Hi.  Has anyone had positive results with UT 2003 or UT 2004 on a Voodoo2 card?  I gave up a few years ago because I could not find a workaround or fix for important things like the HUD.

However ... I recently tried Daniel Borca's OpenGL "replacement" (http://geocities.com/dborca/opengl/sage.html) on a Voodoo2 and had very good results with some maps.  Deck17 is very playable, for example.  The FPS is (obviously) higher with two Voodoo2 cards in SLI mode.

All I did was extract opengl32.dll and sage.ini from sage-0.9.2 into C:\UT2004\System.  Next, I deleted UT2004.ini to remove the previous settings.  After that, I started and exited UT 2004 to recreate a new UT2004.ini file.  Finally, I edited UT2004.ini as follows:

1.  [Engine.Engine] section
Comment:   RenderDevice=D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice
Uncomment: RenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice

2.  [WinDrv.WindowsClient] section
Set: FullscreenViewportX=640
Set: FullscreenViewportY=480
Set: TextureDetailInterface=Normal
(set other TextureDetail* settings to Low or VeryLow)

3.  [OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice]
Set: HighDetailActors=False
Set: SuperHighDetailActors=False
Add: Use16bitTextures=True
Add: Use16bit=True

I have adjusted other settings to see if they make a difference, but the above settings seem to be the most important.  I left the settings in sage.ini alone.

The mouse pointer usually does not appear when I run UT 2004, so I press Alt+Enter once to make it appear.  I unchecked "Detail Textures" in UT 2004's Settings | Display screen to gain a little speed.

The terrain in some maps such as Antalus looks dull, but hey ~ it's pretty "cool" to be able to play a game like UT 2004 on such an old card.  

Long live 3dfx!  

I know what got added:  GL_EXT_stencil_wrap.  I use realtech VR's OpenGL Extensions Viewer to see which extensions are or are not supported.  I am amazed at how many extensions have been "enabled" on the Voodoo 2 the past several months.  Woo hoo!  

Is it possible that Unreal Tournament 2004 looks a little better with the 6.3.0.1 prerelease?  It is difficult for me to tell because I had to run UT2004, walk around a level, stop the game, copy an older version of MesaFX (opengl32.dll) to the UT2004 system folder, rerun UT2004, then walk around the level again.  It looks like the colors are slighly more vibrant.  The textures/details on the ground look better, too.  (I think.)

Thanks ~ T

I played with UT 2004 tonight, but I didn't have much luck making it look better on a Voodoo 2.  I gave up on the UT 2003 demo since it looked pretty bad compared to the UT 2004 demo and full game.  


Here is what I found with UT 2004:

1.  The intro screen and menus look better if TextureDetailInterface is set to Low in ut2004.ini.  I set DetailTextures, HighDetailActors, SuperHighDetailActors and UseCompressedLightmaps in the OpenGL section to False.  

After I got into the game...
2.  "Texture Detail" set to LOW generally usually looks the best, although I had to change it to LOWER for a few maps because some textures on the ceiling appeared white.  

3.  Characters look best if "Character Detail" is set to LOW.  

4.  "Resolution" set to 640x480 worked best for me.  The screen did not resize correctly if I changed it to 800x600, for example, while I was in the game.  


Here are some things I could not fix, no matter what I tried:
1.  I could not get the HUD to display correctly.  All the weapons and numbers appeared as white squares.  

2.  The FPS did not display correctly, although I had a ballpark guess of what it was by watching the color of the box where the FPS should have appeared:  green=high, yellow=medium and red=low.

3.  The "Loading <map name>" messages that appear on the right side of the screen while a new map is loading would not display correctly.  They appeared as white rectangles.  

4.  The lightning gun's secondary fire mode would not display correctly.  A large box appeared where the zoomed-in image should have been.  

