NT4 Enabled versions of WinUAE

[mikeymike]

NT4, once you've installed SP3, is capable of DirectX v3.

Any Quake3 engine-based game will work on it, as will WinUAE.  No speed issues either.

[mikeymike]

Quake 3 (and Quake 2 for that matter) engined games use OpenGL not DirectX.

Yes, but on Windows in order to get hardware acceleration for any 3D engine you need to be able to hit the hardware, or at least have a more hardware hitting interface than just through Windows.  That interface is DirectX.

[mikeymike]

Would you like to explain how opengl32.dll has a dependency on DDRAW.DLL then?  Run it through Dependency Checker (available in most MS resource kits, generally freely downloadable) and see for yourself.

If Quake didn't use any hardware acceleration, it wouldn't need to interface with DirectX.

[mikeymike]

Of all the technologies that MS have come up with, I'd say DirectX is probably one of the best that they've managed.  Ok, so it took a while to mature (v5... wow), but otherwise there's not much that can be said against it.

I don't know who John Carmack is, but there's a >95% chance he uses IE, which also installs extra DirectX stuff... :-)

[mikeymike]

Many display drivers have "fake" OpenGL drivers which basically converts the OpenGL API calls to D3D, or as it seems to be in this case, DirectDraw.

None AFAIK convert OpenGL calls into D3D calls, it would be terribly hacky if it worked at all.  DirectDraw however is a very different kettle of fish to D3D.  99% of graphics cards nowadays are designed to be at least DirectDraw 1.0 compliant, if not, the latest version of DirectX.

I doubt many Graphics-chip manufacturers write 2D-OpenGL drivers...

2D OpenGL drivers? :-)

Some driver designers replace opengl32.dll with their own.  I've seen it occasionally.