Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines - 2D Graphics Acceleration API: DirectDraw
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.ค. 2024
- A game which stirs up quite some memories. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines was for sure capturing the attention of the player. Constantly on the lookout of hiding spots, sneaking past enemies, and finding the most efficient path to complete objectives. In today's video, I will have a look at the graphics API that is used by Commandos: DirectDraw
Let's see how different graphic cards from 1994, 1995, and 1997 perform in using DirectDraw!
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00:00 Introduction
02:31 InfiRay P2 Pro Giveaway
02:57 The graphic cards
03:30 Trident TGUI9440
07:44 S3 Trio64V+
10:45 Matrox Millennium II
12:03 DirectDraw Benchmark
13:25 End - บันเทิง
Commandos was an amazing game. I played the demo off a demo disk back during the Win95 days. Ended up enjoying Commandos 2 and 3 later. Still haven't played the full first game yet.
Before DirectDraw, there was WinG.
The difference:
DirectDraw offers hardware acceleration features like BitBlt and things like that, while WinG was just a fast way to access the video memory of the videocard on a Windows 3.x system.
I guess this was why many game developers were reluctant about Microsoft's request to port games to unknown Windows 95. Fast video memory access was already available in MS-DOS plus plenty of other BIOS functions developers were used to.
@@bitsundbolts Bill Gates went super hard on pushing 95 as a gaming platform. There's a super cringe video of him superimposed into Doom running on Win 95 from one of the launch events that always made me laugh. WinG would be a great topic to cover TBH, I've heard of it but don't remember ever actually using it myself or even seeing it running in a video.
@@bitsundbolts Well, first we have to talk about Windows 3.x. Windows 3.x had to be purchased separately. Some only had IBM DOS or DR DOS and would have had to buy Windows 3.x separately.
Therefore, there were only a few games for Windows 3.x. Although the advantages such as protected mode for easy access to more than 1 MiB or 640 KiB of RAM and a unified API for accessing the graphics card, sound card and input devices were tempting because they reduced support costs for game publishers it was not enough.
WinG also only solved the problem with the graphics, for the other devices, such as the sound output and input devices, the developers had to use the Windows APIs optimized for everyday office use, which were not optimized for games.
For DirectSound and DirectInput, it took a few more years for Windows 95 to appear.
When WinG for games came out for Windows 3.x, there were already DOS extenders at that time, such as DOS4G/W. These allowed access to more than 640 KiB of RAM in protected mode under DOS. Uniform sound card APIs from third-party manufacturers that reduced the effort involved in developing games for DOS with soundcard support and supported as many sound cards as possible already existed at this point in time.
And the input devices such as mouse and joystick followed the specifications of the first IBM PCs and its gameport. For example, the joysticks didn't have any special functions, and for an analog throttle and two more buttons, you simply used the control on the gameport, which was intended for the axis of the second joystick and its two buttons. You could only use one joystick of this type, but it was still sufficient at the time.
Special drivers were therefore not needed, and there was no uniform API that abstracted the input under DOS anyway.
That changed when Windows 95 came out.
Windows 95 offered not only DirectDraw with its support for hardware acceleration functions that WinG did not yet have, but also DirectInput for input devices and DirectSound for sound output.
DirectInput provided a uniform interface for accessing joysticks, for example, and the fact that it was also a driver interface for hardware manufacturers meant that they were able to bring joysticks onto the market for the first time that support many buttons and axes, they only had to develop one driver for their Joystick to support Windows and its DirectDraw.
And for the game manufacturers, it massively eased the support costs. A hardware problem was no longer a problem with the game, but with the driver of the hardware manufacturer and Windows. As a result, there were fewer customer inquiries to the game manufacturer and the support costs were reduced.
And then Windows 95 came out right away as a standalone operating system, it didn't have to be bought separately with DOS, since it pretty much delivered DOS right under the hood.
From Windows 95 onwards, the advantages of developing games only for Windows clearly outweighed this. But, of course, it takes time to develop a new game.
Anyone who overslept WinG and Windows 3.1 and was still developing for DOS and still had a current DOS game as a development project in the pipeline, of course finished developing it for DOS.
Therefore, after the release of Windows 95 in August 1995, there was of course still a whole range of other games for DOS.
The development of a new game should have taken about 1-2 years at the time, depending on the game. So it was only logical that most of the games for Windows 95 would not appear until mid-1996 at the earliest and 1997 at the latest.
