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Issue with Lego Island Direct3D hardware acceleration


Plasmodium
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Hi there! I've just finished setting up a retro gaming machine (Compaq Deskpro, Win98SE, Pentium 3 733mhz, 512Mb RAM, Geforce MX400). I've installed Lego Island but if I run it with the standard Direct3D HAL mode it just gives me the Infomaniac floating on a blue background when it starts up. It is similar to the issue shown on this page (except that the Infomaniac also has plain white textures on his face and shirt): https://www.legoisland.org/wiki/index.php/Windowed_Mode
F43M2lN.png

 

It works fine (as far as I can see) in Ramp mode. My question is a) what am I missing by running it in a software emulation mode? And b) If there's any real advantage to running it in the Direct3D hardware rendering mode...what can I do to fix it?

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2 hours ago, Plasmodium said:

It works fine (as far as I can see) in Ramp mode.

I mean, why not just use Ramp mode then? :P

 

All of the different graphical setups there are just different ways to the same end. I don't understand enough about graphics processing to understand what they do, but I'd presume it's how they send instructions to the CPU (or how the CPU sends instructions to something else). As time passes and hardware changes, several of these flat-out break, but if one of them works, go for it.

 

I guess it's a bit like picking the file format of a document. You could save it as a .txt, a .docx, a .pdf, or even something newfangled like .odt. Sheesh, you could even save it as a .png by grabbing the whole thing with Snipping Tool! But as long as you've got something that can read the document (good luck opening a .docx without any Office products!), then who cares what it's saved as, the important things are the content inside the document :)

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Thanks for the response - I see what you mean. I was just wondering if there was any advantage to running it with hardware acceleration, though the machine seems to have the power to handle the it in software accelerated mode (though I haven't tried it in a particularly stressful environment yet) so I'll probably just do that. Ramp seems to handle transparency a little worse (ie, they have an odd checkerboard pattern to them) which is annoying but not the end of the world. I wonder now if it might be because the version of DirectX is too new? I have 9.0c at the moment and obviously this shipped with something much older. It's just a bit annoying because I hoped by setting up an old Win98 machine with period-correct hardware I would be able to run it natively without the usual compatibility issues!

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On 11/20/2021 at 12:48 PM, Plasmodium said:

It's just a bit annoying because I hoped by setting up an old Win98 machine with period-correct hardware I would be able to run it natively without the usual compatibility issues!

I mean, it might have been designed with the older hardware in mind, but that doesn't mean it works on the older hardware anyway :P These games always were a nightmare to run, even on classic hardware.

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Yeah, fair enough. I remember having install issues with Lego Island on my parents various computers over the years when I was a kid anyway! I just wanted to check that it wasn't a known issue with a known fix.

 

FWIW I have tested Ramp mode by playing all the various activities at least once and I can't see any real performance loss on this hardware. The only issue is that with software emulation it can't do transparency - elements like bike wheels, visors, windscreens etc are just a checkerboard pattern of opaque and transparent 'X's rather than actually being translucent, but I guess that was just an advanced effect at the time that needed hardware acceleration. I will live with it for now though as it's pretty minor and absolutely playable.

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