Glide Wrappers for MoE

[Baggins]

You can use 3rd party glide wrappers to get the high end graphics mode in the game, as long as you can figure out how to get the game to work .

[MusicallyInspired]

All Glide wrappers do is translate the API to other APIs. You can't get the trademark effects of a Voodoo card to work on other cards. Whether their native Direct3D support just plain sucked or not is another matter, I suppose.

And regarding the direction MOE finally took, that wasn't Roberta's fault. After Ken sold the company the project was taken further and further away from her hands. I agree that had she had the opportunity to see it through to the end properly, we'd still probably have King's Quest games today. A King's Quest MMO doesn't even sound so bad to the ears. When you think about it, King's Quest was always setting the bar as far as computer game capability was concerned. It had the first "3D" animated graphics, it was the first game to utilise sound card support, it was one of the first games on CD-ROM (if not the first), it was one of the first computer games to have a well-voiced cast list of notable actors, raised the bar again by bringing in Disney-style animation to a full adventure game (even though I don't like it very much), and even dared to take the step into the 3D realm and change things up a bit. It's just a shame that it wasn't done as well as it could have been (and should have been, if not due to unforeseen consequences by selling the company).

[Lambonius]

I've gotten it running on Windows XP, but the big issue I had was that you can't turn on the Dynamic Lighting setting (which is part of what made the graphics really shine back in the day), with a Direct3D card.  Is this something the Glide wrapper will fix?  The graphics options used to be even worse--then they put out a Direct3D patch for it, but it still didn't add the full range of colored lighting that was capable with the Voodoo cards.

[Baggins]

Yes, as far as I know it worked for me on my XP system. It's full voodoo emulation.

http://kingsquest.wikia.com/wiki/Glide_Wrapper

Give it a try, there is a built in MOE mode.

[MusicallyInspired]

Wrappers are not API emulators. They're API translators. You'll never get a wrapper to look exactly like a real Glide card.

[Lambonius]

Hmm.  Well I'll definitely be giving this a try, either way.  Thanks for the tip, Baggins! 

[Baggins]

Musically inspired, I'm pretty sure that glide wrapper, gets the lighting and transparencies working in game, plus the higher resolution mode... It certainly looks better than direct 3-d version :p.... I did all the screenshots on King's Quest Omnipedia using that particular glide wrapper. There were certainly lighting in the game, that you wouldn't get if you just played with the direct 3-d mode.

I have a machine packed away, with an actual glide card, so if I ever get the chance I'll do a side by side comparsion someday (if the machine still works), but it looked about the same as I remember back when I first played through the game.

If it doesn't work for you lambonius there are a handful of others you can try, but I don't know if they convert all the features over or not;
http://www.sierrahelp.com/Utilities/DisplayUtilities/GlideWrappers.html

[MusicallyInspired]

It may enable some features inherent in both APIs but was unavailble in MOE's native Direct3D support because it just sucks, but wrappers are not emulators regardless. You cannot get glide-specific effects with a wrapper to another API. It's impossible since other cards aren't capable of utilising glide in any way. But like I said, the native Direct3D support in MOE probably just sucks or there wasn't such effects available at the time for Direct3D. But wrappers are not emulators.

[Baggins]

http://evoodoo.emulation64.com/us/products.html

Apparently some of these "wrappers" combine wrapper features with some software emulation to get some of the functions.

[MusicallyInspired]

I wouldn't know about that. But that is both a wrapper and an emulator in one. I'm just saying that being a wrapper doesn't make it an emulator.

[dark-daventry]

Guys, just keep in mind that this topic is specifically about MoE in TSL. If you wish to talk about actually getting MoE to work, please use a separate thread for that.

EDIT: In fact, I'm going to go ahead and split this topic for you...

EDIT 2: And I've split the topic for you. Have fun!

[Kimmie]

I went on my comp upstairs to try it (Windows XP) but I keep getting this message;

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\AUTOEXEC.NT. The system file is not suitable for running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows applications. Choose 'Close' to terminate the application

I typed it into google and got someone with a similar problem and the response was to download DOSBOX, so I tried that and it didnt work (although I'm probably doing everything wrong)

So for those of you successful people who got it running on XP...how did you do it?


OMG SCRAP THIS POST I HAVE GOT MOE WORKING

[dark-daventry]

I went on my comp upstairs to try it (Windows XP) but I keep getting this message;

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\AUTOEXEC.NT. The system file is not suitable for running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows applications. Choose 'Close' to terminate the application

I typed it into google and got someone with a similar problem and the response was to download DOSBOX, so I tried that and it didnt work (although I'm probably doing everything wrong)

So for those of you successful people who got it running on XP...how did you do it?


