Graphic card/CPU configuration for best memory graphics in Flight Simulator 98?

[jacilore]

Hi. I am an enthusiast of vintage Flight Simulators, and I want to enhance FS98, but I have some graphic issues that seem to be related with the GPU/CPU combo in relation with the game itself. (FS98 is a 16-bit game that only runs in 32-bit systems up to 8.1, and in all systems I have found the same issues)

The problem is I can’t find where the bottleneck is; that’s why I need your help.
Although I get high FPS, as this is an old game that I have been able to run in rather modern PC's, I have those graphic issues when the game demands a higher graphic memory usage, by including dynamic scenery with aircraft traffic.
The specific problems I have are, that objects (being them aircraft or landscape), begin to lose their textures and become black, starting from the most distant to the nearer ones) when more objects (aircraft), appear.

Actually I have tried the game in 2 systems:

• An older i7 870 2.93 Ghz, with AMD Radeon R7-200
• And a newer i7-7700 with a GTX 1060.

And I have had the same problems in XP, W7 and W8.1, regardless of the different capacities of those systems.

So, could any of you tell me, where the bottleneck is, or which could be the best CPU-GPU combination to get the best results? Because, in case my systems are not adequate, I would be willing to try to get from cero the hardware for it.

I have read of z-buffer storage configuration and things like that could play a role. Or it could be that the game itself has those limitations. But this last option I find it difficult to believe, because there are much bigger sceneries with much more dense traffic and I don't think the game on that time was suppose to work that bad.

Here to post 2 images to show the issue.

• 1st one, a game configuration that Works
• 2nd one with more aircraft, where game/card capacities seem to overflow, (But I doubt that can be the maximum limit to play the game)

So can anyone help me about this?
Thanks and regards

 

[Davros]

The bottleneck will be in the program itself, either live with it or move to a 32bit/64 bit version of flight simulator
ps: I dont think it is a 16bit program whats more likely is it's a 32bit program with a 16bit installer
I cant imaging it's a lack of vram issue when the game came out no one had more than 16mb of vram your 1060 has nearly 400 times that
you could try dgvoodoo2 (needs win7 or later)

Downloads - Dege's stuffs

dege.freeweb.hu

 

[pharma]

Have you added any texture packs? I noticed this 2008 thread where someone had to change the texture size offered in the pack to remove the black textures.

I've got it to work, I had to change the size of the texture to 256x256 and UVW Unwrap it, I think my .bmp wasn't in the right format so I found ImageTool buried in the SDK and converted to DXT, it now works ok. The texture appears to glow at Dawn but I can probably fix that.
...
Probably specular or ambient values too high.

I used to play Falcon 4 and seem to remember the same issue when using certain texture packs.

 

[Davros]

From what i can tell the textures work until he adds other textures to the scene then the most distant textures go black, reducing texture res may prevent this but then everything is going to look awful.

I used to play Falcon 4

Kudos to you Falcon 4 is a very complex game especially when you start using bms or similar
ps: If you still play

 

[jacilore]

The bottleneck will be in the program itself, either live with it or move to a 32bit/64 bit version of flight simulator
ps: I dont think it is a 16bit program whats more likely is it's a 32bit program with a 16bit installer
I cant imaging it's a lack of vram issue when the game came out no one had more than 16mb of vram your 1060 has nearly 400 times that
you could try dgvoodoo2 (needs win7 or later)

Downloads - Dege's stuffs

dege.freeweb.hu

Ok. I will try dgvoodoo2, although that's an uncertain world for me.
Can you tell me if it works like patch (remedy) or like a diagnosis tool?
And I've seen there are debugging versions. Can it be convenient that version?

Many thanks for your interest and input

 

[jacilore]

From what i can tell the textures work until he adds other textures to the scene then the most distant textures go black, reducing texture res may prevent this but then everything is going to look awful.

Yes, that's right it's not a problem of permanent black textures.
But I had a problem of permanente black textures with another Flight Simulator and I'm solving it with that link you provided me, Pharma. So thanks to you also.

 

[Davros]

dgvoodoo works like a converter it makes games that use direct 3d up to version 8 use direct 3d 11 (or 9)
it will also covert glide (api of voodoo cards) to direct 3d it's useful for getting many older games to run on modern systems

 

[homerdog]

Just to be clear, this isn't a hardware problem. Both of the computers you listed would qualify as supercomputers in the year FS98 came out. Even without considering the GPU, the i7-7700 would be a match for the 5th fastest computer that existed in 1997 according to this list.

TOP500 List - November 1997 | TOP500

www.top500.org

 

[jacilore]

Just to be clear, this isn't a hardware problem. Both of the computers you listed would qualify as supercomputers in the year FS98 came out. Even without considering the GPU, the i7-7700 would be a match for the 5th fastest computer that existed in 1997 according to this list.

TOP500 List - November 1997 | TOP500

www.top500.org

Well, of course I don't think it's a problem of hardware being not capable enough. But as you had mentioned before, does the game struggle itself with not so high memory demand?. Or is just that current hardware, (or its architecture, or the combination of it with the systems it can run with now), while being much more powerful has some compatibility issues, that make the game struggle more than it was designed for in 1997?

 

[Davros]

did you try dgvoodoo2 ?

 

[homerdog]

Well, of course I don't think it's a problem of hardware being not capable enough. But as you had mentioned before, does the game struggle itself with not so high memory demand?. Or is just that current hardware, (or its architecture, or the combination of it with the systems it can run with now), while being much more powerful has some compatibility issues, that make the game struggle more than it was designed for in 1997?

Have you tried running it in a Windows 98 VM? Windows XP might also work and be easier to manage.

 

[jacilore]

did you try dgvoodoo2 ?

