Glide Wrappers

Glide Wrappers

Description

Early hardware accelerated games supported 3Dfx and gave the best visuals and performance. Glide was a proprietary API, so only those who had the permission of 3Dfx could program a driver that supports glide for a given card. Back then, 3Dfx used that to their advantage -- the SDK was free so any company could make glide games, but if you wanted to play that games you had to buy a 3Dfx card.

However, any hardware manufacturer could write drivers with full Direct X and OpenGL support, so those two APIs were more widely used than 3Dfx. By the mid to late 90's the first games supporting DirectX and OpenGL started to appear. Documents at the time stated that Glide was a stripped down version of OpenGL and that's why QuakeGL engines ran faster on 3Dfx cards using the miniGL driver. Later, nVidia bought 3Dfx, so only 3Dfx and nVidia cards had glide drivers, but nVidia eventually dropped the glide APIs.

Now its all DirectX with some games also supporting OpenGL, as modern graphics cards can handle any DirectX and OpenGL game, but do not support older games requiring the 3Dfx hardware/APIs. They have no native glide support, but there are some Glide Wrappers or emulators.

Glide Wrappers are software that emulate the old 3-D accelerator cards (dgVoodoo and Glidos for DOS games, and OpenGLide, eVoodoo and some others for Windows games). They allow you to get the higher resolutions out of the old 3-D (GLIDE) games that supported these cards. Now you can run King's Quest Mask of Eternity at 800x600 resolution on your new PC. But be warned, using a Glide Wrapper may come at the price of lost performance.

Downloads

For your convenience, downloads are offered here, but as always, check the authors' sites for the latest versions.

• dgVoodoo - dgVoodoo is a glide wrapper for Windows and DOS applications.

• Download from SHP - dgVoodoo1.31.zip (ZIP File) [817 KB]
  • Download from SHP - dgVoodoo1.31_log.zip (logging version) (ZIP File) [237 KB]
     

• eVoodoo - eVoodoo is a glide wrapper for Windows and applications.

  • Download from SHP - eVoodooXP-3.2.zip (ZIP File) [297 KB]
     

• Glide64 - Another glide wrapper.
  • Download from SHP - Glide64_NapalmWX_R1.1.zip (ZIP File) [1.52 MB]
  • Download from SHP - Glitch64_bin.zip (ZIP File) [102 KB]
     

• Glidos - Glidos is a glide wrapper for DOS games.

  • Download from SHP - Glidos_v1_46.exe) (EXE File) [1.69 MB]
  • Special build of DOSBox for use with Glidos on 64-bit systems
    • Download from SHP - DOSBoxForGlidos_1_1.zip (ZIP File) [1.04 MB]
       

• Gl2ideal - This wrapper is based on the source code of 'GL2IDE rev. A'.

  • Download from SHP - Gl2ideal16.zip (ZIP File) [58.1 KB]
     

• Hacktarux's Glide Wrapper - Another glide wrapper.

  • Download from SHP - Hacktarux_Glide_Wrapper_0.1d.zip (ZIP File) [43.8 KB]
     
• nGlide - nGlide is a 3Dfx Voodoo Glide wrapper which means it 'emulates' 3Dfx Glide Library, so you don't need to have a 3Dfx Voodoo card to play games written for Glide API. Both versions of Glide API are supported, Glide2 (glide2x.dll) and Glide3 (glide3x.dll). nGlide translates all Glide callings to Direct3D, which is supported by almost all today's graphics cards.

• Download from SHP - nGlide092_setup.exe) (EXE File) [947 KB]
   
• OpenGLide - OpenGLide is a Glide to OpenGL wrapper. It emulates a Voodoo board so you can run old Windows Glide games by translating Glide calls into OpenGL.

• Download from SHP - OpenGLide_009rc7.zip (ZIP File) [34.9 KB]
   
• Zeckensack's Glide wrapper - Implements and emulates the 3DFX Voodoo cards' native Glide2 and Glide3 APIs on top of OpenGL, and supports a lot of games written for Glide.

• Download from SHP - ZeckensacksGlideWrapper084c.exe) (EXE File) [249 KB]

See Also

• Main Windows 3x Page
• Main DOSBox Page
• General Game Help
• Game Troubleshooting
• Emulators
• Utilities
• Utilities Pages
• Main Update Page