Voodoo compatibility fixing

It's well known (and documented on the official PSO PC support site even) that the 3dfx Voodoo series of video cards (starting from banshee, up to 5) crashes the game when you transport to Ragol. There's some ancient threads about it here. It's a shame since it looks good and shows promise with rendering correctly until that point.

PCem recently gained Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo3 emulation (no wrappers - all LLE on the CPU), and can run the game up to the point of Pioneer 2 and reproduces the known crash issue. It happens no matter what driver you use (Official or 3rd party, Win98SE/Me/2000/XP, etc). I don't know the exact cause either. I'd assume texture memory (log says it fails at Direct3DTextureCreate), but 16mb should be enough for the low setting (and non-3dfx 16mb cards are supported by PSO, but are not currently emulated).

I wonder if that emulation's enough to relentlessly debug towards the creation of a possible fix patch? Just curiosity speaking / thinking aloud... 3dfx's been deader than the Dreamcast and still sees use in many retro PC builds today for their overall compatibility range (when they're not scalped by collectors)

Here's a PCem screenshot of the last thing you'll see.
Attachment 42441

I found a way with SA Tools' TextureEditor since that seems to be a working direct PVM editing tool, however it resaves oversized PVMs after.

but... i'm on ragol now!!!

Attachment 42466

All it really took is also looking after the PVMs in the SCENE_MIRROR directory (folder for textures with preprocessed textures intended for video hardware without mirrored UV repeat capabilities - which 3dfx should actually support, but this ability wasn't standardized in D3D until later and 3dfx closed before that could happen on their D3D HAL driver) and resample the 512 and 1024s down to 256, and then PSO proceeds on this hardware happily.

I'd probably have to go further and find more large 512+ textures to replace though, and that could end up being too large for a 'patch'... making a command-line script for some sort of command-line pvm management tool would be preferable.

There's probably some 512's in the BML files which I can't check right now (the only BML tool I can find is PSOBB centric and can't recognize PVMs)