Re:Flash Player is about to stop working on Windows 10
by anthk on Thursday December 31, 2020 @10:36AM
(#25593577)
I know PCEM., but that's a no no under my AMD Turion.
On VooDoo, Bochs does that too, up to VooDoo2 nowadays. There may be clock issues, but if you set the IPS count to the MHZ of the targetted machines, games will run close.
Qemu does Cirrus and Pentium3 compatibility, and still no luck.
I tried with XP on compatibility mode, and no luck. Windows 95, 98, Bochs, Qemu, with Cirrus and VBE. Nada. W2K, compat mode with the RUNDLL trick, both to W95 and W98, still a Direct Draw error on launch.
The game is the Spanish edition of Byzantine: The Betrayal, "La Pesadilla Turca".
If it really is a Macromedia Director game, I hope ScummVM runs it as it does with some games/software.
The project should eventually allow emulation of the entire Windows 95/Windows 98 era. In my mind, it's comparable to what BSNES was to the Super Nintendo - accurate emulation that saves an entire era of software from getting lost.
Flash is homogeneous and hardware-agnostic, unlike those old Windows-based titles. Flash provides ~1 (bar inter-version incompatibility) target platform, and as far as I know, can run entirely in software rendering mode. If your computer is fast enough, there will be no hardware-based problem with running Flash software.
For Windows 95, there were multiple 3D APIs other than DirectX and OpenGL, and some titles depended on hardware-based quirks. Those APIs and hardware needed to be emulated accurately enough or passed through. That's quite a large support surface.
In comparison, Flash needs a Windows XP VM (or a standalone projector) with software-based rendering and that's it. Not nearly as bad.