And that's how it was, because as early as 1998 you could count on one hand the number of games that were only released for DOS. The developers all started to develop new games for Windows 95 right after the release of Windows 95, but it just took a while until they were finished. And the old DOS games that were just being developed were being developed for DOS. A few were also ported to Windows 95 when it was worth the effort.
@@dungeonseeker3087 I had two games that made use of WinG. This was CivNet, a network version of Civilization 1 and Civilization 2. The latter required Windows 3.x or better with WinG as API. Only the multiplayer extension changed that, which required Windows 95 or better.
@@dungeonseeker3087 Before you have to run a WinG based game, it will force you to run a WinG calibration utility which looks like a window which just flips red squiggles around. It will also re-run it every time display mode or display hardware has changed, if memory serves.
I remember Congo The Movie: Descent into Zinj used it. It's not an entirely terrible game btw, if nearly fully forgotten by the Internet.
I had forgotten about this game. It brings back some memories
I used to play this on my p100, with 8MB RAM on some S3 1MB card. We were playing it with a friend at uni, we where taking turns when died. Spent 2 semesters playing this. We both managed to beat the game without a mid game save. Great memories. Thanks for the video!
I had it back in the day around when it released. Such a pretty game, it looks great to this day. I was playing this on either on a P133, or the P233MMX after the former blew up. The video card was a Matrox Millenium 2.
Fascinating video. The 90's were an exciting time. DirectX and GDI were hardware accelerated in GPU's by the early 2000's, but I remember reading an article about 10'ish years ago that 2D hardware acceleration had pretty much been dropped from GPU drivers and nowadays 2D is rendered on the CPU. Not sure if this is true. I do have memories of arguments about games being slower in Windows versus DOS due to the OS overhead, and WinG was a thing for like 2 weeks!
As far as i know NVidia dropped the 2d hardware acceleration support when they switched from the Geforce 7 to the Geforce 8. The Geforce 8 was released in 2006.
I also know of a game that runs worse on modern computers and GPUs than on a computer with a Geforce 7 for this reason.
This game is called Gunship! and is the third part in the Gunship series. It's also called Gunship 3.
The more modern GPUs, such as the aforementioned Geforce 8, have more power and can in principle display the game more smoothly, but there is an undefined lag that you then notice in the game. I didn't have this lag on a computer with a Geforce 7.
Microsoft deprecated DirectDraw at about the same time and introduced Direct2d, which used Direct3d itself for 2d graphics.
Operating system overhead was mostly related to Windows games, which before WinG were developed using GDI. GDI is not made for games and has a significant overhead. As of WinG and at the very latest as of DirectX, the overhead of Windows 3.1/95 is present, but negligible.
After all, Windows manages the hardware and the kernel runs in Ring 0, while the Windows applications, including games, run in Ring 3 of the CPU. This is a protective mechanism that the protected mode offers and is of course used by modern operating systems.
As a result, games can no longer directly access the resources of the hardware and since Windows 95 is an operating system with preventive multitasking, it can of course also take away the computing time from the game, which it does.
But all this is negligible on CPUs from the Pentium and around 166 Mhz, since the advantages of Windows clearly outweigh the disadvantages.
Under DOS there are no protective mechanisms and also, in a normal DOS version, no real preemptive multitasking. The game can take up the entire resources of the computer while it is running. It could even write to DOS kernel memory. That wouldn't make much sense, but it would work because DOS doesn't have any protective mechanisms to prevent this. DOS runs in real mode, the protected mode only existed with the 386 and DOS does not use it.
That's why there is essentially no overhead in DOS. But that's not quite right, because some DOS4G/W games that switch to protected mode have to access DOS functions from time to time via the interface of the DOS Extender, but the CPU has to be switched to real mode and this Context switch is slow. Because of this, some games run even better under Windows than their DOS version does under DOS. Because in Windows this context switch is not necessary. At least not in Windows NT and later versions of Windows NT.
I had a tgui 9440 and some games wouldn't work at all. I remember in particular Railroad Tycoon 2 I couldn't play until I got a 2mb s3 virge. I did not actually realize cards like you show accelerate stuff for games so interesting to see.
IIRC in 1998 I would have had a Pentium MMX 166 with a 2MB S3 Trio64V+, so I would've been able to play this game with pretty good performance, but I had never heard of it. I did like strategy games, but I'm not sure I would have had the patience for it back then. My usual strategy was to build progressively more units until I could overwhelm their defences and beat the enemy, but this is a very different game to most strategy games.
