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Is nVidia Support for Older 3D Games Fading? 133

Posted by Zonk from the everything-old-is-old-again dept.
BrendaEM writes "A thread on Through the Looking Glass depicts the plight of fans of the original Thief Series and System Shock 2, who are asking nVidia fix rendering issues these 3D 16-bit games on their newer video cards and drivers. In the case of the original Thief series, in which the games build tension by their use of light and shadow, the rendering has been badly degraded from that which was originally intended. In another Slashdot article, the author asked the question whether or not video games were art. If one of the greatest video games of all time, with a growing wealth of hundreds of fan produced missions, as well as an entire full-sized expansion, does not play well because legacy support diminishes, then what will happen to lesser 3D video games?"
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Is nVidia Support for Older 3D Games Fading? More

Is nVidia Support for Older 3D Games Fading?

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  • You haven't lived until you've tried getting Final Fantasy VII for PC running on a modern machine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by c_forq ( 924234 )
      I remember there was a pirate version that simplified the process a bit, one of the key things they did was re-encoded all of the FMVs so they didn't have to deal with that funky codec originally used.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Gabest ( 852807 )
        ... and that new codec is going to cause problems 10 years from now in the future.

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          As opposed to 10 years from now in the past?
    • It was a sod to get it to run at the time it came out, with different graphics drivers supplying different texture coord offsets, leading to graphical corruption all over the shop. I dread to think what it's like nowadays.

    • Re:Pure gaming bliss. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rhyder128k ( 1051042 ) on Sunday September 16, 2007 @04:50PM (#20628455) Homepage
      I think that a new generation of emulators is probably a better idea for older games. I wonder what it would take to software emulate a 3dfx voodoo 1 card? Any such attempt could offload some of the work onto the real GPU, of course.
      • There have been Voodoo emulators for years - they are called "glide wrappers" after the 3dfx Glide API. They take advantage of hardware 3d acceleration. Ironically, one of the bigger markets for glide wrappers has been people running N64 emulators: the first good N64 emulator used Glide.

    • You haven't lived until you've tried getting Final Fantasy VII for PC running on a modern machine.

      Actually, nowadays it works fine, since the machines are fast enough to run it smoothly without 3D acceleration. With 3D acceleration enabled, the biggest challenge was reaching the next savepoint before the game crashed.

      Of course, you could just run the PSX version on a Playstation emulator - ePSXe [epsxe.com] works wonderfully nowadays, even under Linux. Kinda funny: I've never owned a Playstation, but have bought

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gravos ( 912628 )
      Exactly. One of the biggest reasons to be a PC gamer is because you can still run most of yesterday's games today, unlike on consoles.

      If nVidia is taking that ability away, then PCs start to look a whole lot more like consoles...

