Following on from the previous post, I decided to look at a few more games on the legendary SiS Mirage3 chipset. There were a few older titles that struggled to run, and it became clear that most post2000 games will encounter issues running at full speed due to the limited capabilities of the GPU.
Also a look at the GPU details in GPU-Z, which does not exist. I guess this GPU is relatively obscure enough to not be in their GPU-Z database. For the system itself, it’s the same Dell OptiPlex 160 running Windows POSReady 2009, with an Intel Atom 230 Diamondville processor which is a 1C2T CPU running at 1.6Ghz. Atom’s of this era were In-Order-Execution.
The lack of GPU-Z information means we cannot see what clock speed the Mirage is running at, and given the system is a fanless design, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Dell had underclocked the GPU to keep the system cool.
Revolt: A racing game with emote RC cards, along with combat mechanics. Here the only way to get acceptable performance is to runt he game at 640×400, setting the different rendering settings to their lowest values. The main issue when running the game with a low draw distance is it just displays the levels skybox, which is unsuitable for many of the indoor levels since it just shows the blue sky indoors. On these settings we can get around 24fps, going down to 8fps when all the RC cars are on the screen.
Some track models are missing, notably the cars that you can ramp off.
The Next Tetris: A simple 3D game of Tetris and at the start we do get good performance, but this drops the port Tetris pieces there are on screen, lowering down to 11fps at its lowest. Although 3D Acceleration is enabled in the settings, we are unable to change any graphic detail settings in the options menu.
Hot Wheels Crash: Runs quite well, we do get slowdown when explosions and collisions start to occur. This game does not provide any graphics settings for us to change.
The Sims 2: We can just about start the game and can get into the neighborhood screen, but once we enter a lot were in the mid-teens of framerate. Smaller lots will have better performance, but not by much to be considered playable. Still, there are no texture or shadow errors that occur if you try to run the game on modern graphics cards, and the stuttering does give a stop-motion feel to it.
Midnight Racing: On medium settings we get on average 17fps when using the near car view. The discant view lowers it down to 12fps average. Selecting low graphics detail makes a slight improvement, but not enough to be noteworthy.
ToCA Championship 2: Setting the graphics settings to low, and the resolution to 640×480 gives us around 14fps on a good track condition when we set the draw desistance to low. The detail setting has little effect.
Halo Combat Evolved: It’s a struggle for this to run, it does play but the framerate is so low and the textures look horrible at their lowest detail settings.
GTA II: Works mostly well, we get some dips when there are a lot of explosions on the screen but otherwise, we get acceptable performance at 800×600. Things slow down when we start driving but settles down once the vehicle is stationery and hovers around 28fps. Switching to 640×480 yields no noticeable difference which makes me think there’s a bottleneck somewhere else.
Unreal: We had a playable experience with Unreal Tournament, So I hoped the original Unreal would be similar. Now it plays ok but expect to see framerate drop whenever multiple enemies are on screen. Overall we get around 20fps in the best scenario, dropping to around 5fps in outdoor combat. Running at 640×480 with texture settings set to high.
Boss Rally: Mostly acceptable performance, with the average around 22fps during most of the race, although it will dip to as low as 3fps when there is a lot of scenery on the track. I would avoid some of the heavy weather options like snow or rain if you can, sand stick to clear sunny weather.
SiS are not a huge name in the GPU market, thats largely dominated by Nvidia and AMD. But they were once one of the more popular choices for entry level 3D graphics cards when the 3D accelerator market was in it’s infancy. When I saw one that had been featured in a Dell Thin client PC, I was curious to see its performace. The system itself (A Dell Optiplex 160) isnt intended for high performace computing, it features a first generation Intel Atom processor running at 1.6Ghz. It’s more of a thin client, or a net top PC, a simple PC design for basic tasks with much less power consumption than a typical desktop PC.
From looking at the specifications, its clear this GPU will struggle against its rivals, with the GMA3100 and Radeon HD2000 being the main competition, along with the low end GeForce series (7100 for example). From what I’ve found online, it lacks hardware T&L support which is hard to believe for a GPU released in 2007. Nvidia released their first T&L GPU with the original GeForce in 1999, with AMD (Then ATI) following suit with the Radeon in 2000. Intel would eventually release their own T&L capable card much later.
