Does OpenGL dynamic lighting work in Heretic on Voodoo?

Posted by exjwpornaddict@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 3 comments

To those of you who have Voodoo Banshee, 3, 4, or 5 graphics, and who play Heretic in gzdoom, skulltag, etc, does the dynamic lighting work, such that ammunition and projectiles illuminate the surround floor and walls?

I ask because Voodoo lacks hardware transform and lighting. So, i assume it would have to be done in software by the OpenGL implementation?

I've never had a Voodoo. I tried testing in 86box, but the emulated cpu isn't fast enough to use OpenGL rendering in skulltag.

I tried searching youtube. I found a video of gzdoom playing doom on Voodoo, but it didn't seem to have lighing. Other videos of Heretic 2 on Voodoo did seem to have lighting. My interest is specifically in Heretic 1.

What cpu and windows version are you using? I'm hoping that the dynamic lighting would work on Windows 98se and Windows 2000, and hopefully on non-Intel cpus, such as k6-2, via c3, or athlon tbird.

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BCProgramming@reddit

I have a Voodoo 3 3000. It is on a Pentium II 233Mhz machine with 128MB of RAM and running Windows 98SE.

Trying to run ZDoom LE in OpenGL mode fails, complaining of a "Unsupported OpenGL Version" error and falling back to software every time.

By installing MesaFX I was able to run it in OpenGL mode. Lighting works as expected, and is also coloured:

https://i.imgur.com/fNrfEWj.png

I see no reason it would not work on non-Intel CPUs. It's mostly about MesaFX.

Note that Glide 3.0 and the Voodoo 3 (the one I have) are capable of Transform and Lighting which is presumably being used by MesaFX here.

I would guess that the information you found might have had users running the game on a Voodoo 2 instead, which might just not have lighting available at all.

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exjwpornaddict@reddit (OP)

ZDoom LE

I tried to use zdoom le in 86box, but it faults on a cmov instruction on k6-2.

I tried changing the cpu to a pentium 2, but i kept running into disk geometry problems with windows 2000 when changing to any other mainboard. (I was using a 4095,16,63 chs image. After changing emulated mainboards, i'd get either couldn't find ntldr, or inaccessible boot volume.)

By installing MesaFX I was able to run it in OpenGL mode. Lighting works as expected, and is also coloured:

https://i.imgur.com/fNrfEWj.png

Cool. Thanks for testing and confirming.

Note that Glide 3.0 and the Voodoo 3 (the one I have) are capable of Transform and Lighting which is presumably being used by MesaFX here.

I would guess that the information you found might have had users running the game on a Voodoo 2 instead, which might just not have lighting available at all.

Wikipedia seems to be pretty consistent in claiming that none of the production voodoos had hardward t&l, that the original geforce was the first pc consumer card with it, followed by the radeon, and that production voodoos used software t&l.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transform,_clipping,_and_lighting

Nvidia's GeForce 256 was released in late 1999 and introduced hardware support for T&L to the consumer PC graphics card market.

3dfx and other competing graphics card companies contended that a fast CPU would make up for the lack of a T&L unit.

ATI was developing their own GPU at the time known as the Radeon which also implemented hardware T&L.

3dfx's Voodoo5 5500 did not have a T&L unit but it was able to match the performance of the GeForce 256,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_256

3dfx and other competing graphics-card companies pointed out that a fast CPU could more than make up for the lack of a T&L unit.

Thanks again.

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BCProgramming@reddit

I think I found out why it gets reported as having the feature. Apparently it has a feature called "Geometry assist" in the driver, which emulates hardware T&L and thus reports that the hardware is T&L capable to software.

This certainly explains why it performed so poorly as well, I assumed it was just the translation layer.

This also explains why the performance wasn't very good- I thought that was the translation layer.