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by neumayr ( 819083 )
        Hm? Two of the three consoles are backwards compatible, and the third at least offers many old titles as downloads.
        At least I usually have a lot more trouble getting a 2001 PC game to work than a PS2 game from the same time. Not to mention PS1 era PC games...
        • All 3 current generation consoles (Wii, 360, PS3) are backwards compatible. Wii can play Gamecube games and offers downloading of games from older systems via it's Virtual Console. The Xbox 360 can play a decent range of older Xbox games, admittedly through an emulator. And the PS3 can play both PS1 and PS2 games.
      • Pretty much anyone who's really into retro on the PC has atleast 1 older PC around, usually a P2 or early P3 running Windows 98 and possibly dual booting to some version of DOS. Some have older machines too, depending on what they are trying to play.
        • DOSBox is quite a big step forward for older DOS games - you could run even games made for DOS and aware of Windows 95 on it (Death Rally)
    • Oh yeah, that one was easy (seriously.) Patching the game [qhimm.com] and other mods [qhimm.com] (like the higher resolution models.) I got to the end of the game (where I was last time when I played it years ago) and still haven't beaten it. Again.
    • I have been able to get it to run in software mode, which looks like crap. FF7 was one of the very early games to make use of 3D graphics, and as such, had trouble running on some of the machines of the time. You were pretty much limited to the ATI Rage 3D and the Voodoo cards (of course, at the time, that was about all there was). It used 8Bit textures or something, and as most modern hardware does not support any 3D textures (or whatever it is) below 16 bit, you can rule out playing this with hardware acc
      • Don't feel like digging out links, but google for "Prboom" for Doom1/2, and for quake I'd say EZQuake for multiplayer, DarkPlaces for amazingly beautiful singleplayer (assuming your computer can keep up.. Think Doom3-era requirements due to the complete overhaul of the lighting and particle systems, in addition to replacing the original textures with high res 24bit recreations).
  • are tending to break more than play these days. I remember a few weeks ago I tried to load up Mechwarrior 4 under winXP only to find that the program would minimize to the task tray at the beginning and never maximize afterwards. Sure this had nothing to do with the 3D drivers, most likely a video codec or something, but regardless... old games are getting harder and harder to play on current systems that shouldn't have a problem with backwards compatibility.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Unfortunately, expecting backward compatability from nVidia, or ATI is asking a bit much these days. Hardward vendors, AND software vendors are looking to future performance and one-upmanship for the competitor. It's the same thing with processor performance thats going on between Intel and AMD.

      As someone who is a fan of Theif series, hearing about this dismays me quite a bit. I have several games that are 5-6~ years old, like Theif, that I wouldn't mind loading just to have available to play. I would expec

    • Re:Old games in general (Score:4, Informative)

      by BobPaul ( 710574 ) * on Sunday September 16, 2007 @04:22PM (#20628203) Journal
      This is probably a WinAPI issue. This has nothing to do with nVidia, ATI, Video Codecs (which would only affect cutscenes anyway...) or anything like that. This is almost certainly 100% caused by upgrades with the WinAPI and/or DirectX. Unfortunately for you, the best thing MS ever did was drop full compatibility with Win9x. Check the game vendor for updates or try it in DosBox or similar.

      • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        What a totally retarded comment. If you had even .01% knowledge of how games are developed you would have not said that.
        100% of all the games have clever optimizations and hacks to improve performance on the then-lowest-common-denominator of System configurations. As a game developer myself I know that some(depends on how desperate the gamedev is) of these hacks are based on undocumented WinAPI behavior. Some of those APIs were not meant to be used outside of Windows "internals", but they are used; as getti
    • I had this exact same problem when I first got Windows XP on a new computer with almost ALL games I tried... I eventually figured out it was the junk that was bundled with the PC. Once I removed all that games worked well. It might not be unwelcome junk in your case, but try seeing if you can get it working with minimal programs running.
    • Ironic, IIRC Microsoft helped with MechWarrior 4, while MW3 worked fine in XP for me a few months back.
    • I've also experienced this issue with older games, like the first two Descent games (the ones that were entirely underground; the third one had above-ground areas) and X=Wing vs. TIE Fighter. The latter had issues (I think) because of the lack of a "serial" or "game" port on the computer for the joystick. USB joysticks simply didn't work, and it frustrated the hell out of me because it was a game that I used to play all the time growing up! I still had the old serial/gameport/whatever joystick, and it was
      • Was your inability to fix this problem due to not having an open PCI slot, or the $5.00 needed to buy a game adapter? ;)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Splab ( 574204 )
      Find the exe file, right click, properties, pick the compatibility pane, check the run this program in compatibility mode for and pick a suitable version of windows. Also you might want to disable advanced services and visual themes.

      Hope it works.
    • (Older games in general...) are tending to break more than play these days. I remember a few weeks ago I tried to load up Mechwarrior 4 under winXP only to find that the program would minimize to the task tray at the beginning and never maximize afterwards. Sure this had nothing to do with the 3D drivers, most likely a video codec or something, but regardless... old games are getting harder and harder to play on current systems that shouldn't have a problem with backwards compatibility.

