Glide API - Glide Wrappers and Emulators

Glide Wrappers and Emulators

Glide emulator development has been in progress since the late 1990s. During 3dfx's lifetime, the company was aggressive at trying to stop these attempts to emulate their proprietary API, shutting down early emulation projects with legal threats. However, just before it ceased operations and had its assets purchased by NVIDIA, 3dfx released the Glide API, along with the Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3 specifications, under an open source license, which later evolved into an open source project. Although no games released after 1999 depend on Glide for 3D acceleration (Direct3D and OpenGL are used instead), Glide emulation is still needed to run older games in hardware accelerated mode. With the specifications and code now open source, there are several capable emulators and wrappers available allowing older games that make use of the Glide API to run on non-Voodoo hardware. Other projects like Glidos allow even older games to use Glide.