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Reviving an old 3DFX powered PC

just picked up a voodoo2... not sure I am going to go slot1 on the mobo... maybe something socket A.. I have all the hardware to make something of that class right now. :p


edit: though.. if I went with a mobo with ISA slots I could use my gravis ultrasound max. but lack of direct sound support would make that more of a pita than nostalgic fun..
 
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Totally awesome thread. Please don't make me go digging around in my box of pentium 2s or k8 amd stuff....

Who is man enough to set up a BBS on a land line and throwdown on some tradewars?!?!
 
Totally awesome thread. Please don't make me go digging around in my box of pentium 2s or k8 amd stuff....

Who is man enough to set up a BBS on a land line and throwdown on some tradewars?!?!
Restart the Internet :D

There needs to be an official [H]ardForum BBS, oldschool style.
 
Oh, and come, ON. This thread ain't shit until someone has a turbo button pic posted! :D
 
lol... true. I don't think mine ever did anything cept change the LED.. I was just always in turbo mode.
 
Restart the Internet :D

There needs to be an official [H]ardForum BBS, oldschool style.


I have been toying around the idea of setting up a telnet bbs for Lord 1 and 2 and Exitilus... etc

Have one working in a vm. Just need to get custom ansi.
 
Totally awesome thread. Please don't make me go digging around in my box of pentium 2s or k8 amd stuff....

Who is man enough to set up a BBS on a land line and throwdown on some tradewars?!?!

Screw Tradewars. Give me Exitilus and L.O.R.D.
 
No luck, still getting BSODs. :mad:

EDIT: I removed some jumper related to MPU-401 emulation and tried reinstalling the drivers. No BSOD now.

Ahh cool...

so I picked up another voodoo2 but it's an STB and then I realized there you need to hack the drivers to get mixed brands of 3dfx cards to run in SLI... they are both 12mb cards (Diamond and STB) and one of them comes with all the cables I will need.

Would it be easier to get another same brand card or just try and hack the drivers? I'm installing XP on the system now but got a disk for installing 98 also. Seems like 98 might be the OS of choice here..

edit: I found this http://members.tripod.com/~devnull_/ looks like 98 support only
 
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Just try and find a same brand if you mix brands try and find a same time revision. I may have a 12mb diamond we could trade too if you need I think I have a diamond and creative 12mb the 2 others I have on sli are are black magic cards
 
ok cool.. yeah, I would for sure be interested in a trade to run same brand cards. If you have another Diamond 12mb that would rule. Let me know. :) when I get my cards I will test them to ensure they work and stuff..

here's some pics of my setup..

IMG_0218.jpg

IMG_0217.jpg

IMG_0216.jpg


MSI K7N2 (one of my favorites boards of all time) + athlon xp2600 + 2x 256mb patriot ddr and a chaintech TNT2 that was new in the box.. lol. going to toss my ocz tccd 512s on later..
the mobo is suspended by some 1" pegs on the bottom... not sure what the final mount will be, maybe a My Open PC bench.. or a wood plank. :p

EDIT: found another diamond 12mb so grabbed it. the two cards are

23150106-006 (Sticker)
23150107-402 (Sticker)

I guess it would be best if they had the same part number but being the same brand is most important.
 
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it was the only socket A cooler I had... I used to OC my old 2600 quite a bit with this cooler and am planning on OCing this one a little.. I dropped it in a 'vinegar + distilled h2o + lil salt' bath for 20 mins and wow.. I should have taken before and after pics. I could probably just take the fan off it but I like the pretty lights. :p I almost bought an old case with a turbo button for this but I like being able to see the innards of the PC so I found a sunbeam ufo acrylic case for the build.. I guess I am going all out. I'll post something in the case section once I get the goods. :)

So what glide games are you guys playing? Unreal, Quake, Carmageddon? Interstate 76? Tomb Raider? I am thinking about win98 / 95 or dos even for my 40G disk... seems like older games and glide might have a better time of it on 98 or earlier?
 
