Qemu+3dfx support

nex86

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Nov 2, 2019
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My original idea was to build another Windows 98 retro PC with a 3dfx card to play older games.
Now something came in my mind that I probably could just use a modern machine with a virtual machine.
I still have a tiny USFF PC that should be powerful enough to achieve this.

I heard there was a custom build of qemu that can emulate 3dfx voodoo cards.
Is there a possibility that this can be used in proxmox or has anyone already tried doing this?

Thanks in advance
 
I am guessing you are talking about this project? It is probably a good idea not to mess around with the qemu in the base proxmox host. However, you could set up a linux vm (eg debian or arch) with nested virtualization enabled and then build the 3dfx qemu there. That should work?

PS: if you want to run dos games, dosbox is cool.
 
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Dosbox also got 3dfx GPU emulation in case those Win98 games can run in DOS mode.
By the way...did anyone ever tried to PCI passthrough a Voodoo card? My Voodoo 3300 card is AGP, but I know these also exists as PCI cards. Never tried to passthrough PCI cards, but from what I heard so far this is most of the time very problematic.
 
I never had a good experience running Windows 98 on Dosbox.. I remember getting a lot of crashes and bluescreens..
maybe its better now but I don't know
 
If I remember correctly, there was a wrapper API for Windows that mapped 3DFX/glide to OpenGL. I tried it a few times back in .. oh .. long time ago .. and it worked well. Maybe you can just run it directly in Wine to get the old games to work?