.

So ...
Comments go to ashopa@gmx.de instead


**** 5)Another DISCLAIMER
Copyrights and trademarks belong to their respective owners. I don't own them, blabla.