      I'm running XP Pro on
  • With such a wealth of poorly phrased material in the article blurb, I think I'd have to look past simple over-use of punctuation and right on to the following senseless sentence:

    who are asking nVidia fix rendering issues these 3D 16-bit games on their newer video cards and drivers.
  • ...only because it is going to have an open source driver.

    Technically by the way, the specs would allow a open source Windows driver to be written aswell instead of the one supplied by ati for windows, right?

    Nvidia is not really good with their drivers lately quality-wise and of course they don't even set their eyesight on things like working well with a tickless kernel. The damn thing generates a tick at the refresh rate of my monitor, a problem I cannot fix because the code is closed. Otherwise my sys

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by k8to ( 9046 )
      Assuming AMD/ATI follows through with their current promise, there will be both technical documentation available, and an effort to actively cooperate with the "open source" world on driver creation. One presumes they are looking at Linux, but if they have resources in communication of fiddly bits in specs and docs I doubt they will look askance at those creating similar for windows.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ant P. ( 974313 )
      I'll believe that when I see it.

      My next graphics hardware will be Intel.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Randle_Revar ( 229304 )
        They already released two large documents, and it would seem pretty silly to release that much and then not follow up on the rest of the promise. I mean, if you aren't going to keep your promise, why not go all the way and and not keep any of it?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ant P. ( 974313 )
          Because it's more profitable that way?

          If they keep their word, great - I'll buy a Radeon when they get it working. Until then I'll also have fully functional graphics which I won't need to throw away when I do get a faster card. Everyone wins.
    • At least not in the way you seem to think.

      ATI hasn't announced anything new. They've simply brought attention to the fact that they will support open source efforts, as they always have.

      As always, there will be 3d drivers for paleolithic versions of their cards, and 2d for everything else. If you actually want to use up to date cards, you'll have to use the closed drivers.

      So you might as well just buy Nvidia cards, since their closed drivers work.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Randle_Revar ( 229304 )

        ATI hasn't announced anything new. They've simply brought attention to the fact that they will support open source efforts, as they always have.

        They never supported open source efforts in the past. This is the first time they have provided documentation and been willing to answer questions without an NDA (and sometime they were reluctant to talk even with an NDA).

        As always, there will be 3d drivers for paleolithic versions of their cards, and 2d for everything else. If you actually want to use up to

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rix ( 54095 )

          They never supported open source efforts in the past. This is the first time they have provided documentation and been willing to answer questions without an NDA (and sometime they were reluctant to talk even with an NDA).
          You're wrong. ATI has always been as open as they could be. They've always released specs and interface docs.
          • You must be thinking of a different ATI than me. Before this, ATI never released any specs for r300/r400/r500/r600. They did share some r200 docs with a few X devs under an NDA: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=743&num=1 [phoronix.com]

            That has always been the problem with ATI, they didn't share the specs so open source drivers could be written and, unlike Nvidia, the binary driver was also complete crap.
            • Historically ATI has always shared specs. I wasn't aware that they hadn't for those GPU's, but this still isn't news, it's just a return to business as usual.

              Given that ATI's drivers suck ass on both windows and linux, I suspect the problem isn't solely with the drivers.

      • As always, there will be 3d drivers for paleolithic versions of their cards, and 2d for everything else.
        Then the 2D drivers will have to support enough 3D to get compositing window managers [wikipedia.org] working, or the developers of such window managers will start recommending Intel graphics for deployment in new PCs.

        • Yep (Score:2)

          by Rix ( 54095 )
          Note that even ATI's closed source drivers don't support that. Neither do Intel's.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Splab ( 574204 )
        Nice trolling there. ATI drivers actually work, maybe not for legacy stuff, but all the new cards I have had since 9500 have worked with no problems under linux.
        • You might want to pull out your spectacles. If you actually read what you responded to, I did note that the OS ATI drivers for paleolithic cards were fine.
        • Nice trolling there. ATI drivers actually work, maybe not for legacy stuff, but all the new cards I have had since 9500 have worked with no problems under linux.

