help im trying to get kotor2 to run but it says i need windows non-generic 1.4.0
im using radeon 7500 series (that also may be the problem)but if anyone can tell me where i can download the opengl driver please reply
The following chipsets did not meet the minimum specifications or were found to have significant problems when playing Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.
3dfx Voodoo 2
3dfx Voodoo 3
3dfx Voodoo 4/5 (VSA 100)
3dfx Voodoo Banshee
3dfx Voodoo Graphics (Voodoo 1)
3dfx Voodoo Rush
ATI 3D Rage II
ATI Rage 128 Family
ATI Rage Pro Family
ATI Radeon 7000/7200/7500
Intel i740/i810
Intel i845/i865
Intel i915
Matrox G100/G200
Matrox 400/G450/G550
Matrox Millennium P650/P750
Matrox Parhelia 512
Mpact 2
Power VR 250
PowerVR Kyro/Kyro II
PowerVR Neon 250
PowerVR PCX/PCX-2
NVIDIA RIVA 128/128 ZX
NVIDIA RIVA TNT/TNT2 Family
NVIDIA GeForce 256
NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX
Permedia 2
Rendition V1000
Rendition V2100/V2200
S3 DeltaChrome S8
S3 Savage 2000
S3 Savage 3D
S3 Savage 4
S3 ViRGE Family
SiS 315
SiS 6326
SiS Xabre 200/400/600
Trident 3D Image 975/985
Trident Blade3D 9880
Trident BladeXP
XGI Volari V3/V5/V8
Originally posted by <Uh>:
Mpact 2
Wow, a blast from the past. I wrote the DVD player software for this POS right before Chromatic Research got bougth by ATI. Funny thing about this chip is that they already used RAMBUS Memory back in 1997. Even funnier was its predecessor the MPACT 1. The 3d “acceleration” was slower then the D3D RGB software renderer and looked a lot worse (on a P-166 MMX).
I think I still have one of those in the cupboard.
Damn those where the times 
RDRAM! That’s amazing!
http://www.gamasutra.com/newswire/industry_analysis/hard_bytes/19980313a.htm
I remember that a few of those early generation cards were slow at 3D. Probably they were weak at bilinear filtering. Don’t know.
Actually Chromatic Research where not the only ones who used RDRAM. Cirrus Logic’s probably last attempt to catch up with the rest was the Laguna3D chip that also used RDRAM. It was used by a lot of asian vendors after they dropped the price to a few bucks per chip, if I recall correctly.
It had two major drawbacks though:
1.) It was slower then the equally priced competition.
2.) What they called bilinear filtering was a joke. It only worked on two texels (in s or t space, cant remember which one), so it looked like crap.
But it wasnt only the filtering that made some cards slow, the lack of an triangle setup engine made quiet a difference too. Imagine the CPU (and we are talking about something in the range of an Pentium 133Mhz) calculating all the delta increments and hand feeding them to the chip using memory mapped I/O ports… Well, triangle throughput sucked big time.
The Rendition 1000 on the other hand, was basically a RISC chip that did the trianlge setup and rasterizing all by it self, hence this was probably the first card featuring a decent triangle throughput.
But the first card that literally stomped the competition was 3dfx’s voodoo 1.
Other cards that left an impression on me include the NV1 (could to curved surfaces, crappy API), ATI Rage1 (no z-buffer, crappy API), S3 Virge/Trio3d (LMAO!), Rendition 1000 (I liked that one), PowerVR (interessting concept, crappy drivers), 3dfx voodoo (yeah!), CL Laguna3d (LOL!) and the CR Mpact1 + 2 (too little, to late), Pyramid3d (early shader type concept) …
Oh well, sorry for the stroll down “3d chip” memory lane, if that is of any interest, I could dig up more.
What do you mean by crappy API?
I’m surprised you remember so much. All I know is that cards were basically not 3D cards. They were rasterizers and very limited in every respect.
It was the TNT or the Geforce that included TnL support so things began looking up for 3D.
When I heard about the TNT, I began to drool. The voodoo was interesting, but was an add-in.
I had a Matrox Impressions Plus, very fast 2D and some (untextured) 3D acceleration for Windows 3.1 and 3DStudio 1.3 (DOS version, way before 3DSMAX).
(however it sucked big time in games, 2D 320*200 8bit could not do more than about 30 frames seconds for fullscreen animation)
Ah, voodoo 3dfx, first time I saw glQuake running 30fps instead of 20seconds/frames … great bilinear filtering … sure, it felt like a hardware hack, only fullscreen, with something like 12bit color, hidden by blurring a lot the video output …
qwerty77, I would be glad to hear more about your memories 
Well, with a crappy API I mean that back in those days almost everyone had it own proprietary way to access the 3d hardware “to get the most out of it”.
DirectX was just fresh out (actually the name DirectX came with version 2, version one was called Windows Game SDK or something like that, not so catchy as DirectX and a complete mess I may add).
So ATI had the Rage SDK, S3 had its own SDK (cant recall how it was called because I did not really bother to mess with it), PowerVR had a SDK called SGL, 3dfx had Glide and so forth.
The NV1 came before DirectX and the only way to access it, was thru Nvidia SDKs. While the card itself had promissing features (curved surfaces as I already mentioned) it was really slow especially in the 2d area and the SDK was developers hell (sorry Nvidia). I guess I wasnt the only one complaining about it so Nvidia dropped it entirely in favour for DirectX and OpenGL for the NV3 aka Riva 128.
And yes you are right, those where not “true” 3d cards, I think the political correct term is: “3d accelerator” and yes, the first three generations only accelerated parts of the rasterazation stage. Starting with the Geforce T&L came into the game.
You want some memories? Lets talk about two “underdogs” the PowerVR and the Pyramid3d.
The PowerVR was using “infinite planes” too descripe objects by intersecting the planes, if that rings a bell you are a good 3d coder.
Yes, you got shadow volumes (almost) for free. Unfortunatly and due too the fact that the chips (the PCX1 and PCX2) never gained enough momentum to play a major role, this feature never made it into the wild except for a PowerVR demo. In retrospective it was fun playing around with shadows when everybody else was still messing with lightmaps 
However the card had some major drawbacks.
Like the voodoo it was a add-in card but it transfered the framebuffer content via the PCI bus to the 2d card hence it was PCI bandwidth bound.
I never got the card to work properly other then when it got IRQ9 assigned which was kind of tricky with some boards. In the 3d department it was missing quiet some blending modes like multiplicative blending and the “Gouraudshading” only interpolated along the blue colorchannel (yikes!).
Oh well, its still an interessting concept and it was fun playing around with the card.
The Pyramid3D came in 1998 I think and was very interessting as well, despide the fact that is was dirt slow and ran real hot, it had a shadertype concept (basic fragment and vertex shaders years before the Geforce3 came to light) and of course, it had FutureCrews/Bitboy Oys enviroment bumpmapping when everybody thought that emboss bumpmapping looked cool.
I did not had much time playing with it though, because my superior PHD took and fried it not long after we got it. What an idiot sigh
But enough for today but I can give you more if you like (crap perhaps I should write a book about it or something)