For the people who thought that our emulator was a virus that messed up their system, here's a description of what it really did:

The first hint that you were about to be fooled, was given in the installation program. We called it the '3dfx emulator version 1.04 (build 098)'. Of course, 1.04 referred to April 1st, and 098 was 1998.

When installed and started, the emulator showed a splash screen with our company logo. That was the second hint: AFD, Inc. stands for April Fools' Day, Incorporated.

Our emulator continued with asking you a bunch of questions, varying from simple, real looking questions to really complicated and absurd questions.

First you had to enter the path to Quake II. Well, it was a Quake II patch, so this one seemed Ok. Clicking Next caused all files in the directory you specified to be checked. All it actually did was displaying the filenames of the files in this directory. It didn't check for Quake II at all, any path you entered here would be Ok!

When pressing the Next button, some 'real' questions had to be answered. The refresh rate seemed to be important. Another hint was given here, because no video card operates on 83 Hz. To make it look real, some known video card were already listed. Some people emailed us, saying that the program always listed Diamond Multimedia Systems, although they tried it on several machines with different video cards. And they were right! No video card was detected at all and Diamond Multimedia System was always listed. Selecting another one had no effect. Another nice one is the 'dithering capabilities'. We also have no idea what this is!

A tip read that the settings for the video cards that were already listed could be found in the README file. Well, we made up those settings ourselves, and they are not related to the manufacturers that were listed in the program. If you really took a look at it, you might have discovered that all settings looked pretty much the same, only the Oak Technology really mismatched.

Next, your video card's capabilites were about to be tested. A black screen would be displayed and if it stayed black for more than five seconds, your card wasn't able to do some 'high-speed dithering' and you had to emulate it. Of course, when trying this for the first time, your screen would indeed stay black for more than five seconds.

You had to go back, select 'high-speed emulation', and go through the black screen again. Amazingly, the program continued after only four seconds!

Some more information was required. For example, the 3D chip. This question defaulted to 'yes', but you most likely had to select 'no', because we claimed to be able to emulate a 3D chip, remember? Gamma correction had to be set. Normally, this is expressed in values between 1.1 and 1.7, so 1.8 does not exist. The default value was quite high, though the warning said no to select it to high. The color palette defaulted to 16 colors, a little low for a program emulating a 3D chip, isn't it? Interlacing defaulted to 'no' although 'yes' was recommended.

Pressing the Next button, a warning was displayed stating that your gamma correction was too low, even though the default value was pretty high. Selecting a higher value had no effect, because when pressing the Next button again, a warning was displayed stating that it was too high. Again, no checks were done on the actual value. You always got a too-low-too-high-now-it's-ok sequence.

Testing the interlacing was the next thing that happened. This time we created something that really worked. A half white half black screen should be displayed if everything was Ok, and, maybe to your surprise, it actually did!

Four seconds later the first 3D test was about to be executed. A green box would be displayed on a red screen. The green box should be 3D. Actually, we ourselved have absolutely no idea what a 3D green box on a red screen would look like. If you do, please email us!

After displaying this so called 3D box, we asked you whether you really saw it or not. If not, we suggested to reduce color palette, although it defaulted to 16 colors, and anything lower than that was not possible.

Then, some final imformation was required. Anyone wondering if blending mode was enabled when you had another video card than the one you owned? Well, it wasn't. Blending mode is disabled by default and will never be enabled. All the other information was nonsense and would not be checked by the program, so whatever you entered would be correct. Or wouldn't it. Pressing the Next button showed an error, stating that the information you entered was incorrect. This error was always generated for a random number of times, varying from zero to ten times, if you were lucky!

If you thought that the final information would be final, then you were wrong. Some really final information was required. And again this was not checked in any way, so whatever you entered was fine.

Finally, the drivers were about to be installed. We first tried to read something from you diskdrive, just to let it make noise. Some of you thought that this was done to infect your bootsector with some virus. Well, we DIDN'T. Next some files seemed to be installed, but at 98 % an error was generated, and you were asked to reboot your system to continue the installation. We got lots of email asking where they could find the missing 3d-ini.drv. If you checked the drivers directory, that was also installed in the installation directory, you would have discovered that we only provided a 2d-ini.drv. If you even tried renaming this file and copying it to the installation directory, you would have gotten a different error! Many of you discovered that the so-called drivers we provided were in fact renamed Windows 95 device drivers, such as mouse and joystick drivers. Someone even threatened to give our name to the BSA for distributing copyrighted software. Well, everyone who has Windows 95 already has the drivers and otherwise you can download them from the Internet.

The next thing we did was providing the missing 3d-ini.drv. This time, we created a file of our own, instead of renaming some existing driver. Although, we had to rename it anyways, because in fact it was an empty dll, that only included the SysUtils library.

And last but not least, on April 1st we provided you with a new Afd104.dll. You had to copy this file to your installation directory and then start the emulator again. You would then see a splash screen, telling you that it was April Fools' Day and that you had just been fooled!

We even explained what the program really did, which was misinterpreted by some people. We did copy 98 files from your system directory to a temp directory, just to get the progress bar running. We did delete 98 files FROM THE TEMP DIRECTORY and NOT from the system directory. Many people claimed that we provided a virus, or a trojan to be more precise, because they thought that we deleted files from their system directory. Do you think your system would still be running if we actually did delete 98 files from you system directory, randomly?

Well, we had our fun with it and we hope that you did too. Although, judging the emails we got, some people didn't enjoy it at all. They hope we die soon in some horrible way. All we have to say to that is: Watch out, we'll be back next year!