OMG SCRAP THIS POST I HAVE GOT MOE WORKING

If I may ask, how did you get it to work?

[Enchantermon]

Awesome! I'm surprised you actually got an error; what did you have to do to get rid of it?

[Collector]

That is an old error message.

http://sierrahelp.com/GeneralHelp/ErrorMessages.html#MissingAUTOEXEC_NT

Most of the Glide Wrappers are more than just an API redirect. The various projects do refer to themselves as emulator projects. For modern systems a wrapper is required to run old glide games in hardware accelerated mode. MoE with a wrapper looks the same as on an old Glide PC. There is also a big performance hit using a Glide wrapper that you would not get with a mere API redirect.

[oberonqa]

That is an old error message.

http://sierrahelp.com/GeneralHelp/ErrorMessages.html#MissingAUTOEXEC_NT

Most of the Glide Wrappers are more than just an API redirect. The various projects do refer to themselves as emulator projects. For modern systems a wrapper is required to run old glide games in hardware accelerated mode. MoE with a wrapper looks the same as on an old Glide PC. There is also a big performance hit using a Glide wrapper that you would not get with a mere API redirect.

This is probably due to the wrapper not only issuing API redirect calls... but also translating the actual API calls.  For example, if you have an instruction that instructs the engine to use the Glide BloomLight effect with 3 modifiers (note I am using psuedo-code snippets here to illustrate points... this is not actual working code):

API Reference:
glide.bloomLight(containerid, particleid, colorid)

Actual Instruction:
glide.bloomLight(0003, 0002, 0001)

The wrapper needs to redirect the API call (BloomLight) to another API as well as translate the modifiers, which are often API specific.  The wrapper can't simply convert the above instruction into a DirectX instruction with the same modifiers, as the DirectX equivilent would (in most cases) use entirely different modifiers.  Without any kind of translation, the wrapper would do the following:

API Reference:
glide.bloomLight(containerid, particleid, colorid)
direct3D.LightSource.Bloom(containerid, alphachannel1, alphachannel2, particleid, colorid, visibleflag)

Glide API Call:
glide.bloomLight(0003, 0002, 0001)

Redirected DirectX API Call:
direct3D.LightSource.Bloom(0003, null, null, 0002, 0001, null)

The conversion to Direct3D would not be a functional call due to the missing call modifiers (which are represented as null).  That being said, the wrapper must not only know what Glide API calls get redirected to what DirectX API calls, it also has to be able to interpret what it is redirecting in order to properly hand off what DirectX needs to correctly execute the call.  If it was simply a matter of issuing redirect calls, you wouldn't have too much of a performance hit, as the wrapper would literally be a transparent interface with little processing or memory resources needed to simply pass off calls.  It's the translation of the calls from one API to another which causes the performance hit.

[Kimmie]

Awesome! I'm surprised you actually got an error; what did you have to do to get rid of it?

I found 2 methods that I printed off, the 2nd method has like 3 steps so I tried that and it worked! It was moving a file back into system32 which must have been missing for some reason!

The only problem I'm now having is controlling connor  I'm so used to the free and easy movement of warcraft that trying to get him to run and see where I'm going is really hard! But atleast it's working. Ah memories

[Baggins]

Now if someone would just create a patch for vista and win7, everything would be awesome.

[Enchantermon]

I found 2 methods that I printed off, the 2nd method has like 3 steps so I tried that and it worked! It was moving a file back into system32 which must have been missing for some reason!

Hmm, maybe the codec was missing. Ah well, glad to hear it's up and running!

The only problem I'm now having is controlling connor  I'm so used to the free and easy movement of warcraft that trying to get him to run and see where I'm going is really hard!

I know, I struggled with that a lot, too. I've got it down okay now, I think. The difficulty for me was remembering to turn the camera, and remembering that "forward" is forward according to Connor and the direction he's facing, not forward according to the direction the camera is facing. Oi.

I'm really enjoying it, though. I do see now why people say that it doesn't quite feel like a King's Quest, but that's just because it's different. I still have no qualms about accepting it into the fold with the rest.

[Baggins]

Enchantermon what's funny is apparently there were other KQ games that were criticized for having "felt different" than a  previous king's quest. People complained about Gwydion, (wha who is this peasant, what happened to King Graham?, and auto-mapping, and having most of the puzzles written out for them in the manual), there were those that complained about Rosella (playing as a female? Oh my... :p), then those that complained about the chapter based style of KQ7, the fact you controlled two different characters, and that it wasn't "realistic" looking like previous games :p...

I think KQ6 was probably one of the only ones that didn't get any major complaints that I can think of... Since it was more or less just improved upon KQ5's style... it really didn't "change much".

I don't know what people thought about KQ5, other than complaints about all the dead ends :p...