What is T&L? Well it stands for Transform and Lighting and means the GPU is capable of generating its own geometry such as polygons and is able to apply effect independent of the CPU. When 3D first hit the market back around 1994, many 3D graphics cards were known as 3D accelerators, with their main purpose being able to offload certain rendering tasks off the CPU, freeing the CPU of the burden and leaving more time and cycles to perform other tasks. How much was offloaded depending on the accelerators capabliles, a lot of the first generation only did texture wrapping and shading. Since they were reliant on the CPU to generate the geometry, it meant the CPU could become a bottleneck if it couldn’t render polygons fast enough for the card.
That’s kind of what we are dealing with the Mirage, since its going to be reliant on the Atom CPU to handle some of the geometry rending. It’ is a dual core model’s a single core dual threaded model, though i’m uncertain how well the micro-arictecture is with geometry calculations. Intel Atom’s typically have their own processor design that is independent from the Pentium 4 (Netburst) and Intel’s Core that was used in the Intel Core 2 duo series.
Still, knowing this, we can kind of guess which generation of games will best work with the machine, already we know it on the same feature level as the Nvidia TNT and the Ati Rage series of graphics processers, but does benefit from additional rendering features SiS might have added. We also will struggle to run games from when this machines was first released 2008.
GHG (Greenham Gaming) did a feature on this system, running what appears to be Windows 7 and concluded it was an epic fail when it game to gaming. A few older titles worked, but even then some had rendering issues. I’m not sure how much was apparent to running Windows 7, but I was curious to see what performance would have been like for Windows XP, which tends to be the go to choice for running retro games, at least for its broad compatibility across hardware.
For this, keeping in line with the machines embedded roots, I decided to use Windows Embedded POSReady 2009, which was a more upto date version of Windows XP SP3 designed for embedded use like sales kiosk’s (hence the name POS – Point of Sale, what else did you think it stood for?). However its still mostly a full fledged version for Windows XP, and even features an up to date installer that can detect SATA drives that this machine uses (still needs to be in IDE mode, AHCI is not supported).
Missing ksuser.dll? (Windows POSReady 2009)
Post install, there were a couple of issues. Most of the drivers provided by Dell did install, except for the sound driver. When installing, it would complain about missing ksuser.dll file and the installer couldn’t continue without this file. Searching inline pointed to the issue with DirectX, but POSReady does come with DirectX 9.0c already installed, and installing the updated runtime from Microsoft’s website didn’t work.
What did work was to install Windows Media Player, which wasn’t installed by default. You can easily install this by popping over to the Control Panel, opening Add/Remove programs, then click Add/Remove Windows Components and select Windows Media at the bottom to install it. Version 11 will then be installed. You could also select this option when installing the OS, but I left it at the typical settings, which appear to not install Windows Media Player. Makes sense I guess, since this is intended for checkouts and cashpoints which might not require sound (unless for disability purposes)
S3 Utilities
They’re pretty basic, you can adjust settings for the gamma and screen rotation, but very little can be changed for the 3D. The system does support dual monitors, but will always identify a VGA monitor as a CRT, regardless if it’s a flat panel.
Here we are using driver version 6.14.0010, which is the latest from Dell’s website. By dedefault, 28MB of memory is allocated to the graphics, which can be adjusted in the systems BIOS, upto 256MB to 32MB at the lowest. It seems to pass the Direct3D rending testes, upto version 9
Games
Here I have mostly tested a few Direct3D 6 & 7 class games:
Midtown Madness – Hits 30 fps on high settings – 800×600, but can suffer to 22 when there are a lot of cars on screens. In underground tunnels we can get upto 44fps. No rendering or texture issues from what I can see.
Driver: We started to see struggles in this one. When running at 640×480, we can see blue squares around the trees, and on the edges of the car wheels, suggesting there is an issues with the transparency for certain textures. Playing at 800×600 result in partially missing graphics like the car wheels and some of the building. A shame because we got a semi-decent frame rate on medium settings.