Sometime around then I bought Quake II (it was expensive, so I was a bit late to the game), that really kickstarted my computer upgrades. First was a 4MB S3 Virge/DX (the Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro), then a Voodoo2, then I bought a second hand Pentium Pro 180 which I overclocked to 200MHz by simply switching the FSB from 60MHz to 66MHz.
I remember CPUs and hard disks I had back then. Graphic cards were an afterthought. The first card I remember was a Diamond Viper V550 (TNT). Anything before that I don't remember. Commandos was a very different strategy game - no base, no resources, no place to hide. It's a frustrating-fun game!
Thanks for the trip down the memory lane!
9:40 amazing, honestly I saw empty socket on board all the time but this is the first time I saw someone actually put something in the slot. Nice video mate I subscribed to your channel. have a nice day
Thank you!
I remember DOS MAME being able to reprogram the VGA registers to generate real slow sync scanlines for a crt which was fantastic.
Windows his all that away so you had to emulate scanlines 😢
Yes, memories from... 2 months ago! I still play those games when I've some free time 😄
Commandos is a great game but just in case anybody sees this and wants to give it a try, I'd recommend Commandos 2 over C1. As you heard in the video C1 has lots of fairly annoying affirmations that get very old very quickly and it has lots of other flaws too. C2 fixes almost all of them and is quite simply one of the greatest real time strategy games ever created. My friends and I sunk literally hundreds of hours into C2 trying to finish every mission perfectly, the final mission is an absolute masterpiece in game design and the phrase "ALARM!!!!" will forever be burned into my brain.
Really cool video, I love the idea of 2D DirectX benchmarks and getting to see how these 2D cards fight it out that is not something you commonly get to see! Also enjoy learning about early DirectX!
I really enjoy these experiments. Thank you BuB!!
Glad you like them!
Love the 3d graph!
Great video!
Now there's a great game I had forgotten about!
I totally agree!
2D/3D transition period is the most exciting! I do have the same beef with Diablo 1 minimum system requirements to test various hardware pecs
I did enjoy 2D/2.5D games a lot! Age of Empires, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, StarCraft (🥺), and Commandos - all fantastic games!. (Ah, I guess I have a few other games I can make videos about).
@@bitsundbolts Maxis, the developers of Sim City, deliberately did not use a 3d mode in Sim City 2000 and Sim City 3000 because the hardware was not yet powerful enough. The change to 3d was therefore only with Sim City 4.
And with Syndicate Wars, the second part in the Syndicate series, they made the mistake and jumped on the 3D train too early. The second part was therefore much less well received by customers than the first and required also much more CPU power to be playable.
played this game on my s3-64v2 with 2mb and cyrix 6x86mx pr166 back in '99
I had P-100 and S3Trio64v+ with 2MB vram back then and this game was playable, smooth by that time standarts.
oddly enough when you mentioned the voodoo 2 and running a 2d game, i jumped back in time to when i had a voodoo 2 and was playing diablo 2, where i was able to select my voodoo 2 to run it, i managed something like 180fps in the game at 1024x768 lol.
diablo 2 has a 3d mode so maybe thats it.
interesting and surprising
I would be interested in seeing the results if you repeat the tests with all three cards but with hardware acceleration disabled. Then you could see how much of the speed difference is due to acceleration and how much is from faster memory access.
Imagine if you can upgrade the vram on today's GPU like that. I have a fond memory with this game back in the days with my Cyrix MII and S3 ViRGE, I also played NFS 3 with "hardware acceleration" at 320x240 res (10-15fps)...Good Times!
My favorite game series from old time. My old S3 Trio 3D/2X 16MB can run both BEL and BCD well, unfortunately not Commandos 2.
Commandos, loved the 1st and the 2nd... Skipped the third.
Why? My favourite commando was missing and that was the driver.
Hmm... At the time I would've had Pentium MMX 200 mhz, 64 megs of ram and a 6 Mb Voodoo Rush... I remember playing the second one briefly and it worked well, guess I probably had the version of Voodoo Rush with a decent 2D core.
i still have my retro stuff laying around.... but where is the time you need?
The struggle is real! If I wouldn't have all the support of my family, I wouldn't be able to release 1-2 videos a week.
I feel like it was just few weeks ago..