Hi, I installed it but after that I've had very hard work days, and I need some time to do the tests, so I left it for this weekend days. But for me it seems the most promosing way. Many thanks for your interest. I will tell you.

 

[jacilore]

Have you tried running it in a Windows 98 VM? Windows XP might also work and be easier to manage.

Well I tried in XP VMWare, that but the problem seems to be the same. I have also tried in Windows 98 Compatibility Mode, but the problems also remain.
I will try Dgvoodoo2 and see what happens.
Thanks for your answer.

 

[jacilore]

Well, I already tried DgVoodoo2 and I got this:

- In the PC where I have FS98 running with Windows 7, I got a little improvement. Program seems to hold a couple more planes. (When I saw it worked, I hoped it could have broken a barrier, and then I could see aircraft according to my new system capabilities or near to it, but that was not it. Anyway, it was an improvement.)
- In the PC where I have FS98 running under VMWare in W8.1 (Host is W10), Dgdvoodoo2 seems to do nothing.

I don't know if this makes sense, but that was the experience.

Anyway, trying to see where the video memory fails, I ran the program in my VMWare W8.1 machine with Task manager, searching for VRAM disposure/consumption, and where to possibly act, but I can’t distinguish anything useful there

Here I enclose 2 captures, before and after the issue, but I can’t see much difference

So do you know if there could be some utility to test the VRAM use by the different programs in use?. Or something else that could help to detect and quantify which are the critical parameters/resources that come in about this issue?

Many thanks, and have very happy Christmas all of you.

 

[Albuquerque]

I think you're heading in the wrong direction. MS Flight Simulator relies on VESA graphics, which isn't "accelerated" in the same sense as any modern game.

The entire render pipeline, if you could really call it that, is 100% computed on the CPU and BLITted to the page frame buffer using VESA calls. If you're missing textures, then you're fighting a software problem, not hardware.

Now, the software you might be fighting could be the VESA VGA BIOS emulation code inside whatever virtual machine app you're using. I can't find anything 100% definitive, but I wager you should try different versions of UniVBE until you find a compatible one. There's a lot of different versions and sometimes you need to use a specific one... Also, some hypervisors aren't fully compatible with VESA VGA BIOS functions.

The only thing your VRAM is being used for is only the framebuffer and nothing else. Don't spend any more time trying to diagnose VRAM for a texturing issue, as you're just wasting your time.

 

[jacilore]

Hi thank you very much for your answer. Of course I might be going in the wrong direction, because I have very little information and knowledge about all that. I'm going trough intution about this because is the only thing I have.
But that's the kind of approach I wanted to receive, to see what is limiting the program to show all it needs, so that's whay I'm asking here, BTW, not many replies from other forums, so thanks once again, for that.

On the other hand, I will try what you say. But the VMWare W8.1 machine captures I posted is one the test benchs I have.
The other is a W7 PC with FS98, where I'm finding the same problems. So, those UniVBE versions to try, would also the way to go to solve the issue in W7?.
(As that's a very unknown world for me, as you can see).

Regards and have nice Christmas.

 

[homerdog]

Have you tried using Hyper-V and Windows XP? Should be really easy to try since Hyper-V is built into Windows under optional features. At least it is in Pro Windows. Though I'm not sure if it has the same feature set as Hyper-V in Windows Server, which is what I'm familiar with.

 

[Davros]

MS Flight Simulator relies on VESA graphics, which isn't "accelerated" in the same sense as any modern game.

You sure about that Alby ?
From the Manual :
3-D acceleration using DirectX and other advanced graphics
technology make scenery pop to life. Flight Simulator supports the
latest graphics hardware to show you more detail and improved
performance.

also univbe is a dos program iirc if he had fs98 running under win7 it's not using dos at all. fs98 also supported NT which has no dos mode

ps: it does have a software rendered mode. for those that didn't have a 3d card but pretty sure the game would be direct draw rather than vesa

@jacilore maybe it's trying to detect vram seeing some huge number like 4gb (cards at the time had 12-16mb max) and the buffer used to store that number is overflowing or freaking out in some way (like the way you could clock some arcade games) try limiting your vram to 8 - 16mb maybe it's not detecting your 3d card and reverting to software rendering (if it is detecting it try the software mode) if it's not try changing the card type in dgvoodoo to something really old or try
3D Analyze (not at the same time as dgvoodoo2) https://www.3dfxzone.it/dir/tools/3d_analyze/download/

apparently fs98 needs a 32bit o/s

read this:
my 98 flight sim will not run on win 7 no scenery ???

Redirecting

 

[Albuquerque]

FS98 relied on Directx acceleration of draw surfaces, but not the (essentially useless at the time) Direct3D API set. It was all immediate mode against the frame buffer.

By the way, NT absolutely had a DOS runtime, which allowed any number of DOS and Win3.x applications to run. No, it wasn't real mode, but it was exactly the same way Win2K and WinXP and every subsequent version of Windows to run command line interfaces.

Remember that FS98 came out long before the release of Win2K and even before the release of Win98. As such, even though FS98 is a windows application, they underlying video driver relies on the VESA implementation of your chosen hypervisor (virtual box, hyper V, KVM, dosbox, etc.) You will need to find a proper VESA driver to support your chosen flavor of Windows for proper operation.

It might be easiest to run XP SP3 and then FS98 in compatibility mode for the highest possibility of success. Only because XP drivers are a lot more prolific (thanks to the original hatred of Vista) than Win95/98 drivers.

 

[Davros]

It might be easiest to just buy FSX steam edition
@jacilore I get playing old games I really do, but later versions of Flightsim are more or less the same game only updated is there a reason your playing FS98 ?
That reminds me try posting on VOGONS ( Very Old Games On New Systems ) https://www.vogons.org/index.php