Quantum3D Mercury brick

I can get those games and do a video when I get them!! I don't have any video capture equipment so that I can look into. Good ideas :)

Also I've never played Forsaken or Descent.. Do you recall what API's those use?
 
Formula.350 said:
Nice score! I was going to joke about how perhaps the one you bought may have been my old card, but then I realized what I had was a 100SB (Dual V1) :p
http://maxpain.lackeydom.net/Obsidian 100SB Voodoo1.JPG

I have a similar pride-and-joy, which was sparked by owning that 100SB... I have 2x Q3D AAlchemy 8132, with a Voodoo3-powered "Sensor Post Processor" (think of it as a dedicated "Shader" card). I've never fired them up though (save for the SPP, which is how I determined it was a V3 chip), mainly out of fear, but also due to improper documentation on voltage. Some of the specialty PSUs were 2.9V output, but my cards are silkscreened with 2.7V.

I haven't been on Gary's site in forever, but I don't ever recall if he had gotten ahold of that V3-powered SPP card. I can tell you that I had never heard of it before and was elated to have picked it up in the auction (also thankfully this was before the 3Dfx and Q3D craze, so I got 'em for less than $100) :p
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I would kill for one of those, would be fun to run it on 3DMark to test the impact of T&L
 
Formula.350 said:
I have a similar pride-and-joy, which was sparked by owning that 100SB... I have 2x Q3D AAlchemy 8132, with a Voodoo3-powered "Sensor Post Processor" (think of it as a dedicated "Shader" card). I've never fired them up though (save for the SPP, which is how I determined it was a V3 chip), mainly out of fear, but also due to improper documentation on voltage. Some of the specialty PSUs were 2.9V output, but my cards are silkscreened with 2.7V.
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The 2.7V cards run fine at 2.9V, it was an "upgrade" to make them more stable.

Formula.350 said:
I haven't been on Gary's site in forever, but I don't ever recall if he had gotten ahold of that V3-powered SPP card.
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I might have a few SSP boards about. ;-)

Congratulations to the OP for getting the brick up and running, they are magnificent beasts with awesome image quality!

Gary Donovan
 

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gdonovan said:
The 2.7V cards run fine at 2.9V, it was an "upgrade" to make them more stable.



I might have a few SSP boards about. ;-)

Congratulations to the OP for getting the brick up and running, they are magnificent beasts with awesome image quality!

Gary Donovan
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so... does 3dmark detect them as being capable of hardware T&L? :D
 
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gdonovan said:
3d Mark is a Direct 3d test program isn't it?

No DirectX for Mercury, just Glide and OpenGL

http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/q3d_mercury_gamefaq.htm
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Yes, however if its using Voodoo 3 chipset it should have D3D support.

Also since the drivers are based off the Voodoo2 drivers i'm sure you could mix and match to get DX support from the gemini parts https://www.philscomputerlab.com/drivers-for-voodoo-2.html


However my bad anyways, I think it was Voodoo 3's with accessory T&L chips that I was thinking of

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/3dfx-tnl.41181/
 
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I wouldn’t mind seeing Doom 3. I know I’ve seen people running it on two Voodoo 2 cards in before so the mercury brick could be an interesting sight to behold.
 
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The new quake engine game is supposed to support glide! :)

Is it possible to get older 3dfx cards on modern motherboards using pci-e to agp/pci risers?? :)
 
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STEvil said:
Yes, however if its using Voodoo 3 chipset it should have D3D support.
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Doesn't matter, the Post Processing board just add effects (fog, rain, blur) after the main boards are done rendering.
 
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Nolan7689 said:
I wouldn’t mind seeing Doom 3. I know I’ve seen people running it on two Voodoo 2 cards in before so the mercury brick could be an interesting sight to behold.
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Can and looks nice two different things.

Here are two images from a V5-6000 from Doom3 deathmatch I took a few years ago.
 

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My favorite glide game: Grand Prix Legends. There are texture packs and upgraded car models with glide compatible textures (I think size was limited so they needed a special texture pack). That would be awesome to see on this setup with AA cranked.
 
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TheeRaccoon said:
WOW OC3D... What is happening
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Not taking away from your effort (which was most excellent!) I'm rather amused by the fact most writers are apparently unaware Mercury bricks have been around since 1998,

I wonder if any have seen a quad Voodoo 3 before? It was prototyped in "brick" configuration too.
 

