Well I started this off hoping I could get Quake running on Windows NT 3.1 … I’m almost there I have the null version running just fine. However I’m not all that great with DIB programming so I was looking thru SDL and saw that it has a WINDIB driver!
So with a LOT of tweaking through SDL 1.2.13 I got it to compile with Visual C++ 1.0!! However it is lacking one critical call, the CreateDIBSection api call in GDI is not present in NT 3.1. So remembering all the MIPS stuff as of late, and that I have Visual C++ 4.0 which should easily support this call, I first got it running with Visual C++ 2.0 on the i386 (Under XP of all things). So it was just a matter of building the source, and making sure there is no errors, uploading it to the emulator, and rebuilding for the MIPS.
And after 30 minutes, I got my exe, and it ran!
Quake 1.06 on the MIPS/NT
I’ve included a link for any other MIPS people out there that want to play quake. I haven’t built the networking as I was having issues with my network earlier and couldn’t get it working…
The exe is available here.
And the source code with all the bits is right here.
In this build I’m not building SDL as a DLL or static library, but rather compiling Quake right into the source. Now that SDL is running on the MIPS, and possibly other Win32 OS’s (I have yet to test Win32s… I suspect the inherent threading in SDL will prevent it, but could the DBI calls be made directly stripping out SDL…?) but who knows, I think anything past 3.51 would work.
Hey; since you seem to be interested in old cool stuff like this, I thought you’d like to know I now have the MIPS Magnum 4000/Microsoft Jazz mostly emulated in MAME. Enough to run Windows NT 4.0 and VC++ and your quake build above anyway. For what it’s worth, the MAME emulation doesn’t have the palette glitch above, so the colours look right. On the downside, it’s much slower due to the interpreter CPU emulation, and there’s no sound (yet).
Would you happen to have a rehost of the Quake file?
I know it’s missing stuff but I uploaded it all here:
https://archive.org/details/nt4-vpsland-archive
In the MIPS there is even a somewhat newer build in the NTGDI directories.