Part of the NEC PC 3DEngine Original Game Collection. Here is Omega Field (PC 3D Engine Demonstration Game), by Bio_100% and NEC Home Electronics, a tech demo game originally bundled with the NEC PC 3DEngine card (released in December 1996) on a driver CD-ROM titled PowerVR Software Collection. The objective is simple: find all the "treasures" by destroying boxes before time runs out. Each treasure is a floating portrait of characters taken from other NEC-developed or -published properties like Private Eye Dol, Anime Freak FX, Princess Rolfee, Ruruli Ra Rura (was still in development during this time?) and Nirgends. The game also contains product placements for the NEC PC-FX console.

This is one of 4 tech demo games included on the PC 3DEngine driver CD, along with Ground Master, PacfaMoroWh!! (たたかえ!パクファモロワ!!) and Dual Power. On the same CD is a program called DOGAGENIE2, which is an application that lets you create your own space ships using prefabricated parts and subsequently animate, render and make short videos of your creations.

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, the same CD that also contains Omega Field.

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 #pcengine #pcfx #90sgames #retrogaming

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