MagicEngine

Kaminari · Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2004 8:47 am Post subject: OpenGL benchmark

OpenGL Infos from Jérôme Hoibian (of Pygmy Productions fame, for the Amiga oldtimers amongst us!) is a tiny tool that displays extensive information about your OpenGL driver.

If the Renderer string indicates something like "GDI Renderer" instead of "GeForce" (or whatever your card is) and the main window only displays a couple of supported extensions, then it means your graphic drivers are not hardware-accelerated and your system is using by default the generic and awfully slow software renderer from Microsoft. You definitely need to install appropriate drivers directly from your graphic card manufacturer.

For an excellent and full-fledged OpenGL benchmark program, I suggest GL Excess from Paolo Martella. Alternative downloads are available at Major Geeks.

Note: 3dfx and Matrox cards are known to have very poor OpenGL support. Nothing much can be done about it, except trying third-party drivers.

PS: David, which minimum OpenGL version is required by Magic Engine 1.0? Btw, you can make this post sticky if it proves useful.

dmichel · Admin Joined: 04 Apr 2002 Posts: 1166 Location: France

Hmm, I think there's only OpenGL 1.0 functions but there might be some 1.1 too but I don't use any extensions.

BTW today I run the program through an OpenGL debugger, my code is clean, no errors where detected. Smile

_________________
David Michel

Chris · Regular Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 125

As for Matrox, There's NO 3rd party driver...that means I can't use full-screen mode....Why Directx isn't default ? OpenGL should be optional...Magic Engine is PCE Emu which doesn't need 3D rendering...and I believe many people still use Matrox for there sharp 2D image

so please support option for color bit and openGL enable/disable in the future version..

Kaminari · Posted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 10:03 am Post subject:

Chris · Regular Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 125

Well..If this is freeware I agree with you 100%...but this is commercial software and people paid price for this as this software is clearly marked as "Windows 9x/Me/NT/2000/XP, using DirectX!"

In this case, compatibility have priority over portability

Kaminari · Posted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 2:52 pm Post subject:

Heh, good one :)

Come on, that page you're referring to hasn't been updated since the 0.9x versions. You've been on those forums long enough to know that DirectX applied only to those previous versions, and it was announced very early on that OpenGL would be the next path. Hopefully you didn't register ME back then, thinking that this would be different?

Chris · Regular Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 125

I registered ME about 2 years ago but ,to be earnest, I really missed the OpenGL part.......then what ? Should I replace my loving Matrox with OpenGL compatible video card to get Magic Engine keep rolling ?.... I really don't need any extra features like hardware accelation or bilinear filtering.....
There's probably other ways to solve this problem..like v99b Gui with some bug fixed (or only pce/tg16 source updated) for example...as a directx version...

Alexsource · Regular Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 103

Weird as it may sound, the emu works, but the OpenGL Infos thingy hangs up over here Razz

SiS cards and drivers are 1v0l!!!!!!! Shocked

I guess david can make a direct x versión for windows usrs, or a patch to enable directx... but i'm pretty sure it would take him a long time, if it were to look exactly like the current OGL powered version...
A stripped down of new graphic features and whistles version could be a nice option, though... Think

Tomasz · Regular Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Posts: 89

Kaminari · Posted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 4:54 pm Post subject:

If that's the same problem I described, yes it has been fixed in the latest PR3 (PR3 was released two times the same day, you'd need to get it again).

The problem was due to fact that PR2 and PR3-1 tried to force the refresh rate to 60Hz, regardless of the refresh rates you may have forced yourself in your drivers (via RefreshForce, PowerStrip, whatever). My 640x480 mode is refreshed at 120Hz and that would clash with ME's fullscreen mode. PR1 and PR3-2 let Windows (or the user, for that matter) decide which refresh rate to use.

Tomasz · Regular Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Posts: 89

Yeah, I'm using the 1st iteration of PR3 because I haven't been able to find a good mirror to download PR3-2. The ME site went down the day it was released... I figure that I'll just wait until PR4 gets released.

Thanks!

EDIT: The refresh rate forcing that you cite is most likely the reason for my problem too because Matrox drivers have this functionality built-in.

dmichel · Admin Joined: 04 Apr 2002 Posts: 1166 Location: France

Guys, when I went the OpenGL way I really didn't expect that OpenGL was that poorly supported on some video cards, here all was fine during the tests (tested on TNT2, Radeon 9200, GF3), on my own (slow) PC it was even faster than the old MagicEngine with DirectX so I was happy and continued this way. And has Kaminari explained OpenGL was chosen for portability reason so that I could use the same code on Windows or OS X, or may be even Linux, who knows... It seemed a good choice to me but now if OpenGL makes troubles, it's not really a problem, I can add a DirectX driver to MagicEngine too, it's very easy to do, I wrote my graphics engine so that it is completely independant of the host OS, but give me some time please, the new version is only 5-day old, and with all the problems there was I was quite busy those past days, once the version will be stabilized and most features enabled sure I can look in making a DirectX driver, or even a Glide driver so that I could resurrect my old PC and its Banshee card, I'm sure it would make a few users happy too, but don't shoot me, else who will make the DirectX driver. Wink

_________________
David Michel

Chris · Regular Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 125

Well..I'm using latest "win98" driver (tried old ones too)..and I'm getting swapped color and sprite has no color at all in full-screen mode ,also getting only 30 fps....I heard ,which is even worse, Matrox stopped supporting OpenGL in win98 platform....for the side note, I also have voodoo 3 as PCI which has similar problem but no sprites with garbled graphics..as far as I know, OpenGL is only fullly supported by nVidia cards and mostly by Ati (such as hardware TnL is missing) and partly by Matrox and Voodoo ,for example, performance is very poor and many compatibility issues like bad color, crash...

about direct-X driver...Yes I'll wait...

thanks..... Applause

I was just worried that I can't have ME.....that's all... Angel

Tomasz · Regular Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Posts: 89

Matrox stopped making new Win9x drivers over two years ago, around the time they released the Parhelia. Their Win2k/WinXP drivers are much better and still somewhat supported. Their OpenGL ICD is not too bad as far as compatibility is concerned; although, it has always been a bit slower compared to their Direct3D support. Of course the ICD does lack support for some extensions, but much of that is due to hardware limitations... remember this is a card that was released at the time of DX 6.1, before vertex/pixel shaders and even before fixed function hardware T&L. Nevertheless this is irrelevant for ME 1.0.

As I said before, the Win2k/WinXP driver works very well with ME using my Matrox G400 MAX. So, I guess you can either try to dualboot/upgrade to one of these operating systems or wait for native DirectX support.

M1Savage · Member Joined: 26 May 2002 Posts: 26

David -

I vote yes on adding the dx support and such. Those of us with "ancient" computers thank you! Applause