          Anecdotally: I was mostly nVidia for my game machines since the tnt2. When the radeon 9600xt came out I heard so many rave reviews that I thought I'd try it a bit after release. For the 4 months I used that card I have never had as many blue screens of deaths, random restarts, and hang ups. I changed drivers, adding cooling ,under clocked the card..
      • For the first time after several years of closed source only drivers, ATI has released at least some hardware documentation. That makes their promise of eventually releasing full documentation halfway credible.

        Of course, they still can reconsider before the full documentation is out. But at the moment, they have somewhat more credibility with the Open Source community than NVidia.

    • Technically by the way, the specs would allow a open source Windows driver to be written aswell instead of the one supplied by ati for windows, right?

      Of course it would be within the realm of possibility with enough effort, but I don't think there are as many ambitious, independent hardware driver developers in the Windows world compared to Linux, or actually the general will to do it. It's a wholly different subculture that perceives itself as not needing a DIY attitude.

      Maybe those Windows folks should just dual boot with Linux and play their legacy games in Wine? It should be much less of a hassle than waiting for a fix that will never arrive becau

    • Authenticode price is prohibitive for hobbyists (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepples.gmail@com> on Sunday September 16, 2007 @05:49PM (#20628923) Homepage Journal

      Technically by the way, the specs would allow a open source Windows driver to be written aswell instead of the one supplied by ati for windows, right?
      Unless the driver is one of those specific kinds of drivers that can run entirely in user space, you can't use drivers you compiled yourself because they are not digitally signed. Workarounds are to 1. press F8 every time you start Windows Vista or 2. pay $499 per year for a VeriSign code signing certificate and sign your code.

      The damn thing generates a tick at the refresh rate of my monitor
      Perhaps this has something to do with the ability to block on the start of vertical blanking, which is crucial for smooth animation in PC games.
      • 64-bit MS OSes, Vista and XP, don't allow for unsigned kernel drivers. The 32-bit ones still do, including Vista. Also I believe the graphics drivers are all user mode in Vista. Every time I install the nVidia beta drivers, it snivels about them not being signed, but allows it to proceed (I am running 64-bit).

  • nVidia not to blame (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zokier ( 1049754 ) on Sunday September 16, 2007 @04:14PM (#20628149)
    I'm quite sure that game programmers are using every undocumented feature and bug they can find to achieve better performance and to allow creating better games, and so they inheritely are fragile. I assume also that situation is getting better as API's are getting better and performance of hardware has increased giving programmers more freedom to produce good code vs fast code.

    • Re:nVidia not to blame (Score:5, Informative)

      by cliffski ( 65094 ) on Sunday September 16, 2007 @04:29PM (#20628283) Homepage
      I'm a game dev who uses a very out of date API for my games (DirectX 7). I do 2D turn based games, so there is zero incentive for me to use a newer API, which would mean rewriting engine code.
      The problem is not so much that newer cards screw up rendering of old games (although this *can* happen), but that no card driver seems to stick 100% to the directx standard. DirectX is HEAVEN for game devs, because in theory it means we can write to a single standard for the windows platform, and have our games work on any card.
      The problem is, there are so many minor quirks, differences and tweaks in the way each card implements the same directx calls, that in practice you will *always* encounter people who have rendering issues just on their PC. I wish ATI, intel (worst offenders) and nVdia would take more time to ensure that their cards actually come closer to the supplied reference rasterizer in terms of results. The entire point of directx is to allow devs to be free of individual card woes. shoddy drivers can undo all of that work.
      • I mean, I could tell you to use OpenGL -- everything you said about DirectX is true of OpenGL/SDL -- but I don't know if it would be any better with this particular problem.

        But 2D turn-based games? Are you really doing so much animation that you need to accelerate it at all?

