I've wondered about this for years:

When you play JK or MOTS in software mode, some textures emit light, in the sense that you can see certain shades of flat colors even in total darkness. (Turn off 3d acceleration in JK level 1 and you will see what I mean with the little lights on the buildings, light panels, and wall switches, and how you can see parts of the texture even when the immediate adjacent area is in complete darkness.) Now, when you turn on 3d acceleration, you lose this nice effect. Does anyone know why 3d acceleration does this?

zomg glowing texture shaders, FOR SOFTWARE MODE ONLY?

actually, I have no idea. It would make the game look a lot more alive with the computer lights on the textures to glow. Sith2 idea!

That was the first thing I noticed when I got my Voodoo 2.
It's because the card blurs the colors together.

Yeah, a little bit too much for my liking. Jk with 3d acceleration looks nice and the animation is silky smooth, but it blurs the hell out of the textures.

Here's the reason:

Software mode of JK runs in 256 color mode and uses palette tables for representing lighting variations. And in these tables (just like in was in Dark Forces) first 16 colors (or 32?) are "non-fading", i.e. - they are completely bright at all light levels.

3D accelerated JK runs in truecolor mode and uses the 3D card to generate lighting. Which ignores the palette table and the first 16 color behaving like the rest of them - i.e. they get darker.

So that's why the shield powerups glow all sexy like that in non 3d-accel. mode...

funny I never realised it was missing with 3d accelleration

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Let's boycott the use of hardware acceleration in JK!! Whos with me?!? Yeah!

EDIT: me spell bad.

We haven't really discussed JK much lately, have we? (in the discussion forum, I mean.)

and thats why we have the SITH2 Forum!