Unreal Tournament: Framerate struggles in some of the more busy areas of the maps, framerate seems to hover round 20-30fps, with 22fps being common in more open areas. The opening sequence did dip to 14FPS during the skyscraper sequence. Using an updated Direct 3D9 render helps out massively, with it nearly reaching 60fps in certain parts of the map. Patches can be found here
Sega Touring Car Championship: Runs very well at 640×480
Monster Truck Madness 2: This crashed the graphics driver when selecting 3D acceleration, by default it opted for software rendering. I had some luck choosing the image quality to ‘normal’. Unfortunately it didn’t play well with Fraps, and would lock the system up when trying to run both, sometimes resulting in a BSOD. On its own however, its mostly stable.
Quake 3: Here we can work off average of 50fps, with the game only slowing down when there is too much action on the screen. One of the few native OpenGL games.
GTA III: On default settings at 640×480 we are treated to a slideshow of 8fps for the opening mission, dropping even lower once we are in control. Turning off the trails and reducing the draw distance did little to help unfortunately. Yup this is unplayable.
The Operative: No One Lives Forever, On standard configuration at 640×480, we have an average framerate of around 12fps during the opening sequence outside, inside the building it does go up to around 25 but we still get a few dips. Once we get into gameplay it’s a different story, only managing 3fps for the training section. Dropping the graphics settings to ‘Best Performance’ only gives up a marginal improvement of 8fps. If you point the camera down to the flow when moving you can get reasonable performance but not what I would regard as playable.
Alcatraz Prison Escape: This was also unplayable, managing only 1fps for the opening sequence. The game only runs at either 800×600 or 1024×768, no option for 480. Another game to avoid
South Park: Had issues getting this to work, I had to install nGlide to get the game to start up. However I was then able to select the correct graphics rendered (it detected the DirectX SiS Mirage renderer) but there are multiple graphics issues when playing the game, with some of the games text not being rendered correctly. The framerate, although it appears to be running at around 25 is very jerky with the game freezing every 2 seconds. Settings the graphics quality to low and long with lowering the draw distances helps out with the framerate, but we still have missing or corrupted textures, especially with the HUD. The freezing I also odd since the game still runs – you can attack enemies and hear them respond but the screen will freeze for a few seconds.
Running the game with the Glide wrapper (nGlide) ended up being a much better experience, since the game was a t a more decent framerate, reaching 26fps and only lowering when there were too much turkey’s onscreen.
Half life: Here I tested the original release of the game, not the Source based re-release. Running at 640×480, its performance is dismal in the opening cutscene, dropping frames to a low 7fps. Walking through the facility corridors gives us a more fluid framerate. Half Live offers the choice of three renderers, a software based one either Direct3D or OpenGl.
OpenGl did give up better performance but was a lot more unstable, with the game crashing particularly at the moment the Lambada experiment goes awry. Switching to Direct3D allowed me to progress past that part but the performance just wasn’t good enough. We are able to lower the resolution but at that point it start’s to low more like a PS1 game. Oh and the water effect;s are non existant, with the textures warping like a PS1 game during the underwater sections, as seen in the last screenshot.
Conclusion
So performance is pretty dismal across the various different games that were tested. I expected it to handles games that were released within the sixth generation of consoles, but it struggles to run even certain late 90s games at 480p. How much of this is down to the Mirage, or the Atom CPU remains to be seen.
It does appear to be on the level of the Sega Dreamcast in terms of overall performance, and you have to contend that SiS possibly haven’t optimised their driver like Nvidia or ATI (AMD) have previously done. You also have to take into accound that due to the machine being fanless for both the CPU anf GPU, thermal throttling could also be a issue that could explaint the less than ideal performace.
This does appear to the one of the last release of SiS graphics chips, the XGI Volari is closely related but there are difficult to find except for a few Asus server boards.