        (Oh, and regardless, it's poor encapsulation if you're tied to one graphics API anyway. Most visible example, probably: Unreal (specifically Unreal Tournament 2003/04), which runs on DirectX, OpenGL, and various consoles, with the same e
      • Hell if it's 2D use Flex. You'll be able to deploy to multiple platforms (unlike DirectX) through Apollo, or just throw that sucker in a browser with Flash. And you don't get much more high-level than Actionscript 3.0, it's a managed language. Flash gets a bad rap for all the banner crap developed with it, but it's pretty crazy what you can do with Actionscript these days.

      • DirectX is HEAVEN for game devs, because in theory it means we can write to a single standard for the windows platform, and have our games work on any card.

        For your purposes, it sounds like OpenGL+SDL would be heaven, too; possibly even a better one. :-> You can write to a single standard and have your games work on any card, too - but on lots of platforms. Not just Windows, but also Mac and Linux, plus quite a few others [libsdl.org]. The book "Programming Linux Games" is only a little out of date (basically in th

    • Re:nVidia not to blame (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Sunday September 16, 2007 @05:55PM (#20628991)
      While I don't doubt that, nVidia at least has been caught cheating in their drivers before now to get better scores in benchmarking software, and I certainly remember them releasing new drivers to improve performance in popular games that reportedly broke other, less popular ones.

      Even now, the latest nVidia drivers (which the Bioshock demo recommends you install) has caused a few minor glitches in Oblivion (for me at least), and that's hardly an old game.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mikael ( 484 )
        I have some non-games based applications written a couple of years ago that use hardware shaders for rendering. Even those fairly simple shaders suffer from the occasional bit-rot. The first occasion was when I got so used to adding f's to all my floating point constants (recommended for C/C++ programming), then when the next update of the device drivers, the compiler started choking on them. On the other hand, two years ago, the shader compiler refused to allow me to use for-next loops or mid-function retu

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by JNighthawk ( 769575 )
      Don't assume. There are two big issues, aside from what you stated, here:

      1. Drivers not sticking to spec. Many drivers have many bugs that game devs have to work around.
      2. Legacy support leads to sub-optimal performance. When driver devs need to choose whether they'll devote their time to legacy support or a new whiz-bang feature, sometimes they choose the whiz-bang feature.
  • We at Slashdot complain about cruft!

    I also like to be able to play my old games in modern machines, but alas, that is not always possible. Keep a few old machines handy, in case you need to play your old DOS favorites, or your Win9x ones.

    My only hope is that at some time, a combination of modern HW+Virtualization done right allow me to play my old favourites in modern HW, retiring in the process my compatibility fleet of computers.

    Suerte y feliz día
  • Those older video cards that have open specs will find themselves virtualized or emulated. Of course, there may be a 5-10 year or longer gap before an emulated video card can perform as well as the original. But in 2015, playing games from 2000 should be no problem, provided at least some vintage video cards are open-spec.
    • That doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. No game for Windows is touching the hardware directly; everything is done through APIs. The only thing that needs to be done is to implement the APIs properly. That would typically mean fixing the driver.
    • I remember I using 3Dfx wrapper software to play old games since no one uses 3Dfx cards anymore these days. We need something like this for older NVIDIA cards. Actually do they exist that I don't know about?
  • Starting around Detonator version 60.xx, the PC version of Soul Reaver would no longer run on Windows XP. Reverting to the earlier Detonator versions fixed the problem. I assumed at the time that NVidia had tweaked it to improve performance in the rice-gamer benchmarks at the expense of real-world compatibility.
    The initial release of NVidia drivers for Vista made the game run correctly. My assumption then was that Microsoft had tightened the restrictions on compatibility with the new driver model. I haven't

  • Dithering is supported but doesn't work (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kegetys ( 659066 ) on Sunday September 16, 2007 @04:24PM (#20628219) Homepage

    The problem with thief/sshock2 is that the 8800 series cards do not seem to do any dithering which leads to those ugly colors when using a 16bpp mode. The interesting thing however is that the cards claim they support dithering in D3D (D3DPRASTERCAPS_DITHER caps bit is set, which means "Device can dither to improve color resolution.") but they still just do not do it.