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gdonovan said:
Not taking away from your effort (which was most excellent!) I'm rather amused by the fact most writers are apparently unaware Mercury bricks have been around since 1998,

I wonder if any have seen a quad Voodoo 3 before? It was prototyped in "brick" configuration too.
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I wish that you could still find the bare VGA chips in massive bulk of V3 and VSA101, for dirt cheap, like you could years and years ago...
With today's custom PCB services, it'd be super interesting to see if someone with the skills could cook up something like a V5 6K or a quad V3 :D

Imagine with the advancements in bridge chips being able to have a PCIe V5 6K? lol
Nevertheless, the issue of drivers in a modern OS rears its ugly head in that regard, so XP would sadly be your best bet. However, given we do have the 3Dfx source code, there's hope!!
 
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gdonovan said:
Not taking away from your effort (which was most excellent!) I'm rather amused by the fact most writers are apparently unaware Mercury bricks have been around since 1998,

I wonder if any have seen a quad Voodoo 3 before? It was prototyped in "brick" configuration too.
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Yah, I noticed a few seemed to not understand
gdonovan said:
Time to break out Rampage.
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do you still have the clam shell part?

PCB looks silk screened for it, did you remove the clam shell and directly solder the chip to the board? (i believe that's what was done?)


https://hardforum.com/threads/3dfx-rampage-testing-2013.1771419/
 
erek said:
do you still have the clam shell part?

PCB looks silk screened for it, did you remove the clam shell and directly solder the chip to the board? (i believe that's what was done?)
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Ah I see the confusion.

I have the Rampage posted today, the clamshell board belongs to a friend of mine.
 
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gdonovan said:
Time to break out Rampage.
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I thought the boards laid out that way were Daytona and VSA101 powered?
Has my aging brain forgotten something, or do they just share a similar board design and otherwise unrelated?

EDIT: Oh, also... Coincidentally my buddy and I were talking about Rampage a few days back and he didn't think there could've been that many ES boards out there. I did a quick Google Images search and counted roughly 5 that appeared to be different (it's funny, but the fan wires are quite the 'fingerprint' for this sort of thing). That said, do you happen to know roughly how many survived and are out in collections? (regardless of whether they work)
 
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Formula.350 said:
I thought the boards laid out that way were Daytona and VSA101 powered?
Has my aging brain forgotten something, or do they just share a similar board design and otherwise unrelated?
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They look fairly different to me and there is only so many ways to arrange 4 ram chips around a GPU

Formula.350 said:
EDIT: Oh, also... Coincidentally my buddy and I were talking about Rampage a few days back and he didn't think there could've been that many ES boards out there. I did a quick Google Images search and counted roughly 5 that appeared to be different (it's funny, but the fan wires are quite the 'fingerprint' for this sort of thing). That said, do you happen to know roughly how many survived and are out in collections? (regardless of whether they work)
Click to expand...

Offhand I know where five are, maybe six or seven. The rest? Sitting in someones closet or the bottom of a landfill.
 

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gdonovan said:
They look fairly different to me and there is only so many ways to arrange 4 ram chips around a GPU


Offhand I know where five are, maybe six or seven. The rest? Sitting in someones closet or the bottom of a landfill.
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Ok, yea that's way way smaller.

Thanks :)
 
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erek said:
what's all going on Formula.350?
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MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS, EREK!!!

lmao Kidding
I had previously asked him if he was interested in looking at a friend's broken 3Dfx cards to see if he could fix them, but was just following up that it's mainly just his Rush (artifacting), and the Voodoo 1 may be unreparable since some of the pins were broken off one of the chips (bought as-is off ebay, dropped on the corner of a desk maybe *shrug*). So I just wanted to make sure he didn't forget about our convo now that he's gone viral and is famous... lol

Don't worry, if I ever have plans to sell my AAlchemy cards, one of them this same friend has an interest in, and I'll be sure to offer you the other :p
 
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DSCN6135.JPG
TheeRaccoon said:
First of all if you're not familiar with these boards.. They are basically two 3DFX Voodoo 2 chipsets in SLI on a single board. 4 boards = 8 Voodoo 2 chipsets that were used to achieve 4 tap rotated grid FSAA with no performance loss. These boards were used for military simulation and even NASA used them for certain configurations. (You can look up thedodgegarage to see more detailed information on these. Yes Gary Donovan I see you ;) )
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You know, can't be a brick owner without an official Quantum3D desktop or copy of OpenGVS demos.

I'll e-mail you a link after it is uploaded to my server.

Gary
 
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