Gonzo likes this video.
Even late Trident's were lousy at raw pixel-pushing and that was what you needed in late DOS & early-windows games before real graphics-accelerator era. Best I used were late S3's like overclocked 868, overclocked Cirrus-ones and Matrox'es. Pentiums suffered badly from 66MHz FSB, but if card worked ok with 37.5MHz PCI-bus 75MHz FSB made a visible difference in some games.
Commandos is excellent game but difficulty is brutal. I bought mine (Commandos Ammo Pack) from GOG years ago, it was easier than try to tune my ancient copy to work with Win7. For some reason included addon "Beyond The Call Of Duty" -manual says that it requires DX6, but original needed just DX5. Requirements from the manual; 32MB RAM, "2MB SVGA Card completely DX6 compatible".
At that time I had an ATI Charger Rage 2. My CPU was the Pentium 2 MMX with 233 MHz. I think I had 32 MB RAM. The game ran almost too fast with this system.
Great great video, thx. I have a question, at 9:43 i can see you can choose how many chips you put in the card , what happens if you put 3 of them? it wont work? also, about your fancy graph at 12:26 , could you put the names ,legends, not in the very lower part of the screen, because when i stop the video, youtube put symbols there, so i cant read the information.
Odd number of memory chips let th card boot, however, the image output is not correct. You get black lines in a pattern. Surprisingly, the card doesn't care - it just ignores the missing 512kb. Depending on which socket is filled with a memory module and no partner, it could also end up with random colored character over the entire screen. I do have some footage that I can put on my Patreon account.
I'm kinda remember some utility, that should allow to select a primary videocard in W98. Cant remember now. It should be some kind of about hacking/patching executable files.
I would imagine requiring a video card have 4MB of RAM was done more to help ensure that whatever 2D card a user had would be new enough to have proper DirectDraw support. Chances are a card that maxes out at 2MB of RAM or less would have lousy performance, much as you saw with the Trident card.
Back in the Windows 95 days tended to stay away from the early DirectDraw 2D games as my 486 120MHz machine had an integrated local bus VGA chip that only had 512 KB of RAM and had basically no DirectDraw support. Most DOS games that required a fast 486 or entry level Pentium ran just fine but Windows based ones that used early version of Direct X ran poorly.
It wasn't until I replaced that machine with a custom built AMD K5 (later K6) based PC with a Diamond Stealth3D 2000 S3 ViRGE chipset card that I could play games that used DirectDraw well.
I do have similar memories. I think I dragged my 486 way too far. The next upgrade was a Pentium II 350, but at that time, Pentium IIIs we're already available. It was a turbulent time!
Pretty interesting. You don't see a lot of 2D benchmarks on TH-cam.
(p.s. those voice responses to commands quickly get very annoying! .... _sir_ )
what program did you use to display what the card accelerated in hardware?
PowerStrip 2.78
I'm building a PC for Win95/98SE "2D gaming" (I have a dedicated PC for 3D with a V2 SLI) and this is exactly what I needed, though probably I'm gonna repeat some tests with more modern hardware. I'm interested in AOE1 and AOE2, C&C games, Commandos 1-3, Desperados, Warcraft 2, etc.. you get the idea. I was wondering if there was any way of benchmarking those games (or the 2D subsystem), but so far got nothing. What's the DDraw benchmark you're using? I'll probably go with a Matrox G200 or something like that.
I used "VideoDD1 DirectDraw Benchmark", google it and you should find the website of Roy Longbottom (download VideoDD1.zip)
My old neighbor once told me how much he liked playing that game, I wanted to find and gift it to him but the version I found on the web didn't work what so ever.
I beat the game with my first buildt PC. A Celeron 433MHz, S3 Virge DX 2MB, 256MB 133DIMM. 256 MB ram was overkill for most pcs, surely was for mine.
It will be interesting to see results with same graphics cards, but with more time propriet cpu, like Pentium II or Celeron maybe double speed of that p1 200... Oh and as I think little bit about commandos, maybe even p1 200 mmx may have a different result?
tried to make the resolution to 1080p .didnt help. lol :D
Thx, what display resolution and color depth it was? 800x600@65k ?
That is the maximum you can use with 1MB, right?
