Every build of Gold

2026-10-24, the wrapper across all of POD Gold.

Twelve of POD Gold's 14 builds, each 30 s into the same single race on Beltane, through the wrappers in the emulated PC. Top to bottom: software, 3dfx, ATI and S3, PowerVR (before its lighting fix).

The user's request was short: "run every version". POD Gold ships 14 Windows builds. The race-loop session, which owns the emulated PC, ran each one from start-up through the menus to about a minute of racing; this session read the builds, fixed what they needed and wrote it up.

What the 14 builds are

Their imports and code said (observed):

• Five "X" builds (PODX3DFX, PODATIX, PODS3DX, PODD3DX, PODPVRX) are the MMX twins of the card builds, as PODMMX is of WINPOD: 500 to 800 MMX instructions each, none in their twins, and the same card libraries.
• Two "64" builds (PODMAX64 software, PODFXM64 3dfx) are for Guillemot's Maxi Sound 64 sound card. They import six calls by number from 94DLL32.dll, "Dream thunk for 9407 products": a bridge down to a 16-bit driver for the card's Dream SAM9407 chip, which Wine does not have. A stand-in that answers as a silent card came first; the sound-card session then made it play the game's music.

Every build but the two PowerVR ones has Gold's CPU check, and the three 3dfx builds also refuse a desktop that is not 16 bits; the wrappers patch both in memory, at each build's own addresses.

The results

Twelve race (measured, the race-loop session's captures). The 3dfx and PowerVR builds are drawn at 1280 × 960; the software, ATI and S3 builds are scaled to it. Each run took about seven minutes for one minute of racing: every renderer here runs in software on an emulated CPU, and at those frame rates the script's throttle presses fall between frames, so the player's car never moves.

The Direct3D build in the game's demo race, drawn by Wine's own Direct3D at 640 × 480, at its own pixels.

The two Direct3D builds first stopped at once, with a fault inside the intro's video player. With the intro switched off they start, draw the demo race through Wine's Direct3D, and stop at the same place when the next video plays. The missing piece is the Indeo video codec, not the wrapper; a session of its own is on it.

A bug, and a question

The PowerVR build before the fix: the player's car is a dark shape, and the whole scene dim.

The PowerVR builds raced, but darker than all the others. The PowerVR session traced it to the stand-in: POD lights its PowerVR cars almost only with spotlights of "concentration" 32, and PowerVR's own driver makes those far wider than the stand-in did (observed in the driver). The fix is in GameFrame (wrappers/sgl, PR #13), and a rerun confirmed it: the track is now about as bright as in the 3dfx build, and the player's car is lit and textured, a little darker than the 3dfx build's, which is what the driver's rules give (unverified against a real card).

PODATIX.EXE 30 s into the race: one car's light beam drawn as an opaque white shape.

The ATI builds sometimes draw a car's light beam as a white shape. In the first edition a fix seemed to remove it, but the frame checked then had no beam in it; the fix never worked. Reading both builds now shows why. The game hands the same beam to the S3 chip with an alpha of 0 to 255, and to the ATI chip with twice that scale, up to 717 (observed). Our ATI library clamps anything over 255 to fully opaque. What the real Rage did with such values is unknown: if it clamped too, 1997's ATI players saw these white shapes as well. Drawing them the S3 way would only be a guess, so it stays an open question until a capture of the real card turns up.

How it is known

• What each build is and imports, and the patches: observed in the EXEs.
• Which builds race and how they look: measured, the race-loop session's runs (derived/vm/builds/, docs/running.md, "Every build in the emulated PC").
• The PowerVR cause: observed in PowerVR's driver; the fix measured in a rerun.
• How the ATI Rage drew vertex colours above 255: unknown.

What is next

• The Indeo codec, so the Direct3D builds play their videos and race.
• Speed: a host with a GPU, so the player can drive.