A third person shooter games related in 2012 by Sega, set in the future where global warming have causes robots to become the main labour force, followed by a series of conspiracies. However the game is well known for its use of speech input mechanics that can be used to give commands and reactions to the characters. It’s heavily driven by its shoot and cover mechanics that give it close similarities to Gears Of War.
A key mechanic is the “Consequence System,” where player actions and dialogue choices affect squadmates’ trust in Dan, influencing their behaviour and the story’s progression. Players can issue commands to teammates either via controller inputs or voice recognition (using a headset or Kinect on Xbox 360), though the voice feature was often criticised for inconsistency. Personally I gave up with it after 20 minutes of use, since you often have to shout the commands to the game for it to pickup, its easier and more convenient to press the corresponding button on the controller instead.
Combat involves fighting highly detailed robots that react dynamically to damage—shoot off a leg, and they’ll hobble; remove their head, and they might turn on their allies. Boss fights take advantage of this also, requiring you to find the enemy’s weak spot to attack it.
The main characters in the game are Dan Marshall, also known as ‘The Survivor’ due to his lucky history. Dan is a brash, cocky American with a sarcastic edge and a never-say-die attitude. He’s a natural leader but often hides his deeper emotions behind quips and bravado—like calling himself “The Survivor” after narrowly escaping death repeatedly. He’s loyal to his team but can clash with authority, showing a rebellious streak.
Additional characters you will meet no the way can be selected as team-mates, and your trust can increase as you react to certain dialogue lines or how well or quickly you shoot an enemies. Be careful though, friendly fire or picking the wrong dialog option can reduce their trust in you. In a way it’s similar to mass Effect 2 where your relationship with your squamates has an ultimate effect to the game’s ending.
Charles Gregory: Charlie is the calm, intellectual Brit of the group—think of him as the squad’s brain. He’s composed, methodical, and speaks with a dry wit, often playing the straight man to Dan’s chaos. He’s a stickler for protocol but isn’t above bending rules if the mission demands it. Beneath his cool exterior, he’s driven by a quiet sense of duty and a need to protect his team. He has a very professional demeanour, which means its best to respond with ‘yeah’ for most of his dialogue.
Cain Delaunay: Cain is a suave, charming French robot—yes, a robot on a team hunting robots, which is peak irony. He’s polite, witty, and unflappably cool, with a refined accent and a knack for dry one-liners. He’s programmed for loyalty and efficiency but shows glimmers of personality beyond his code, hinting at deeper self-awareness. He’s the squad’s optimist, balancing their human squabbles with calm logic.
Roy Boating: Big Bo is the loud, brash muscle of the group—think a jock with a heart of gold with a physique that could makes Ronnie Coleman look small. He’s got a frat-boy vibe but a strong sense of camaraderie, often hyping up the team, which makes me think he based based off Cole from Gears of War.
Faye Lee: Faye is cool-headed, reserved, and deadly precise—a Chinese operative with a stoic exterior. She’s professional to a fault, rarely cracking a smile, but shows hints of warmth as she bonds with Dan. She’s driven by duty and a buried personal vendetta, making her a wildcard in the squad’s dynamic.
Rachael Townsend: Rachael is tough, fiery, and no-nonsense—a classic strong female archetype with a British edge. She’s quick to call out stupidity and has a sharp temper, but she’s fiercely loyal once you earn her trust, and becomes more compassionate towards the end of the game.
Getting more involved with the story, it’s set in Tokyo in the year 2080, Binary Domain takes place in a world reshaped by global warming and rising sea levels, where robots have become a dominant labor force. The story follows Dan Marshall, leader of an international squad called the “Rust Crew,” tasked with infiltrating Japan to investigate Amada, a corporation suspected of creating “Hollow Children”—robots indistinguishable from humans, violating global laws. Binary Domain explores themes of artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and the essence of life, unfolding in a futuristic Tokyo divided between derelict slums and pristine upper-city towers. If you’re a fan of Battlestar Galatica, the story should interest you as it questions the liens between AI and humanity.
