Getting Started

Welcome to QEMU-3dfx! (arch)

What is it?

QEMU-3dfx is a patch of QEMU created by kjliew that adds OpenGL/Glide Passthrough without using a dedicated GPU as a passthrough and runs games faster while on Windows 9x to Windows NT. Introduced in VOGONS fourms around 2018, It has been praised as a viable alternative to PCem and 86box.

Because QEMU uses virtualization rather than emulation!

QEMU-3dfx-Arch is a forked repository based of QEMU-3dfx that tries to add Binaries, Tools and Documentation while trying to port it to the latest versions based on QEMU upstream.

How does it Work?

Refer to this page for details

In short it uses dlls as "wrappers" in guest machines and passthrough into the Guest machine by using mesapt and glidept. But the application your running will become fullscreen.

If you don't know, it means more FPS and faster performance than emulation.

How to Install it?

Unfortunately kjliew does not provide binaries to the public unless you donate to him or compile it by yourself which is confusing.

Fortunately, there are lots of repositories that do have binaries or scripts that compile it for you, this repository is one of them.

To install it, Download the Binary from releases and extract the folder.

How to Use it?

QEMU is hard to learn as it uses commands though a terminal. Sure there are GUI frontends but are you sure you want to use it? If you want to install Windows, Follow the instructions here or watch a video here.

If you are still confused, Don't worry as the released binaries includes a pre-installed Windows 98 as a benchmark to see the powers of Passthrough.

Refer to readme.rtf in binaries for details.

How to help?

The best thing to do is to donate to kjliew and have better binaries and game elections or report such issues on this repository issue tracker (not kjliew) when i open it for public.