Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 25:28

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Here is a full playthrough of ReVolte/リボルト (developed by Virtuality KK), one of few really well-programmed PowerVR-exclusive games from back in late 1996, running on a real PowerVR PCX1-based NEC PC 3DEngine PCI video card. This time (unlike my last ReVolte capture) I play the game as intended using a Microsoft Sidewinder game pad, which was bundled with the PC 3DEngine originally (along with ReVolte, Biohazard and driver discs). This results in MUCH better controls than using mouse or keyboard control presets.

Thanks to the SGL (Super Graphics Library) API and the PowerVR PCX1’s Image Synthesis Processor (ISP) the game features excellent use of shadow volume effects, including the casting of a shadow from the player-controlled space ship based on a global light-source direction (sun), self-shadowing on said space ship and environmental shadow volumes that project per-pixel accurately onto enemy vehicles as well as the player (all without a stencil buffer!). This was cutting-edge technology in 1996, almost 2 years before the introduction of stencil buffers and stencil shadows on video cards such as the nVidia Riva TNT!

The capturing was done in VirtualDub2 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. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 (VGA) capture to 3200 x 2400 (QUXGA) was done using VirtualDub2.

DRIVER INFORMATION:
The drivers used for the PCX1 are the 1.0.0c1 drivers from the original NEC PC 3DEngine driver CD-ROM from late 1996, which are the drivers that ReVolte released alongside with. The game will perform and display graphics as intended, with the "please wait" loading text and all polygonal terrain rendered correctly. Later drivers (for example, ones from the latter half of 1997) will allow ReVolte to run at a higher frame-rate than with the 1996 drivers but it does speed up the game too, resulting in more audio distortion (from weapons firing too fast) and erratically fast camera rotations as well as giving the player less reaction time in general.

TIMESTAMPS:
Starting game - 0:00
First moon (Guian) - 0:41
Second moon (Calaf) - 4:10
Third moon (Azo) - 7:04
Fourth moon (Nazca) - 10:49
Fifth moon (Negor) - 14:48
Final moon (Hibiy) - 17:40
Ending/Record summary - 22:37

Here are the specifications for the computer used in this footage:
- Dell OptiPlex GXPro case and motherboard (manufactured in July 1996)
- Intel 440FX chipset
- Intel Pentium Pro 200 Mhz (256KB L2 cache) processor
- S3 Trio64V+ (2MB) video card
- NEC PC 3DEngine (NEC PowerVR PCX1) 3D accelerator card
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 (CT3900) sound card
- 256 MBs of EDO DRAM/memory
- Microsoft Windows 95 (Japanese OSR 2.1 OEM) operating system

In late 1996, Videologic and NEC together produced and released the first commercially available PowerVR 3D accelerator card (not counting the Midas3 installed/bundled in Compaq Presario 8000 series computers); the NEC PC3DEngine, powered by the Videologic-licensed and NEC-manufactured PCX1 (codenamed Midas4) chip/IC. The PCX1 was a chip ahead of its time in some ways and gravely misunderstood at the time due to its lack of bi-linear filtering and need for a somewhat faster processor to perform at an adequate level in contrast to other 3D accelerators of the time (although that would depend on how any given game was coded). 24-bit color depth and very impressive shadow volume effects were possible thanks to the nature of the PCX1's depth cueing (hidden-surface removal) hardware and tile-based deferred rendering (TBDR), making it possible to get said visual benefits at a negligible performance cost. Despite lacking bi-linear texture filtering, mip-mapping is still accounted for to reduce visual artifacts at a distance. The PCX1 ran at its best using the SGL API developed for the PowerVR Series 1 cards (Series 2 being the CLX2 as used in the Sega Dreamcast).

#windows95 #powervr #datapath #visionrgb #upscaling #nec #pentium #japanese #90sgames #retrogaming