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Rails Of Blood! That sounds like the name of an 90's death metal band. Anyway, what can go wrong when trying to capture the flag on a very high-speed train?

When I revisit a nostalgic configuration, I look for any excuse to play UT99, and why the Hell not! It's one of the greatest games ever made. Sure, a short time later, Halo on the XBox would do its thing. But, many people were already playing Halo before it was released. It was called Unreal Tournament. To say that the multiplayer action in Unreal was really intense would be a massive understatement. It was hardcore! And UT99 will be forever remembered because of it. Unfortunately, it seems that there aren't any servers anymore, so if I want some intense Unreal action, I will have to use bots instead. However, the bots, depending on game type, can still be quite fun and hardcore, especially in Capture The Flag and Deathmatch.

When I heard about SoftGPU, this was one game that would instantly go headshot through my skull. I loaded UT99 onto the Win98 SoftGPU VM, and fired it up. The action was instant, and intense. There would be an occasional slowdown or hickup here and there, but by and large, the gameplay was very smooth and very much playable. UT'99 has no issue running on a Ryzen 5 5500 running at 4.2GHz. Considering that when this game was released, 400-500MHz was considered top of the line, I can now make the very safe assumption that even under virtualization, one really isn't going to crawl. It's quick, fast-paced nonstop action from here my friends. The very fact that this upload is nothing but Unreal content on SoftGPU should hint about how well this game can run under it. Not only that, UT99 looked very stunning too. UT99 has always been a visual treat, as one finds beauty, bliss, and solace with body parts and human entrails flying across the screen in such an awe-inspiring manner. A sight to behold indeed! I call it art!

Now I did have some issues at first. The virtual machine that I downloaded from Archive.org had sound stuttering issues when the SB16 was used. But when I switched the audio adapter to the AC'97 and installed the appropriate Win98 drivers, the sound issues went away. Thus, I could near hear the bullets rip apart flesh and chunks of human remains flying off into space.

VirtualBox 7.0 is virtualizing a multimedia gaming configuration with a single CPU core allocated to it (host is an AMD Ryzen 5 5500 6-Core Processor Running at 4.2HGHz), 512MB's of RAM, a VESA 1.2 Compatible Display Adapter with 3D Acceleration enabled via Passthrough with SoftGPU. An AC'97 Intel 82801AA Audio Device is installed with the appropriate drivers. Also installed is an AMD PCnet NIC. Windows 98SE is installed in the VM.