it was the only socket A cooler I had... I used to OC my old 2600 quite a bit with this cooler and am planning on OCing this one a little.. I dropped it in a 'vinegar + distilled h2o + lil salt' bath for 20 mins and wow.. I should have taken before and after pics. I could probably just take the fan off it but I like the pretty lights. :p I almost bought an old case with a turbo button for this but I like being able to see the innards of the PC so I found a sunbeam ufo acrylic case for the build.. I guess I am going all out. I'll post something in the case section once I get the goods. :)

So what glide games are you guys playing? Unreal, Quake, Carmageddon? Interstate 76? Tomb Raider? I am thinking about win98 / 95 or dos even for my 40G disk... seems like older games and glide might have a better time of it on 98 or earlier?

IIRC, these are what I used in XP when I had a Voodoo5 5500. I believe they also supported Voodoo2.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/3dfx-1.09-Windows-XP-download-406.html

Check this link as well if the above doesn't work.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?id=11
 
A friend offered me an old Banshee for free and then I looked up their value on eBay and see they go for something like three bucks. Banshee sort of sucked anyway from what I can remember. It was a V2 that also did 2D graphics but has one less texture unit than V2. I never did buy that card back in the day.
 
IIRC, these are what I used in XP when I had a Voodoo5 5500. I believe they also supported Voodoo2.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/3dfx-1.09-Windows-XP-download-406.html

Check this link as well if the above doesn't work.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?id=11

Thanks.. yeah there appears to be good/decent voodoo2 driver support under xp. I might play with putting 98 on another disk but no audigy support so I will have to get an sb live or something.. or use nforce2 audio in 98... hmm..

Bop - sorry for the thread steal :p
 
I got my first voodoo2 today and got it installed and working... playing unreal with glide support... been a while since I have done that. ;)
I used these drivers

http://downloads.guru3d.com/FastVoodoo2-4.0-XP-Gold-Edition-download-715.html

and this fix (because I was getting the error "mapmem returned an error trying to map memory")

http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=644

once I installed the XP fix it worked perfect.... farking cool as sheeeeot to be playing a game with glide support again... :)
 
Got my rig up and going. Windows 98SE install.

I bought 2 different brand 12MB voodoo2's from a guy without the SLI link cable.

So I made the cable following these instructions:
http://forum.3dfx.cz/viewtopic.php?p=7349#7349
This cable was harder to make than I had anticipated.. Probably just because I tend to rush things.

I installed the Fastvoodoo 4.0 gold drivers from here:
http://www.falconfly.de/voodoo2.htm

And then also had to use the mismatched sli drivers, as well as the radeon glide drivers since I'm running a 9200SE as my AGP card.

Anyways it all worked, the v2 control panel showed that SLI is detected.

Here are a few pics of the rig.. It's a mess, ugly as hell.. But it gets the job done:
http://i.imgur.com/h1u9p.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/mE8PN.jpg

I played some UT glide @ 1024x768 last night, and man I forgot how fun that game is. I suck though.
http://i.imgur.com/GQGcl.jpg

One of the cards has half the amount of ram chips, but still seems to be a 12MB card.. Did they have different densities of ram chips on some of the cards?

Full specs on the system are:

Asus P3B-F
PIII 500
768MB PC133 SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9200SE
2 x 12MB Voodoo2
Sound Blaster PCI 16
D-Link DFE-538TX
40GB Maxtor IDE hard drive
Corsair 430W power supply (I burned out 2 older 300W power supplies.. They just stopped working. I guess they were just too old)
 
sounds great.. Gotta love the retro rigs :)

as far as the 12mb combined with an 8mb that may be just from the mismatched sli driver but as long as ou don't see any popping textures or anything like that you should be ok

you may not even see an issue with it until later games that needed more memory.

as far as Voodoo 2's with higher density memory i don't think i've seen any with higher density. Even my pure3d II which is a very compact card still has the 512kb memory chips. a 12mb board should have 24 and an 8mb board should have 16
 
as far as Voodoo 2's with higher density memory i don't think i've seen any with higher density. Even my pure3d II which is a very compact card still has the 512kb memory chips. a 12mb board should have 24 and an 8mb board should have 16

I should boot the system up with just that one card in question.. The driver says how much memory the card has..
It's weird because the one with fewer chips only has 12 chips, not 16.
 
