Digital Foundry gets Windows 98 with 3dfx Voodoo graphics up and running on Xbox Series X via emulation, opening the door to a classic era in PC gaming:
The late 90s were many things - but for me, it was all about Pentium PCs and Windows 98. That being the case, I was delighted to learn that the DOSBox Pure RetroArch core had recently received support for the venerable OS, opening the door to a range of classic PC games that can now run on today's Microsoft console hardware. Quake, Half-Life, Turok: The Dinosaur Hunter, Command and Conquer...
Even so, I had a lot of fun with this. In Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun, I left the game speed at its default and turned down the scroll speed a touch, finding it really even more intuitive to play than any controller based RTS I have tried on console, such as StarCraft 64 or Command and Conquer 64. It looked and ran beautifully too with no issues at all with sound or full-motion video playback.
At this point it's important to stress how this functions technically as we're basically talking about emulated graphics hardware on an emulated Win98 OS, meaning you need to install 3dfx drivers just as you would on original hardware - a bit of a headache, as we've seen when it compares to importing files onto the system. The other key limitation to bear in mind is that everything is being emulated by the Xbox Series CPU and not the Radeon graphics.
3dfx Voodoo Graphics is the Achilles Heel of the enterprise at the moment. It's CPU emulated and much slower than real hardware. It's roughly in line with Voodoo 1 performance, easily bested by Voodoo 2 and a down-clocked Voodoo 3. For many titles like RTS games, there is no 3D support any way so you are fine. However, for other key games like Quake 2, you will have to select software rendering in the menu. Software mode can mean some changes to visuals such as a lack of texture filtering and no v-sync support, but I honestly love that unfiltered look, and at times, you can force v-sync in software mode as well, depending on the game at hand.
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