Eidos F1 World Grand Prix - Heat effects have noise rectangle

[fellaw]

Host: Win10 22H2 GTX 750 Ti Virtualbox: 7.0.10 r158379

Guest: Win98SE fresh install GPU: VBoxSVGA VMGPU10: on HW acceleration: off Direct3D HAL + T&L set in the game's graphics options

Other findings:

Rectangle tilts depending on race car speed. Does not occur with "Heat Effects" disabled in the game's graphics options. Does not occur with "Heat Effects" enabled, but also "Video Noise" enabled in the game's graphics options. Does occur with VMGPU9 and HW acceleration either off or on. Does occur without T&L setting in the game's graphics options. Seems to be a DX 7 game since it requires a DX 7 compatible sound card as per Readme.

Game information

Screenshots:

[LoStraniero91]

A reference to how it's supposed to look like (this is running natively on W10 with DgVoodoo2).

[fellaw]

A reference to how it's supposed to look like (this is running natively on W10 with DgVoodoo2).

Thanks, forgot a reference. Yet it's strange to see this exact reference. I attempted W10 dgVoodoo2 and the game would crash at going in-game. Which version of dgVoodoo2 did you use? Was this on your RTX 2080Ti?

[LoStraniero91]

A reference to how it's supposed to look like (this is running natively on W10 with DgVoodoo2).

Thanks, forgot a reference. Yet it's strange to see this exact reference. I attempted W10 dgVoodoo2 and the game would crash at going in-game. Which version of dgVoodoo2 did you use? Was this on your RTX 2080Ti?

Yes, on my RTX.

dgVoodoo 2.81.3 settings:

General

• Output API: Best available one
• Adapter(s) to use / enable: All of them
• Full Screen Output: Default
• Appearance: Full Screen - Scaling mode: Unspecified
• Miscellanneous: "Keep window aspect ratio" and "Capture mouse" ticked

DirectX

• Videocard: dgVoodoo Virtual 3D Accelerated Card with 256MB of VRAM
• Resolution: Unforced
• Behavior: "Application controlled fullscreen/windowed state" and "Disable Alt-Enter to toggle screen state" ticked
• Miscellanneous: "Bilinear DD/CPU operations", "Force vSync" and "Apply Phong shading when possible" ticked.

nVidia Control Panel settings:

Forced fps limiter to 60 on both running and idle status, if you go over 60fps the AI logic and physics completely break.

In main menu, these are my graphical settings: Even if it's all written in Italian you can easily figure them out, but here's the catch: you can see that heat effects are actually OFF but noise is ON. The reason? I will explain in the next step.

Ingame graphical settings:

There's seems to be some kind of weird behaivor where the ingame graphical settings will override the menu ones. Have you also noticed that shadows (and other options) were OFF in menu but they are ON ingame? Also the nosie filter will turn off the heat effects... and in my opinion I'd rather not play a racing game that looks like Silent Hill 2.

EDIT 2: I want to add that I've seen this glitch elsewhere in a game called "Zero Comico" that will take a snapshot of the screen when saving the game. This was also fixed with dgVoodoo! I believe this is incorrect framebuffer emulation of a render-to-texture effect since this is actually a overlayed texture that is manipulated to give the illusion of heat. Pretty neat trick for a game of that era, because most of these framebuffer effects were hard to pull off on PC but late PSX's F1 games weren't afraid to show it.