    Makes me wonder if it is just something that's not implemented yet on the drivers or is it a hardware limitation. Either way the driver should not say it supports dithering if it doesn't.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Eideewt ( 603267 )
      Nvidia definitely has some driver issues with Thief -- it won't even start with the latest drivers.
    • The problem with thief/sshock2 is that the 8800 series cards do not seem to do any dithering which leads to those ugly colors when using a 16bpp mode.

      Thank you. The problem here seems to be an bug in the driver, not that (as the article suggested) that nVidia is dropping support for "legacy games". I was about to rant about this (slashdotted-frame of mind, one might say :), until i realized this is, once again, a poorly worded summary that suggests something without any merits. A forum entry reads..

      "Nvidia
  • Someone who knows about graphics, please explain: What can be wrong in a driver that affects only old games? A bug in rendering a certain version of directx? Wouldn't that break all of the games of that era (or the ones that use the same api) instead of a few ones?
    • In the case of these games, NVidia's driver is probably not doing the right things with regards to some older DirectX edges. At some point the API's
      have to be dropped- problem is they're still advertising something that the game wants if it's there and the implementation in the current drivers
      is busted for that something. Not knowing all of what those games use out of DirectX, I couldn't say- a little further up towards the top of the
      conversation, someone mentioned dithering being broken; that shouldn't k
  • ...3D 16-bit...

    In what way 16-bit, and why should this matter?

    Even the original System Shock used a 32-bit protected-mode extender. I'd have thought that almost all DirectX/OpenGL games would be Win32 applications.
    • Ah, I see. I'll just shut up now, then.

    • Probably 16-bit colour instead of 24 bit colour.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by NSParadox ( 135116 )
      16-bit as in 16-bit integer color per pixel, as opposed to 32-bit floating point color per pixel that all video cards have supported since the notorious NVIDIA GeForce FX/ATI Radeon 9700 series. This has nothing to do with 16-bit memory utilization/integer size vs. 32-bit.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Solra Bizna ( 716281 )

        ...You're... not quite right.

        16-bit as in 16 bits per pixel, with 5 (or 6) bits per color component, as opposed to 32 bits per pixel with 8 bits per color component.

        -:sigma.SB

    • 16-bit colorspace (and graphic card mode) which is probably something Nvidia nor ATI don't care as much as before (these days all games are true color, i.e. 32-bit framebuffers and often even higher color transformation precision)

  • Not merely a driver issue (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cpt kangarooski ( 3773 ) on Sunday September 16, 2007 @04:45PM (#20628403) Homepage
    There's also a copyright issue involved; even the developer will cease publishing and supporting the game over time, and it's likely that it will stop being compatible with modern hardware and software due to underlying changes in APIs and such.

    Part of the solution to this from a legal angle (in the US at least) would be: to mandate registration for all works for which a US copyright is sought; to mandate the deposit of a full, unprotected/unencrypted copy of the software and source, plus additional comments and information, so as to enable a programmer of ordinary skill (cf. PHOSITA in the patent field) to understand and make use of it freely; and to have a very short maximum copyright term -- perhaps five years -- in recognition of the especially short commercial lifetime of software.

    As much as it would be great for the original parties -- the creators of the game, the OS, the hardware, etc. -- to provide long-term support, ultimately, it's safer to not put all of our eggs in that basket. Instead we should make sure that the resources are available so that even if they're not interested, but some third party is, that the software can be kept running in one way or another.

    • Part of the solution to this from a legal angle (in the US at least) would be: to mandate registration for all works for which a US copyright is sought; to mandate the deposit of a full, unprotected/unencrypted copy of the software and source, plus additional comments and information

      Lawrence Lessig suggests exactly this in The Future of Ideas. The real irony of the situation is that part of the reasoning behind intellectual property (more so patent than copyright, but the concept still applies) was to pr

    • Part of the solution to this from a legal angle (in the US at least) would be: to mandate registration for all works for which a US copyright is sought; to mandate the deposit of a full, unprotected/unencrypted copy of the software and source, plus additional comments and information, so as to enable a programmer of ordinary skill (cf. PHOSITA in the patent field) to understand and make use of it freely; and to have a very short maximum copyright term -- perhaps five years -- in recognition of the especially short commercial lifetime of software.

