Halo (1999 build): How it runs on a 1998 PC — Pentium II 400 MHz / 3Dfx Voodoo 2 / SB Live

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REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.

Also known as blambeta.exe! It’s the infamous Halo "Speartest" leak that has surfaced recently, now running on a 3D card/GPU and CPU that actually existed when this was first compiled (supposedly around October 1999)! Behold as I drunkenly test out how the game runs in a number of scenarios by shooting weapons and recklessly driving around in an assortment of vehicles contained within this build.

How does this early version of Halo perform on a high-end 1998 PC such as this Pentium II 400 & Voodoo 2 system? Considering the unfinished state of this old build, I would say that Bungie did a hell of a good job keeping the code optimized! It definitely runs more than well enough, I think, but that doesn’t mean that slow-down can’t occur. For example, there is a limit on how many alpha textures (i.e. transparent layers and effects like smoke, foliage and explosions/fire etc.) can be displayed on screen at once before performance starts to drop significantly on the Voodoo 2. Some weapons, vehicles and destroyed objects certainly do generate enough alphas to cause speed issues. Namely, (1) the flamethrower, (2) cannon fire smoke generated from tanks, (3) dirt kicked up by vehicle collisions and scraping tires, plus any up-close explosions. The more screen area these alpha effects occupy the more things will slow down, on top of there being many layers of them in play at once.

Using the level editor found within this build of Halo, it’s possible to place multiple objects, characters and vehicles in close proximity. I decided to use the editor to conduct another performance experiment; multi-vehicle collisions! There can indeed be slow-down caused by too many Warthogs being thrown around by a Scorpion tank but I think the amount of debris and dirt generated from all the friction is a bigger culprit in this case! With a zoomed out camera view, performance is noticeably snappier during a mass-vehicle crash.

This version of Halo features positional 3D audio (HRTF). You can hear the filtering of sounds as they emit from different locations around the camera’s view. This feature was kept all the way to the Xbox version. Really well done for such an old build!
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Operating system used: Microsoft Windows 98 (First Edition/FE)
Drivers used for Voodoo2 card: Glide 3.03.00b DirectX 7.0 beta drivers.
Drivers used for Sound Blaster Live: VXD 4.06.704 (Liveware 3.0, September 1999) drivers.

Renderer used: Glide.
Texture quality settings being used: High Res 16 Bit.
Resolution settings: 640x480 pixels.

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Dell Dimension XPS R400 case and motherboard (manufactured on April 30th 1998 according to case label)
Intel 440BX motherboard (all board components are manufactured before April 30th 1998)
Intel Pentium II 400 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL2S7, manufactured week 14 1998)
Matrox Millennium II AGP (8MB) video card (manufactured somewhere in Q1 1998, don’t exactly remember)
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 (CT6670) (12MB) 3D accelerator card (old variant with dark-colored circuit board, maybe manufactured around March or April 1998, don't remember)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! (CT4620) sound card (manufactured around August 1998, don't remember exactly)
Turtle Beach Montego (Aureal Vortex) (A3D) sound card (manufactured around March or April 1998, don't remember, need to check again dammit!)
192MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM (all DIMMs manufactured around 1998, some earlier and some later in the year probably)

The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into an ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core i7-2600K using 8 GBs of DDR3 SDRAM and an nVidia GTX 580 video card installed (basically, using my 2011 “vintage” PC). A VGA cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 capture to 3200x2400 was done using VirtualDub2.

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 — Start-up
0:11 — Looking around
0:35 — Firing rifle
1:02 — Explosives test
1:43 — Flamethrower test
2:28 — Light tank firing test
3:00 — Scorpion tank ride
4:29 — Abandon tank!
4:50 — Underwater walk
5:05 — Warthog drive
5:57 — Swamp level
7:51 — Grunt time!
8:15 — Grunt getting speared
8:47 — Ghost drive
9:32 — Banshee flight
10:09 — Banshee crash landing
10:50 — Tank vs. Cars! (mass collision)
12:49 — Driving off a cliff

#halo #halocombatevolved #halo1 #windows98 #bungie #3dfx #voodoo2 #glide #soundblaster #soundblasterlive #pentium #mmx #pentium2 #1998pc #1998game #gamecapture #upscaling #datapath #visionrgb #e1s #intelprocessor #speartest #macworld1999 #prototype




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