Good morning [H]orde!
I made mention of this in one of the board threads a few weeks ago and today I have a few moments to make a post. Without going into too much detail or history I'll simply state I have one of the few fully functioning (to some degree, more later) 3dfx Rampage boards which I have owned since 2005 and last year finally got around to doing some work when a German 3dfx enthusiast stepped forward to make a prototype dongle to invert the output.
Lets get some misconceptions out of the way first.
1) There are 2 fully operational Rampage boards floating about and three known "clamshell" boards. There is also one clamshell board with half the ram that was used for testing. 3dfx made roughly 10 boards the 46th week of 2000 and 10 boards the next week. There is a confirmed number of 24 chips made, I know where there is at least 4 if not more loose chips.
2) The reason for the dongle is the chip was modeled in software first and the DAC output was overlooked. The dongle flips the output.
3) The only (current) drivers are very alpha win9x which I have tried under Win95A, Win98SE and WinME. The drivers work but only in a limited sense. The engineers were trying to focus on working on the chips core aspects and some aspects of memory management were disabled, were working on this.
4) Rampage was a DX8 part, it had very little in common with Voodoo Graphics --> VSA-100. It was to be a clean sheet design, native DirectX part with native D3D/OpenGL with Glide supported via a wrapper.
5) Rampage is very picky about what motherboard it will run with, these has caused me some headaches getting everything operating.
6) I have a limited number of DirectX demos and games running and a few OpenGL games running with a wrapper. Some applications will run for some time, others will crash out in a few seconds.
7) Since this was a first batch chip there was a lot of stuff disabled so they could do debugging, one of them was the memory interface as well as most AGP functions. Once I thought of the card as a dumb PCI device I had more success getting it to run reliably. 3dfx was debugging the board & chips and working on the drivers right up till the moment the doors closed. Too late as the rampage boards were still a year from commercial sale, not enough to save the company.
Just to be clear, I have no illusions that the board will ever run to its full potential but there are a number of people (including other Rampage owners) would would like to see them up and running as best they can. A few of the ex-3dfx people have been helping out and there are a large number of enthusiasts who have chipped in as well.
Next I'll post some pictures of the various boards and links to videos.
Gary Donovan
P.S. Some information here- http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/rampage.htm
And last years fun and games here- http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/rampage_2012.htm
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