I decided to try the Tenebrae mod for Quake. After installing Quake I tried to run Glquake and I got an error:

Could not find glide2x.dll

Remembering that it used to work fine on my GeForce 4, I downloaded the glidedll and tried again. It started up then quit to desktop and said

Genport I\O initialization failure

I clicked Close then another popped up:

GrSstselect: non existant SST

I clicked Okay then:

Wglcreatecontent failed.

So how do I make glquake work with my 9600xt? I've patched quake to 1.06 but don't know how to get it to work. Any help would be great.

Daryl Gregory, Melbourne, VIC

I'll start by explaining what Tenebrae is - it's essentially a graphical update modification ("mod") for the ID Software game "Quake" (this means you need to have the original game in its entirety for the mod to work). It adds "stencil shadows and per pixel lights" to Quake, which basically means it looks a lot better for a 1996 game (a lot of fancy "shinies" as well if you card supports such features). In fact, the new additions are very similar to corresponding effects used in the newest game from ID - Doom 3.

As a result of this update mod, the system requirements for running Quake have shot through the roof. Quake 1 required at least a Pentium 1 75 MHz CPU and 8M of RAM. With Tenebrae installed, the makers recommend at least a 600 MHz CPU, 64M of RAM, and a GeForce or Radeon 3D video card. For the more advanced "shinies", I imagine you will need at least a DirectX 8 compliant video card (GeForce 3 and above, not including the GeForce 4 MX, and nearly every ATI video card after the 8500 series).

Back to your question! If you want to launch Quake using Tenebrae, you should be using the executables supplied by the mod makers. These are "tenebrae.exe" (for starting the mod directly) and "Tenebrae_launch.exe" (if you want to change some graphics and sound related options). I assume you have enough grunt to run Tenebrae - I imagine your 9600XT is coupled with a decent system.

Running GLQuake is another story however. When Quake was first released, there was initially no 3D accelerator support (they were a very expensive and new tech back then!). All graphics processing was performed by the CPU (it wasn't pretty!). Eventually, ID Software eventually released the "GLQuake" update, adding support for 3D accelerators.
At the time, 3dfx was the market leader in 3D graphics cards with its Voodoo chipsets. However, they did not have a fully-fledged OpenGL (the software GLQuake used for 3D acceleration) driver. This was solved via a special 3dfx "GL miniport" driver. As you can see, by default, GLQuake looks for a 3dfx card, with the glide2x.dll file required for operation. You don't have a 3dfx card, but you do have a card with full OpenGL support! The problem is quickly solved by removing the glide2x.dll file, searching for your opengl32.dll file (usually under C:\Windows\system32), and copying it (don't move it!) into your Quake directory.

Enjoy your revitalised copy of Quake!

Marcel Doust