      Such limitations on copyright, if applied to works from all countries, would violate international copyright treaties [wikipedia.org]. If applied only to works first published in the United States, such limitations would just drive publishers to Canada or the UK; the United States has to honor Canadian and UK copyrights for at least the Berne minimum term.

      • Such limitations on copyright, if applied to works from all countries, would violate international copyright treaties.

        That strongly implies that we need to pull out of the treaties then. It should be pretty obvious that the intent of copyright is not to allow artistic works to vanish/become useless in less than a decade while preventing anyone from trying to restore them for more than a century.

      • Such limitations on copyright, if applied to works from all countries, would violate international copyright treaties.

        Did you have a point to make there? The treaties are, it turns out, a bad idea. The US should leave them as soon as possible. This is not an uncommon opinion, either; whenever you hear someone suggest that copyright terms should be shorter than life+50 (e.g. the original 14+14 term, or some other amount) then those people are necessarily supporting exiting Berne and its ilk as well. A bette

        • The treaties are, it turns out, a bad idea. The US should leave them as soon as possible.

          Because World Trade Organization membership is a package deal [wikipedia.org] involving dozens of treaties [wikipedia.org], leaving Berne means leaving TRIPS [wikipedia.org], which in turn means leaving the WTO. I know of a whole bunch of industries that would lobby against that.

          • Because World Trade Organization membership is a package deal

            And the US is a significant force in the WTO, and this wouldn't involve mandating changes for anyone else; just us. All that would be required would be to change the deal. It's doable.
  • And do you remember games that only worked with 3dfx Glide? I seem to remember that Incoming was like this.

    How the hell can we play that, nowadays?

    • Use a glide wrapper - http://www.zophar.net/utilities/glidewrapper.html [zophar.net]

      Works pretty damn well actually.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by neocrono ( 619254 )
      With a Glide wrapper. A proxy library that makes available the Glide API functions, but internally does some voodoo and maps them to another 3D API like OpenGL or Direct3D.

      Half-Life, as you may remember, had a miniGL driver designed for better performance on Voodoo cards. There was also the third-party WickedGL "drivers" that did the same kind of OpenGL-to-Glide translation for other applications, using a drop-in opengl32.dll replacement. In both cases, the application treated the card like OpenGL, but the

  • ATi no better (Score:2, Interesting)

    by BlueCollarCamel ( 884092 )
    I use the latest version of the Catalyst drivers. Day Of Defeat and all other HL1 mods were unplayable in OpenGL, and barely tolerable in Direct3D. I proceeded to switch to the Omega [omegadrivers.net] alternative, and all is well now.
  • With the hardware in these videocards advancing - the drivers will little, by little stop supporting games from the Win95/98 era.

    I am a Thief fan, a BIG one. I own all series and downloaded each and every fan mission. I have tried to make my own but have since stopped. It was at first because my Pentium Pro, 96mb RAM and 8mb Video card could not support Thief 2's DromEd program very well and it required a Pentium 2 CPU. But I later upgraded to an Athlon 2500XP and 128mb Video card and Windows XP. I had trou
  • ... access the source code to force companies to release code of old games into public domain. Since gamers have legal rights to be able to play the games they legally purchased and be able to fix them when they stop working. Freespace 2 SCP would not have been possible without the source, and emulation takes a long time and is imperfect. It would be better if people could expand, update and maintain the actual source.
    • It won't happen because companies put too much proprietary stuff in their games to be able to release it. ID Software for example doesn't package proprietary stuff in their games for the specific purpose so they can release their games as open source if they choose to at later dates.

      For a glimpse of the proprietary crap you have to deal with look at the mess with installing Neverwinter Nights 1 on Linux. Bioware couldn't provide a Linux installer simple because InstallSheild (the installer they used to let

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