Burning's Software Renderer as a Standalone Emulator

[Monkeyman]

Hi,

I've searched around the forum and can't find anything relating to this particular subject, so please excuse me if it's out of line...

Can anyone advise if Burning's Software Renderer, either through fiddling with Irrlicht or by other means, might be made to operate as a standalone video h/w emulator for general purpose usage? Eg, in the same manner as a drop-in solution like Swiftshader?

Background info - I have a bunch of AMD K6-500 PC's which have onboard Dx6 or worse video cards (eg, Blade 3D, etc) with no spare slots to add in a better video card. I would use Swiftshader to sidestep the issue except it requires SSE or better CPU's - can't use the K6's with Swiftshader even though they have MMX + 3DNow. I'm also guessing Swiftshader would be tediously slow on the K6's.

Pixomatic 2 (Dx7, MMX, 3DNow, tolerably fast) would be THE perfect solution if it was available as a drop-in package - but it's not. I doubt it's even available for any price any more, now that Intel owns it.

Hence my enquiry. Yes yes, I know the most sensible solution is to get better PC's - which I have, so that's not the point. It's not about being sensible - it's a hobby thing - these are my children, and I want them to be the best they can possibly be. Like a dog with a bone, I can't let it go...

Anhow, any useful advice on this would be welcomed.

[ACE247]

I asume with Blade3D you mean the Trident Blade 3D 9880 8Mb? With OpenGL 1.1 and DX6 with a few DX7 extensions.

3D Acceleration
l Integrated 1 million triangle/s set-up engine reduces CPU
and bus bandwidth requirements
l 4K on-chip texture cache
l Edge anti-aliasing
l Modulate alpha function
l Composite alpha modulate
l 32-bit color rendering
Rendering Engine
l Gourard and Flat Shading
l Scene Anti-aliasing
l OpenGL compliant blending for fog and depth cueing
Texturing Engine
l Anisotropic, Tri-linear, Bi-Linear, Point-Sampled Filtering
l Perpective Correction
l Mip-Mapping with 11 Levels-of-Detail
Full Software Support
l WHQL Certified Driver
l Windows® 95 and 98 Display Drivers
l Windows® NT 3.5, 4.0, and 5.0 Display Drivers
l Direct3D, DirectDraw, and DirectVideo
l OpenGL ICD support

It's not exactly powerfull is it
Anyway I'm not the expert on this, but neither am I sure why you would want to run a video hardware emu on ancient K6's. Just plain software rendering would almost be the norm for those devices. And reprogramming the engine to take advantage of such old video cards, is also hard.

[hybrid]

Hardware emulation would also mean that you get access to the OpenGL or DX methods which are mapped to the SW renderer underneath. But that's not how Irrlicht and its SW renderers work. Instead, we have a common API over SW and HW rendering, which is mapped to the low-level drivers. So you'd have to convert your OpenGL or DX apps to Irrlicht, and then can use any of the provided drivers.

[hendu]

llvmpipe is a great opengl emulator, allowing for about GL 3.0 even on that hw.

In any case, it will not be fast, nor help you any with DX. Why do you want such emulation?


I mean, if you want to run a specific old app, just get the best card for that purpose from ebay.

[devsh]

there is no point to software renderer's in irrlicht, they are old and archaic... even mobiles use OGL ES

The only merit to a software rasterizer was its flexibility, irrlicht's software renderers are most probably as painful to expand and optimize as the OpenGL driver etc. because the entire engine is coded in compliance to freaking DX9

If we gonna have a software rasterizer at least make it a raytracer

[Granyte]

devsh you are living in a fantasy world but that's fine