Best glide wrapper under wine

mr jingle · Post by **mr jingle** » Sat Mar 24, 2012 10:52 am

Has anybody found out which is the best glide wrapper to use under recent versions of wine?

I'm trying to play some old windows games from the late '90s on my iMac (ATI 5670), most of them do not support neither opengl nor Direct3D, just Glide. I've tried running under Bootcamp / Windows 7, but it seems that right now wine has become more compatible for such software than windows itself.

Some ancient tests are shown by AppDB for such libraries, but by reading their description it seems that such results are no more applicable. If it wasn't enough, more recent wrappers are Direct3D only (nglide, psvoodoo).

I'm aware that such API contraption ( Glide wrapper translated to Direct3D calls and again translated to OpenGL calls by WineD3D) would hardly show correct results, so I'm asking if anybody had any luck with them even before wasting my time to find out that none of them work correctly.

paulthetall · Post by **paulthetall** » Sun Mar 25, 2012 6:02 am

i would use 1.3.9

mr jingle · Post by **mr jingle** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 5:06 am

paulthetall wrote:i would use 1.3.9

1.3.9 what?

Anyway, I'm having some good results with nglide, ironically much better results than using opengl based wrappers like Zackensack's one.

There are some weird minor glitches, but I'm having an hard time clearly identifying if such problems are due to the use of a plugin, some rendering differences due to using Mac OS X, or in the games themselves.

No Idea how I should report what I've found by using a custom Library on AppDB (or Bugzilla, for the matter.)

doh123 · Post by **doh123** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 9:41 am

mr jingle wrote: No Idea how I should report what I've found by using a custom Library on AppDB (or Bugzilla, for the matter.)

you shouldn't.. report it back to the people making the custom stuff, as its not something to do with Wine itself.

mr jingle · Post by **mr jingle** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 2:58 pm

doh123 wrote:
mr jingle wrote: No Idea how I should report what I've found by using a custom Library on AppDB (or Bugzilla, for the matter.)
you shouldn't.. report it back to the people making the custom stuff, as its not something to do with Wine itself.

No, by saying "custom Library" I mean the actual glide wrapper itself.
In other words, there's no way to correctly specify the status of something that affects other applications, other than listing every single instance where a dissimilar behaviour appears.

For example, nglide 0.98 is unable to create bilinear filtered textures, rendering every texture as nearest-point sampled(?). This only happens only on specific applications, while other games show their textures correctly.

Should I file this under a specific bug for nGlide, creating an "App" profile? Or should it be considered an error of the application occurring while a specific glide wrapper is being used?

The same kind of consideration could be said while using any kind of third party plugin / filter that somehow affects the whole wine/windows environment.

By the way, if it weren't clear, I'm just using a stock wine build (1.5.0) running on Mac Os X Lion 10.7.3, on iMac Late 2010 (i3, AMD 5670 Video Card)

lahmbi5678 · Post by **lahmbi5678** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 5:40 pm

Hi mr jingle,

first you should find out, if the glide wrappers would run perfectly under Windows (zeckensack was developed for Windows XP or earlier). If they'd exhibit the same glitches under Windows, then it would clearly be a bug in the wrapper, not in wine, in that case you should report bugs to the developers of the wrapper.

Post by **DanKegel** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 10:42 pm

Have you tried 'winetricks glidewrapper' ?

lahmbi5678 · Post by **lahmbi5678** » Wed Mar 28, 2012 9:39 am

Which would be the most feature complete glide wrapper? It seems, openglide and zeckensack haven't been updated anymore since 2004/2005. nglide seems to be the most promissing candidate, its version number is close to 1

mr jingle · Post by **mr jingle** » Wed Mar 28, 2012 11:00 am

@lahmbi5678: I tought about that too, unfortunately I've been unable to test most Glide games directly, given that Bootcamp supports only Windows 7, and most of them are not working under 64bit.

@DanKegel: Winetricks installs Zackensak's wrapper, which gives quite a "dadaist" result (random camera position / wrong colours on palettized textures, wrong geometries, you name it) using Mac Os X and an ATI video card. No idea using Linux or Nvidia Card anymore, unfortunately I've dismissed my old linux & nvdia powered laptop.)

Excluding such small aesthetic issues, nGlide has given quite good results, tough. No idea about dgvoodoo, but it looks like it's the default choice by some games retooled by Good Old Games to run on modern systems ( P.O.D. , probably King Quest VIII and Interstate '76 too.)

Given the work already done to implement WineD3D and that voodoo cards have been extensively documented and emulated by recent versions of MESS/MAME, I wonder if it would be that problematic to implement Glide API directly as a WINE library. An exercise best left to some goodwilled reader