Reviving an old 3DFX powered PC

I have messing around with quake 3 engine games (RTCW and Jedi Outcast) on this voodoo2 setup and it's been interesting. The MesaFX opengl32 driver seems to be the best for these games. I tried the WickedGL but things were shaky on it at best... I can only bump the quality up so far before things become unplayable.. Any unreal1 based games seem to play buttery smooth though on the plain old FastVoodoo2 4.0 GE glide drivers... I use the miniportGL drivers for quake2 and quake which work well. I guess I could use MesaFX for all openGL stuff but as I have been experimenting with different drivers I now have a mish-mash, but it gets the job done. :)

I am waiting for Hexen2 to come in the mail.. I can't believe I never bought that one.. seems like a game I would have played back in the day.. maybe I just played the demo or something. :p I'm gonna get the voodoo5 installed soon on my p4 machine soon now that I have messed with these v2's a bit.
 
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I just received the Riva TNT2 Ultra I ordered..
I just need to install it now, and my machine will be complete!
 
awesome.. make sure to post pics.. i haven't had time in the last couple of weeks ot mess around.. i did start to get out all my games with the 3dfx logo on them.

i decided that with the retro rig going, now is a good time to replay the Xwing and then the Tie Fighter Series.. maybe even in the original DOS game.
 
yes pics when you got'em. :)

...every time I see that 3DFX logo spin around before a game starts I get such a rush of nostalgic happiness.. funny how little things like that can affect a person. :p
 
revenant said:
yes pics when you got'em. :)

...every time I see that 3DFX logo spin around before a game starts I get such a rush of nostalgic happiness.. funny how little things like that can affect a person. :p
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Indeed!

Guess what else I found.. A friend of mine dug up an old Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback joystick :D
 
Bump for nostalgia.

I started my crack habit with a Gateway P2 233, 32MB, Riva 128 AGP 4MB, and I think an 8GB HDD. The 19" CRT weighed a ton.
 
The first computer I actually owned (bought myself) was an HP 700mhz celeron with 64 MB of SDRAM and crappy onboard video.

I upgraded it to a Pentium III coppermine 850 and added 256MB RAM. Then I wanted faster graphics, but OH NOES, no AGP slot. I got the Voodoo 5 5500 PCI version. That rig rocked some Quake 2 and Quake 3, and especially Unreal Tournament Glide.

It was my introduction to tinkering with PCs back in 2000/2001. I had been interested in them before, and spent a lot of time in the college computer labs in 1998-2000, but it took owning my own PC and breaking/fixing things to really get into it.

Love the idea of reviving an old rig, and I miss 3DFX. There used to be three companies for gaming cards!
 
I got to do a little digging, but im sure i still have a quake 3 demo with motion blur enabled for the v5 5500 cards. I did run that a couple of times, it was pretty neat.

BTW, for those that dont know. Canopus quit making official drivers about 2/3's of the way through the spectre 2500 life. I had to use Reference drivers to get quake 3 to work.
 
Zohar78 said:
I got to do a little digging, but im sure i still have a quake 3 demo with motion blur enabled for the v5 5500 cards. I did run that a couple of times, it was pretty neat.

BTW, for those that dont know. Canopus quit making official drivers about 2/3's of the way through the spectre 2500 life. I had to use Reference drivers to get quake 3 to work.
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Yep, being an original owner of a spectra 2500 + Pure 3D II SLI I remember just moving to a the reference drivers for newer games at the time. I remember playing Quake 3 and it was similar performance between the two (TNT vs 3dfx SLI).

Canopus did release a followup to the Spectra 2500, I believe it was Spectra 3500? It was a TNT 2 or ultra and still had the witch doctor pass through. I don't believe it ever made it to the states, or at least in retail.