At the heart of Binary Domain is the New Geneva Convention, a global treaty banning the creation of robots indistinguishable from humans (like the “Hollow Children”). This reflects a political debate about controlling advanced technology—think AI ethics or genetic engineering in our world. The game pits the Amada Corporation, which secretly violates this law, against international forces like the Rust Crew, sent to enforce it. It raises questions about who gets to set technological boundaries, how those rules are policed, and what happens when profit-driven entities (Amada) defy them for power or innovation. The Hollow Children themselves—robots unaware they’re artificial—force players to grapple with the moral cost of such laws: is it right to destroy sentient beings to maintain human supremacy?
The game’s vision of Tokyo starkly illustrates class divides, a classic political theme. After global warming floods the world, Japan builds a new upper city for the elite—gleaming, robotic, and exclusive—while the lower city remains a derelict slum for the marginalised. Robots, built by companies like Amada, replace human labor, leaving the working class obsolete and resentful. This mirrors real-world anxieties about automation and economic disparity, asking how societies manage when technology benefits the few at the expense of the many. Characters like the resistance fighters you meet highlight this tension, fighting against a system that priorities robotic efficiency over human livelihoods.
The Hollow Children introduce a philosophical-political angle: if something acts and feels human, does it deserve rights? The game’s twist—that some characters, and even Dan’s potential offspring, might be hybrids—blurs the line between human and machine, echoing debates about citizenship, personhood, and exclusion. In 2080, humans cling to their dominance by denying robots agency, a policy enforced through violence. This mirrors historical struggles over who gets to be “human” in political systems—slaves, immigrants, or marginalised groups—and critiques rigid definitions of identity upheld by power structures.
Versions
Windows: Available on Steam. For this version ic recommend to test and check the microphone settings in Windows before you play if you’re insisted, since the game will default to the selected input device in Windows.
PlayStation 3: Runs at a lower frame rate compared to the 360 version, but still fun to play.
Xbox 360: This version has the ability to use the gamepad’s headset or the microphone on the Kinect Sensor to give voice commands. The headset seems to be the more reliable way of doing this, though its still hit or miss if the commands get registered in time.This version can also be played not he Xbox one, and even benefits fromFPS Boost on the Xbox Series X.
Binary Domain was not considered a success, so it has yet to be rereleased onto a modern platform. A such, the Xbox One/Series X remains the better way to play, or the PC version since it benefits from higher resolution textures on modern hardware.
The SimCity series was one of the first simulation games to gain widespread popularity, despite a lack of concrete goals or action-packed gameplay. SimCity 4 maintains this kind of sandbox play, letting players build and develop cities as they see fit. Aside from staying within the constraints of a budget and carefully avoiding a rioting populace, players are free to build whatever environment strikes their fancy. The cardinal rule in SC4 is, keep the citizens happy. As the mayor, it’s up to you to set the taxes and zone the land in such a way that your residents happily build the city you want. There’s even a terrain-building mode with all the tools to create your own topology before founding a city.
Screenshot
Veterans of the series will have no trouble assuming the role of mayor and will immediately begin laying down the roads, railways, economic zones, and other infrastructure. One notable feature is the addition of interlinked regions of cities even lets players create and manage economies of scale. By building transportation links in a region, cities can share resources, exchange labor pools, trade goods, and benefit from each other in dozens of other ways that weren’t possible in SimCity 3000. This also lets you be more flexible with designing your city, since you have have an industrial focused city, while another can be commercial or agricultural focused. As long as you have strong transport like between the two, you can have a very efficient network of cities. Resources like electricity and water can also be shared, at a monthly cost.
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SC4 comes with seven precreated regions, some of which contain existing cities that can be played if you don’t feel like starting from scratch. Some of the remade serve as tutorials which help the player gradually learn the advanced mechanics of SC4.
Screenshot
Growth in SC4 is obtained by carefully placing commercial, residential, and industrial districts to encourage new development. There’s a comprehensive system for managing transportation, including roads, highways, rail, sea, and air routes. Traffic management can be challenging but rewarding when optimized, giving a sense of accomplishment when your city runs smoothly. As your city grows, important municipal services such as water, public schooling, and hospitals must be placed strategically to keep your city happy and healthy, as each building can only serve a limited area. Transport will be the first issue you may encounter, such traffic jams can make sims unhappy if your roads aren’t high enough to accommodate, solving this cane done by implementing bus stations, tram, train or monorail lines.
