Silent Thunder & Cybergladiators Rendition versions

[vetz]

With the Sierra Screamin' 3D Rendition Verite V1000 card special versions of Silent Thunder and Cybergladiators came bundled. The normal retail versions of these games do not work on Rendition cards, and thus can not be 3D accelerated.

I'm wondering if anyone has these two versions from the bundle and would be interested in sharing the executables to make a patch so that people with the retail version can play with their rendition cards.

Indycar Racing II was also included in this bundle, but Sierra included the Rendition version in a re-release of the game, named Cart Racing.

[Collector]

If the only difference was just the main executable, such a patch would be easy to do, but I do doubt the value of it, given the age of the card. Not many would still have a functional card in a working ancient PC. I can see more use in a patch for allowing owners of these special versions of the games to run them on a modern machine.

[vetz]

There are still many people out there with retro computers with these cards available. I am one of them, and I love playing the games that are tailormade to each card. I did some digging and I now doubt Silent Thunder and Cybergladiators were Rendition Ready games (meaning they ran on Renditions own API). Cybergladiators is Glide and Direct3D compatible and from what I can find from old Google group discussions the version that came with the Sierra card also ran on Direct3D (which the card was able to run). This is probably attributed to the fact that both these games are Windows games and the Windows API for Rendition, RRedline wasn't released untill 1997.

Silent Thunder also looks to be Direct3D, but this version is not possible to find anywhere unless you have the bundled version. From bjorn3d archived page I found this:

Q Is A10-Silent Thunder rendition ready?

A: The version of A10 that comes with the Screamin' 3D is Direct3D. Unfortunately none of us can get our hands on it because it is bundle only. /Mike

I also found this list published by Microsoft with games that will have Direct3D support. Silent Thunder is mentioned:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/pre ... gmspr.aspx
Both games were also planned to be released on the Voodoo, but only Cybergladiators made it. If they had plans for Silent Thunder as well, making it Direct3D would make sense.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... _18835454/

If Silent Thunder really is Direct3D (which I am now pretty convinced of) this makes it much more interesting in making a patch. The game would then be able to run on modern graphic cards as well.

[Collector]

I was able to make a compatibility patch for Silent Thunder to get it going on Win7 x64, but if you are capable of patching the EXE directly for modern machines, that would be better.

[vetz]

Since Direct3D can't be run on Windows 3.1 (as the retail DDraw version could) I would expect it to behave differently on newer systems. Would have to try out your patch, or maybe we could be very lucky and it would run without major issues.

Anyway, that is just speculation. Still need to identify someone who has this version of the game and be willing to do some testing.

[Collector]

I only have the retail version and the re-release. My patch is included with the installer from here, if you wanted to try it.. As I said, it is a compatibility patch that I made with ACT. Neither the installer nor the patch would work on Win16, as it is intended for modern Windows. The game's EXE is a 32-bit EXE and I don't recall the CD including a 16-bit EXE, too. It would have had to use the Win32s to run on 3x.