I should boot the system up with just that one card in question.. The driver says how much memory the card has..
It's weird because the one with fewer chips only has 12 chips, not 16.

doing a little digging it does appear that they did make Voodoo2's with 1Mb memory modules :)

that is great.. mind taking a picture of the front and back of just hte card?

i haven't seen one like that before.. even the dodge garage doesn't seem to show one like that.

if you can too grab the make and product number

from this thread
http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1826
gdonovan said:
Powercolor, 3dfx/STB and Aisha, I have examples of these boards from all three makers. The 3dfx board has spots for ram on the back but are unpopulated and the Powercolor and Aisha boards have no ram locations at all on the back.
 
Cool. I believe this is an STB model. I'll get some close ups as soon as I'm done work.

doing a little digging it does appear that they did make Voodoo2's with 1Mb memory modules :)

that is great.. mind taking a picture of the front and back of just hte card?

i haven't seen one like that before.. even the dodge garage doesn't seem to show one like that.

if you can too grab the make and product number

from this thread
http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1826
 
I am noticing some oddities with the fastvoodoo2 4.0 GE driver... under the voodoo tab called '3dfx V2-1000' in my display control panel I have no drop down menu for "direct3D"... the only option is "Glide"... also in the tabs on the bottom of the "system info" is all kind of scrambled... I can kind of read what is there but it doesn't look right.

I started messing with this trying to run Jedi Knight DFII with the voodoo.. which is a direct3D only game.. seems like this fastvoodoo driver I used doesn't have direct3D support? I have cleaned it and installed it a couple times.. I downloaded it from a couple spots to ensure I got a valid package...

also the OC tool won't install.. it complains about the .dll file for it not being in the same directory when it's right there in the same dir with it. sigh!

Well... at least I got Diablo II running on glide again... yay for that. ;)

I might try KoolSmoky's drivers here soon just for grins.. my second voodoo2 came today but I have no sli cable yet.. I was going to make one but I have one coming with the STB card (tomorrow? Sat?) so I messed with other things... this diamond card I got looks brand spanking new... not a dot of dust on it.
 
I'm using the Fastvoodoo 4.0 GE driver, and I definitely do have direct3d support in it. I'm running on Win98SE if that makes any difference.

I noticed there's a 4.6 version driver, but I decided not to use it for some reason.

If you do make the SLI cable take a lot of time when you're placing the cable down onto the pins of the floppy connector.. I made a couple initial cables that mustn't have been making clean contact with all of the pins.
The last one I did I took a lot of care and time and it worked.
Also, make sure you don't use one of the floppy connectors that has one of the pins blocked out.

I am noticing some oddities with the fastvoodoo2 4.0 GE driver... under the voodoo tab called '3dfx V2-1000' in my display control panel I have no drop down menu for "direct3D"... the only option is "Glide"... also in the tabs on the bottom of the "system info" is all kind of scrambled... I can kind of read what is there but it doesn't look right.

I started messing with this trying to run Jedi Knight DFII with the voodoo.. which is a direct3D only game.. seems like this fastvoodoo driver I used doesn't have direct3D support? I have cleaned it and installed it a couple times.. I downloaded it from a couple spots to ensure I got a valid package...

also the OC tool won't install.. it complains about the .dll file for it not being in the same directory when it's right there in the same dir with it. sigh!

