Mesa 17.x.x on Win9x

[WhiteArmpits]

Hello again, can someone please help me find a way to make Mesa 17.0.0 work on windows 98? A few months ago I've seen someone on twitter run the Mario 64 PC port with it, but everytime I try replicating the same things I fail, I've tried to contact that person, but he won't respond, but despite that, I still haven't given up, even tho I'm bad at compiling or programming in general, I still want to succeed, any useful information is appreciated!

[WhiteArmpits]

Update: I tried mesa on Minecraft versions up to 1.2.5 and it works, but for some reason versions after that always crash, I assume it's because Minecraft started using an internal multiplayer server on singleplayer after that version, even tho I can't find any workaround... Any ideas?

Edited March 5, 2023 by WhiteArmpits
Forgot to Mention Minecraft

[woi]

Take a look at this: https://github.com/JHRobotics/mesa9x It's a port of Mesa 17.3.9.2 to Windows 9x.

It's for VMs only and i got Minecraft running on it. I did not test it on real hardware yet, but you can give it a shot if you want to.

Edited April 27, 2023 by woi

[WhiteArmpits]

On 4/27/2023 at 8:01 AM, woi said:

Take a look at this: https://github.com/JHRobotics/mesa9x It's a port of Mesa 17.3.9.2 to Windows 9x.

It's for VMs only and i got Minecraft running on it. I did not test it on real hardware yet, but you can give it a shot if you want to.

It doesn't work, It throws the exact same error as the other Mesa files (OPENGL32.DLL+0x172d963), thanks for trying to help me tho

[TheMajorTechie]

On 4/28/2023 at 4:58 PM, WhiteArmpits said:

It doesn't work, It throws the exact same error as the other Mesa files (OPENGL32.DLL+0x172d963), thanks for trying to help me tho

What hardware are you trying to run it on? It mentions that even the most basic softpipe implementation requires a Pentium II to run, meaning you'll need at minimum i686 compatibility. I can confirm that it works fine on Windows 98 and an AMD Athlon XP, which has i686 compatibility and SSE extensions.

[WhiteArmpits]

45 minutes ago, TheMajorTechie said:

What hardware are you trying to run it on? It mentions that even the most basic softpipe implementation requires a Pentium II to run, meaning you'll need at minimum i686 compatibility. I can confirm that it works fine on Windows 98 and an AMD Athlon XP, which has i686 compatibility and SSE extensions.

I'm trying to run It from an IBM ThinkPad T42 with an ATI Radeon 7500 video card and an Intel Pentium M 1.7ghz processor, i've however tried to run the same file in a VM on a modern laptop and it works.

[TheMajorTechie]

Huh. That's strange. The Pentium M certainly supports SSE. I'm not sure if this has any impact or not, but I have KernelEX installed on my own Windows 98 machine. Though the files do normally work fine without it, maybe it could help?

[WhiteArmpits]

10 hours ago, TheMajorTechie said:

Huh. That's strange. The Pentium M certainly supports SSE. I'm not sure if this has any impact or not, but I have KernelEX installed on my own Windows 98 machine. Though the files do normally work fine without it, maybe it could help?

Yes, KernelEx is installed with core updates, I remember trying an older Mesa3D file once and it worked, but It was pretty slow comparing to the mesa9x file, I've never tested the file in a 98SE installation without KernelEx tho.

[awkduck]

On 4/27/2023 at 6:01 AM, woi said:

It's for VMs only

This is on the Github page:

Quote

Mesa 17.x build for Windows 98 require at last Intel Core2 CPU (SSE3 required).

So you could try using the Win95 Mesa 17.

[WhiteArmpits]

5 minutes ago, awkduck said:

This is on the Github page:

So you could try using the Win95 Mesa 17.

I tried both files to be fair, yet none of them worked, I or someone else should find a way to code or compile a recent version of Mesa that might work on older hardware (even though i'm not that good when it comes to programming, and therefore I need some help).

[awkduck]

Didn't you, at one point, have a build environment setup? Or was that only for building Qemu, and not for building Win9x software?

[WhiteArmpits]

7 minutes ago, awkduck said:

Didn't you, at one point, have a build environment setup? Or was that only for building Qemu, and not for building Win9x software?

I don't remember ever trying to build Qemu, even though I've tried to compile Win9x files a few times but failed doing so, maybe it's because I don't actually have a proper setup, along with having poor programming skills...

[awkduck]

I'm working on trying to build a few things. There are plenty of gotchas, when targeting Win9x. The JHRobotics pthread9x might be useful for using newer Msys2/mingw-w64 (32bit or target 32bit). You could then "maybe" avoid issues, that occur from using older build environments/tooling.

If you were trying to build Mesa 21.* for Win98/ME, you could compare your build error outputs to the JHRobotics project, and merge the fix into yours (supposing there were patches implemented/required?).

On a side note: I started wondering if the reason it didn't work for you, but did for TheMajorTechie, has something to do with video drivers. Maybe there is a minimum OpenGL requirement, that you card doesn't have? We're looking at OpenGL4.x against drivers that support OpenGL 2.1 and maybe 3.x.

[TheMajorTechie]

3 hours ago, awkduck said:

I'm working on trying to build a few things. There are plenty of gotchas, when targeting Win9x. The JHRobotics pthread9x might be useful for using newer Msys2/mingw-w64 (32bit or target 32bit). You could then "maybe" avoid issues, that occur from using older build environments/tooling.

If you were trying to build Mesa 21.* for Win98/ME, you could compare your build error outputs to the JHRobotics project, and merge the fix into yours (supposing there were patches implemented/required?).

On a side note: I started wondering if the reason it didn't work for you, but did for TheMajorTechie, has something to do with video drivers. Maybe there is a minimum OpenGL requirement, that you card doesn't have? We're looking at OpenGL4.x against drivers that support OpenGL 2.1 and maybe 3.x.

I've been able to get it to work both with and without video drivers installed on my Athlon XP. 

I will say that the Pentium M only supports up to SSE2 though.

[awkduck]

On 8/5/2023 at 4:26 AM, TheMajorTechie said:

I've been able to get it to work both with and without video drivers installed on my Athlon XP. 

So software render works fine.

@TheMajorTechie This question doesn't help WhiteArmpits, it is just out of curiosity. Is OpenGL hardware accelerated, after you install your video driver?

Edited August 6, 2023 by awkduck