I tried different settings for MESA_FX_MAXLOD again, but that usually resulted in a corrupted picture.  DM-Deck17 map looked absolutely great with MESA_FX_MAXLOD set to 9 one time.  The only problem was with the "smoky" area down by the red lava that makes players bounce up:  The "smoke" came up in large blocks.  I tried some other maps (including DM-Deck17) a few minutes later, but the graphics were corrupt again.  I could not figure out why, so I stopped playing with MESA_FX_MAXLOD.  

Here are the specs for my main computer:
* Athlon XP 1800+ with 256 MB RAM
* Windows XP Professional with SP1
* Creative Labs 12 MB Voodoo 2 (CT6670)
* FastVoodoo2 4.0 XP GE drivers
* MesaFX 6.1.0.9 rc7
* UT 2004 with latest patch (3236?)

I have read that the Voodoo 2 in SLI mode still only has 8 MB of texture memory, so I decided I wouldn't gain anything graphics-wise by putting a second Voodoo 2 in the computer.  Is that true?  Even so, would the FPS increase very much in my situation if I install a second Voodoo 2?  I think 3dfx used to claim double the performance with two Voodoo 2's.  

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.  

Till next time...  Tony

@Nightbird:  I wouldn't say the maps look great, but they are definitely playable.  Can you give me the names of a few UT 2004 maps with large textures?  I just bought the full game since I got the demo to work.  

@dborca:  I'm at work now, but I can post details when I get home tonight.  Here is a brief summary of what I have done:  
1.  Copied MesaFX's opengl32.dll file to the Windows folder, then ran regedit.exe and pointed the default OpenGL driver to C:\Windows\opengl32.dll.  

2.  Opened ut2004.ini in Notepad, then changed the renderer to OpenGL.  I added the following two lines to the OpenGL section:  
  Use16bitTextures=True
  Use16bit=True

That allowed the game to start.  The textures were white, so I changed "Texture Details" from Normal to Low.  That made the game look much better.  Characters were grayish, so I changed "Character Details" (?) from Normal to Low or Lower.  I also changed some settings such as UseCompressedLightmaps=False in ut2004.ini.  

A few textures still aren't rendered correctly in the game screens, but I can live with that.  One of the guns has a secondary fire that makes the game unplayable because a big square appears on the screen.  (Can't remember the name - It's not the sniper rifle, but it allows you to zoom in on other characters .)  Maybe there isn't a workaround for that.  I tried setting MESA_FX_MAXLOD to 9, 10 and 11, but that made the maps looks bad.  

I want to play around with the ini settings to find a balance between speed and graphics quality.  I'm guessing that some of the detail settings with numbers (0.500000, for example) should make a difference.  I will have to read about that.  

My computer with the two Voodoo 2 cards is only a Pentium III 933, so it is below the minimum specs.  I moved the single Voodoo 2 card from my Pentium III 450 (don't ask - I just wanted to see if the game would work) to my AMD Athlon XP 1800+ last night.  The game is much smoother now, even with only a single Voodoo 2.  

I'm not sure about this, but it seems as if release candidate 6 from your situ makes the textures such as wood look better.  Is that possible?  I will try release candidate 7 when I get home.  

I figured out how to get the mouse pointer to appear in the menus, so I had to congratulate myself on that a few times.    None of this would have been possible without MesaFX, so thanks again for working on it, dborca.    

Yikes...  My first message sounded confusing.    Let me try again.  

One computer has two Voodoo 2 cards in SLI mode.  Another computer has one Voodoo 2 card.  Both computers can run UT 2003.  They can run UT 2004, too.   I am using the FastVoodoo2 4.0 XP GE drivers with the latest release of MesaFX.  

I played around with some configuration settings last night and got a better picture and somewhat higher FPS in UT 2004.  I will see if I can improve the "experience" more when I get off work.  

This is looking promising, so thank you for your hard work on MesaFX, dborca.  

Hi.  This is my first post, so I thought I would try to make it good...  I recently figured out how to run UT 2003 and UT 2004 with a Voodoo 2 SLI.  It's neither fast nor pretty, but it works.  

Here is what's amazing:  Using the same method, I can run both games on a single Voodoo 2 card.  Both computers are running Windows XP.  

Anyone interested in how I did this?