Well... at least I got Diablo II running on glide again... yay for that. ;)

I might try KoolSmoky's drivers here soon just for grins.. my second voodoo2 came today but I have no sli cable yet.. I was going to make one but I have one coming with the STB card (tomorrow? Sat?) so I messed with other things... this diamond card I got looks brand spanking new... not a dot of dust on it.
 
weird.. ok. Thanks for your reply. I am running xp atm. I tried koolsmoky's drivers and same behavior... glide apps work fine but anything direct3d seems to use the TNT... I'll mess with some more later.

edit: AHHH... ok, looks like XP is the issue here... nothing based on the NT kernel will allow glide to run D3D according to this:

"V2 SLI runs best under win9x/ME, XP drivers don’t have D3D support, there is only support for glide/opengl."

http://helppage.3dfx.sk/#SLI

I found that from this thread.

http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=13582


So....... looks like I got it running as good as I can on XP... and guess what I will be doing this weekend? If you guessed "installing win98" give yourself a pat on the back. ;)
 
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Yea, 98 works good for gaming with these old games for sure.. It really sucks for most other things though.. :).. Internet browsing is brutal with IE6.. It's a bit better with Firefox 2 (which I believe is the newest you can run on 98).

This site http://www.oldapps.com/ has been incredibly helpful with getting the right versions of stuff installed in 98. It tells you with pretty good accuracy which version of each app is the latest supported with 98.

Also, as far as directx is concerned, this page http://www.falconfly.de/directx.htm is good for getting a package with the absolute newest version of whichever directx your OS will support.

weird.. ok. Thanks for your reply. I am running xp atm. I tried koolsmoky's drivers and same behavior... glide apps work fine but anything direct3d seems to use the TNT... I'll mess with some more later.

edit: AHHH... ok, looks like XP is the issue here... nothing based on the NT kernel will allow glide to run D3D according to this:

"V2 SLI runs best under win9x/ME, XP drivers don’t have D3D support, there is only support for glide/opengl."

http://helppage.3dfx.sk/#SLI

I found that from this thread.

http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=13582


So....... looks like I got it running as good as I can on XP... and guess what I will be doing this weekend? If you guessed "installing win98" give yourself a pat on the back. ;)
 
Thanks for the links! The STB card I bought with an SLI cable is coming soon... hopefully tomorrow. I was going to build one but I think I can wait...

So I bought a voodoo5 5500 pci for my P4 machine.. what the heck is the matter with me. ;)
 
Totally awesome thread. Please don't make me go digging around in my box of pentium 2s or k8 amd stuff....

I just recycled my P2 and K8 rig a few months ago, figured dosbox was a better way to go. The only PC I regret tossing is my old C64 (with a Commodore monitor and 5.25" drive).

I think I still have the SB Live (Value) card sitting out on an endtable in my office. PM if you need it! I may even have a Voodoo 3 hanging around somewhere--I hate throwing parts out.
 
got the rest of my voodoo gear today...

top is a gainward geforce3, then the STB voodoo2, and then the voodoo5 5500. The STB has the normal memory density setup with mem chips on the front and back.

IMG_0250.jpg

IMG_0245.jpg


here's the whole setup for now... I was going to install it into a Sunbeam UFO case but I am kind of liking the bench setup.

IMG_0246.jpg


The 5500 will go into my DFI pro875b rig...
 
It's a PC version...

been playing quake2 and unreal @ 1024x768 with sli... the performance is for sure better than a single card even at the higher res. Glide is so damn snappy and something about the color blending is really nice. I'll get around to putting the v5 into my other machine tomorrow I reckon.
 
It's a PC version...

been playing quake2 and unreal @ 1024x768 with sli... the performance is for sure better than a single card even at the higher res. Glide is so damn snappy and something about the color blending is really nice. I'll get around to putting the v5 into my other machine tomorrow I reckon.
How does it compare to modern video cards?
 
I think the v5 5500 is about equal or slightly less powerful than a geforce2 GTS.. depends on the situation. The AGP version is about 2% faster in most situations than the PCI version also.. or so I have read.
 
I think the v5 5500 is about equal or slightly less powerful than a geforce2 GTS.. depends on the situation. The AGP version is about 2% faster in most situations than the PCI version also.. or so I have read.

Also, it could do AA without much of a performance hit as well.
 
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