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Although you can anticipate their needs, you can save a little money by improving services as complaints arise. Just don’t wait too long to add that water treatment plant or fire station, or your mayor rating will drop drastically and can lead to a population decrease, which means less taxes. All new mayors start with what seems like plenty of cash, but aggressive spending can lead to monthly deficits. Really, your city budget and expensive are the mainbattle here, and it’s difficult to keep themin balance witht he overall income. Slow growth is best, though the game can be too slow at times. It’s difficult to have more than a few hundred dollars cash-positive every month, and with that amount of money little expansion is possible even on the easy difficulty.
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Among the tools at your disposal are graphs , colour-coded maps, and advisors who may or may not provide useful suggestions, these help provide data like which areas have the most serious crime, or which area is well educated or polluted. Residents of the city will also share their desires and frustrations in a number of ways. SC4 lets you place characters from The Sims into your city for more individualised feedback about life in your town. You can place these around the different residential locations of your city, and keep an observation of how rich or poor the different areas are and the success of your sims. They can also get ill and die, providing a reflection of the state of health in that area (pollution and access to hospitals). You might want to place several sims in different areas of economic value, to gauge the overall performance of that area.
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Natural and unnatural disasters, including extraterrestrial incursion, present the most dramatic threat to any city. Although rare, meteor showers, lightning storms, and the like can level entire blocks and start fires throughout the city. Despite the damage they cause, these events are an enjoyable showcase of the improvements to the graphics in SC4, The detail available at the closest zoom level is quite striking. Individual Sims can be seen driving to the train station or enjoying a community garden.
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SimCity 4 includes a day to night cycle that’s reflected on-screen, complete with vehicle headlights, streetlights, and midnight basketball games on outdoor courts. If the nighttime view is too dim for your liking, you can elect to forgo the visuals, although your city will still operate according to the cycle. For your listening pleasure, Maxis included a diverse selection of music to accompany your play. Custom MP3 files can be added if you wish to add your own music.
Versions
Windows: The original port of the game, designed for DirectX 7. This version runs fuine on modern Windows 10, but the retail disc releases will require SecuROM which Windows no longer supports. The Steam release of the game removes this requirement in favour of Steam’s own DRM. Also, this game is notorious for crashing, especially on systems that have dual core or multi-core processors (pretty much any CPU from 2006 onwards). Setting the CPU affinity to 1 in Windows Task manager has been known to help, but I still do experience crashes. Always save your cities often, preferable every 5 minutes.
This version does not natively support widescreen resolutions, or higher resolutions but can be customised to run in a specific resolution.
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Mac OS X: Simcity was ported to OS X shortly after the release of the Windows version, and was only for PowerPC initially. The port is similar to the Windows version.
This version later received a Universal Binary patch that allowed the game to run natively on the Intel platform without the use of Rosetta, however this required the Rush Hour expansion to be installed.
Aspyr would later rerelease the game on the Mac App Store, and would update it to allow it to run on future versions of MacOS, enabling support for the Metal graphics API that enabled native support for higher resolutions, and 64bit support (though the game does not benefit much from this, even with a lot of mods installed). Music from iTunes can be played by using playlists, although this has issues on alter OS released (tested on Monterey) likely since Apple replaced iTunes with the Apple Music app. Still, This new version is the preferred way to play the game if you have access to a Mac.
And yes, like the Windows version the game can crashes frequently.
Conclusion
SimCity 4 isn’t a perfect game. It has a difficult learning curve, so the poor documentation and limited tutorials might frustrate players. And the gameplay suffers from some pacing and balance flaws. The time commitment to build a megalopolis from scratch is extensive, which might encourage players to just cheat instead. Still this version of SimCity is very highly regarded, and is preferred over SimCity Societies and the 2013 release of SimCity. It might be years before we will see another good SimCity game like SC4.
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