qemu-3dfx VS dxwrapper

There is also https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx pass-through 3D acceleration for qemu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e34mSBxDm7s

I've been porting this to Nixos all week. Handles glide emulation pretty well

https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx

As for 3D acceleration, I've seen this repository (no idea if it works) https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx, and I've also seen that QEMU added the "ati-vga" device, which supports the Rage 128 Pro and Radeon RV100, but those seem to be a bit WIP.

And, here we also have the 3rd option which is less well-known than CrossOver and Parallel Desktop while targeting older Windows games with compatibility issues on modern Windows, QEMU featuring qemu-3dfx for Apple Silicon https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx

You can check out qemu-3dfx for Apple Silicon macOS. https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx/wiki/Apple-Silicon-macOS-Prerequisites

If you are a true gamer from the late 90' s though, you can and probably will run into an old game that doesn't work on modern windows. PCem is really the only good option IMO, but performance is very limited. Especially with glide and 3d acceleration, even the fastest CPUs aren't able to emulate much faster than a pentium II 200mhz at voodoo 2 at full speed (if you are emulating MMX on top of that forget it). Virtualization is possible but not likely to help as win95 virtualization is very basic and doesn't do much gaming things very well. With that said, there are some pretty crazy virtualization projects out there; here is one that requires you to compile everything from source yourself for basically no reason https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx (have fun).

Then, download this and place the files inside the game directory (C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity Classic).

There's also dxwrapper that implements old DirectDraw/3D interfaces with newer D3D9 api for better compatibility with newer Windows versions:

https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper

FYI: The Space Bar re-release features Elisha Riedlinger's DxWrapper (https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper), whose config file is otherwise stock with just FullScreen enabled. I strongly believe they didn't properly test it.

RTX Remix uses a custom d3d9.dll though so you additionally need another wrapper such as https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper to customize which dll should be loaded since by default d3d8to9 uses the default system file which will result in translated calls not being redirected to the path tracer used by Remix.

If you have a GPU that supports DXVK (Basically it forces DXVK to run the game in Vulkan intsead of it's usual DirectX 9, which the DX9 version hates GTA IV and while GTA IV hates DX9 back) and has more than 2GB of VRAM (DirectX Vulkan), then I HIGHLY recommend it: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases (Use this guide to install it: http://ant-sh.blogspot.com/2020/07/gta-4-stutter-choppiness-fix.html. If you want aliasing AND DXVK, use this guide: http://ant-sh.blogspot.com/2021/01/antialiasing-with-dxvk-and-gta-iv.html. If your GPU doesn't support Vulkan, use DxWrapper: https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper/releases).