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CherryA27
Contributor
Contributor

3D Acceleration Questions

Here's a basic info of my system:

i5-6300U 2.40 Ghz

8 GB DDR4 2133 Mhz (Single stick)

256 GB SK Hynix SC308 NVme SSD

Intel HD 520 (SKL GT2

Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS Host

VMWare Player 16.1.2 build-17966106 with fully updated guest additions

 

 

Now, i've got a bit of an interesting question. First to address my GPU: I have found success with systems with a line allowing VMWare to use unsupported drivers to use 3D acceleration, as it appears it does not like using it without that line otherwise.

Onto the actual question: Is there a paticular reason Windows 98 isn't supported for 3D acceleration, other than being (hugely outdated/old)? Is there some limitation in the code that could theoretically be changed, or a line that could force/allow VMWare to do such a thing for Windows 9x/98 with 3D acceleration? Or a modification somewhere?

IF there is such a thing at all, I will state beforehand I am fully accepting risks of corruption/unstableness/crashes.

 

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bluefirestorm
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It is likely down to Windows 98 being too old.

VMware was founded in 1998.
I don't think 3D accelerated graphics was a VM feature from the get-go.

From the historical release notes, it looks like 3D accelerated graphics started with version 6.5 for Windows XP guests
https://www.vmware.com/support/ws65/doc/releasenotes_ws65.html#majornew

That was in 2008, 2 years after Microsoft ended official support for Windows 98. It wouldn't make sense to backport a feature to an OS that Microsoft no longer supported by that time.

 

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CherryA27
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I made this post being fully aware, at the very least in a vanilla state, 3D acceleration was not available and would be too old to code for at the time for it to be worth it.

My question was if there was a possible line that could be used in the configuration file to possibly bypass something stopping it from being used or force/allow it, or some sort of code that could be modified/changed somewhere for a bypass on this. Not exactly in the state you are mentioning.

So basically a long shot here, given it might likely need to be 9x code specific, but I figured it would be worth a shot to ask anyway. Could have worded the original post better though.

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RaSystemlord
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As an additional discussion to the above:

What is really the 3D that you want to accelerate? Are you really referring to 3D graphics that worked better on Windows 98 hardware than under current VM computer?

I mean, Windows 98 was hardly used for any professional 3D tasks. Windows NT came out in 1994 and was a completely different OS, no DOS dependencies. Windows NT had OpenGL libraries, which Windows 98 never had. In cutting edge Windows NT workstations you could have dual-OpenGL graphics cards already in 1995. If not obvious, the price tag was high.

I'm not familiar with 3D gaming on Windows 98, but I would think that current hardware gives the same performance without any 3D acceleration, which may or may not have existed for some 3D game in Windows 98. So, I'm interested in knowing which kind of 3D games you talk about, where Win 98 gave hardware 3D acceleration?

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CherryA27
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No, I am not referring to 3D that worked better on the hardware of the era than under the VM. Nothing really type-wise in paticular.

And what 3D games in question? Well, I have a bit of a unique interest with older systems, where i'm not sure exactly just what yet, i'm attempting to run newer than the system natively could run with things like KernelEx / additonal DLLs that werent in 98 but were added in, etc. Not anything on any sort of professional level. Just a little past time thing I like doing with systems in the 95-2k range.

So essentially I don't know exactly what yet, but once I decide on something it will likely use some form of 3D acceleration, or at least make an attempt given the nature of these types of experiments and OS changes. Maybe not given the nature of the type of experiment, who knows.

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RaSystemlord
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@CherryA27 . Thanks for the explanation of the issue.

This isn't my expertise, but just as "some ideas" - maybe bring OpenGL support to Win98? With Windows NT, it wasn't originally done by Microsoft but by a certain CAD-related company for their high-end graphics cards. 

As for games requiring OpenGL support - don't remember them closely, but Quake (follow-up for Doom) did have OpenGL support and we used to demo Windows NT workstation with Quake ... well, because OpenGL support was there.

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bluefirestorm
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There is a difference in the Windows driver model in the different Windows versions. This in turn affects the video driver and the last VMware Tools version supported for a particular guest Windows OS version. With Windows 98, the video driver is named SVGA II while those with 3D support is named SVGA 3D.

So it would have also required a change in the video driver to have the 3D acceleration capabilities. If you run dxdiag on Windows 98 SE VM, the Test Direct3D button is disabled and there is a bullet point "Direct3D functionality not available. You should verify that the driver is a final version from the hardware manufacturer".

In that sense support for 3D acceleration would also require driver change and it looks as though VMware has not revisited since 2013 (based on the vmx_svga.drv datetimestamp in dxdiag). So it is unlikely that there is some hidden switch that will magically allow 3D support in Windows 98 VM,

You might have better luck with having Windows 2000 VM for 3D acceleration support (it shares the same VMware Tools as Windows XP) although it will likely a painful process to get it installed on a fresh Windows 2000 SP4 VM.

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