@@RetroTinkerer Correct, but you have no room for double buffering:
(800 x 600 x 16 )/8 = 960000 Bytes
@@RetroTinkerer exactly, and no more VRAM left for a second buffer of double buffering. Or with 800x600@256 it will be enough for double buffering but not tripple buffering that needed to completly eleminate tearing
Yes, 800x600x16bit. It's noticable that there is no buffering going on with 1MB video memory. It gets much better adding at least another MB.
Hey is there way how to eliminate screen tearing in videos like game intro or eidos logo? I tried three different computers 233MMX + S3 Virge 4MB, P3 450 + Matrox G200 8MB or P3 600 + Voodoo 3 16MB. Ingame dont have issues but on all computers movies screen tearing
Is vsync enabled in the driver for the Voodoo 3?
Maybe something else is causing screen tearing. I have a HDMI-USB capture device that causes issues.
i belive i once tryed to put memory in trio one chip at the time, but i no longer remember if it can increment by i chip or 2 or you always have to double it
3mb trio would be hilarious to see though :]
I have a feeling 3MB aren't possible :) But now I am curious - maybe I'll try and see what kind of messed up picture the card produces with 6 memory chips...
@@bitsundbolts i liked to test such things to see what changes, max resolution or the color depth
I added some pictures to my Patreon account available to everyone to show what happens when you install an odd number of memory chips.
In some cases, the card prevents to system to boot and I got the VGA failure beep code.
looks like the 4mb brings animation of the river water and flag. Is it true?
During briefing, no objects are moving including soldiers and flags. I had to go back to verify this, but even at 1MB, the flag is moving. An animated flag is shown at the end of the video, where the TGUI9440 (2MB) struggles rendering the camp.
What's that graphics system information tool that you're using ? I can't find it.
I use PowerStrip 2.78
@@bitsundbolts Thanks !
Which one ripped-off another? Amiga's Cannon Fodder or PC's Commandos? :)
I wonder if there are any notable 2d games that can Utilize DirectDraw on a Voodoo 2. A voodoo will not be able to accelerate many important DirectDraw features though due to its memory architecture, using it as anything more than a dumb framebuffer might be difficult as it will only support accelerated blt from tmu memory to fbi memory, a regular 2d accerarator supports blt from anywhere in vram to anywhere in vram (important for complex 2d effects). A voodoo only really supports DirectDraw because it is a requirement in order to support Direct3d acceleration , it didn't need to actually support direct draw acceleration features that were not requirements for Direct3D. Even if a 2d game does support a voodoo , I doubt it does much in the way of boosting performance. At the time most people with a voodoo probably had a good 2d card already so 3dfx wouldn't have cared
Thank you fo sharing more details on the Voodoo support for DirectDraw. It is an odd combination with the Voodoo, but it makes sense that there's no benefit adding one in this game. I guess it would come down to the driver. As I have seen on falconfly a driver allowing windowed Voodoo rendering - which should not be possible.
@@bitsundbolts Windowed rendering was possible in 2 situations. Using a glide hack called WinGlide that could allow windowed OpenGL applications to be acccelerated if you had the full 3dfx opengl driver file, it wasn't fast but leagues better than software opengl. Also Windows 2000 removed support for 3d only cards so 3dfx released an Experimental 2d driver for the voodoo 2 for Windows 2000. It was kind of terrible and didn't support glide or OpenGL. It was something of a novelty having a voodoo 2 render the Windows Desktop. Most people found using the NT4 glide only drivers to be a better choice
The video title suggested to me that it was about the game's development or rendering techniques of the game but... basically it's just testing the game running under different graphics cards! I'm a bit disappointed 😅
I'm sorry 😅. Hopefully the video still brought back some memories!
@@bitsundbolts yes it definitely did! Thank you! I watched my step dad for hours while he was playing this game... I was 10 years old... Good times! 😊
I was hoping for some more in depth analysis, for example dxwrapper logging to reveal what directdraw calls are being used the most, and more VGA chipsets tested. Comparing Matrox against ATI mach32 and mach64 or any later Rage.
I still have the game but it won`t start under Win10.
ISA Trident TVGA 9000i 512 KB
Would that potato run the game? Not sure about API support. Probably none. CPU fallback possible?
If it manages to run the game, then in lower a lower resolution and everything emulated on the CPU. If DirectX and DirectDraw manage to work with this card, I can imagine that it may work - poorly :)
I need'd this. uwu)/
The type of the chart you presented is an abomination. It's not clear what you want to share.
I added a bar chart to my Patreon page available to everyone.