I still have the parts and spun up a retro rig about a year ago and played a few minutes of Die by the Sword. Although I remember the good times my 10 year old son just looked at me with a puzzled look asking why does it look so terrible:)

I still have memories of seeing Quake 1 in glide for the first time and that intro to Unreal. I must admit it was fun spinning up the old machine for a few minutes, but a few months later I ended up putting the parts back in boxes. Maybe in another 15 years I'll spin it backup;)

Fortunately I created a CD of all the drivers about 12 years when Windows 2000 was rolling out and many of these vendors started pulling drivers around that time. Some of the drivers I copied off were Diamond MX300 Sound card, WickedGL, 3DFX, and etc.

My olde retro rig was running MSI Socket A KT266 Pro Turbo + athlon 900. I believe shortly after that the AGP spec changed and most of these older AGP cards were SOL.
 
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my v5 5500 pci on a DFI pro875b..

v5pci-2.jpg


It's good at opengl and glide but not too great at d3d... I am using amigamerlin's 3.1 r11 drivers which seem to work pretty well.. I tried with and without AA and as it turns out AA does hit the performance kind of hard anything 1280x1024 and over.. dep on the game though.

I moved my v2 sli machine into a sunbeam ufo case but it the case wasn't as nice as I had hoped... very limited cable routing, all the tollerances were off, including the whole pci slot bracket so the only way to get the cards seated all the way in was to take the pci covers off... ugh. It was nicer looking and more sturdy on the open bench so I moved it back to the bench. Still replaying unreal and rtnp on the v2 sli setup.. pretty fun!
 
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This reminds me of my old Voodoo2 setup, hmm maybe I'll rebuild that thing as well.
 
a few unreal ss from the v2 sli rig... they came out really dark looking for some reason.

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Shot0014.jpg


Shot0016.jpg
 
Ah Unreal. Think I might load up UT. Are you using the high res textures?
 
Glide uses a post processing technique. This is the whole rendered in 21bit color dithered to 16bit or something like that. It was always notoriously difficult to get accurate screen shots of glide and 3dfx in general. If I remember there are utilities out there that will pull am accurate screen shot
 
You have to love Craigslist. Today I scored 2 free pentium iii's w 512mb and universal agp slot motherboards (815e). Going to setup a dedicated voodoo 5 5500 system :). Time for some more hot glue!

If anyone wants a mb/cpu for the price of shipping let me know. It would be a p3 733 soyo mb w 256 sdram
 
sweet, yeah I have been scanning cl a bit... I scored a Chaintech 7VJL APOGEE today on ebay... it's got a 1.5v/3.3v agp slot and I kt333 via chipset which should be good for any agp voodoo card.

I need a bigger office for all these machines lol. :p
 
here is 3dfx Hot Glue PC #2 - this time with included Floppy (for my Xwing and Tie Fighter Originals)

3dfxComputer2.jpg


Specs are
Intel P3 1k
512Mb PC133 SDRam
Asus CUSL2
3dfx Voodoo5 5500
SB Audigy (Not Pictured)
20gb HDD

I learned my lesson from the first build, to face the CDrom the same direction as the power cord.. i have a book shelf i am storing these on and if i face the power and cdrom i can put them all on a shalf and hookup everything and run them while on the shelf.

my 9 y/o has gotten into playing the old Alien vs Predator games :)

I have enough parts for one more Retro build - I am thinking a PC for the Geforce lineup (i have the Geforce TNT - TNT2 - 256 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6), i've also got a KYRO2 i want to setup and play around with.. have to see how that goes.
 
I LOVE THIS THREAD!!!!!!

Because of this thread i just decided to dig out 1 of my many vintage systems I was working on at one time. This is my favorite of the bunch. I dual boot it with win xp fundamentals and win 98se

Specs are as follows:

Dual slot 2 Pentium 3 XEON's at 500mhz & 2meg cache each
voodoo 5 5500
sound blaster awe 64 gold
1 gig pc100 ram
2x 9gig seagate cheetah scsi drives
1x plextor scsi 32x burner

It's everything you wanted in the mid 90's but couldnt afford! Now a super system for under $100
 
H-street said:
here is 3dfx Hot Glue PC #2 - this time with included Floppy (for my Xwing and Tie Fighter Originals)

Specs are
Intel P3 1k
512Mb PC133 SDRam
Asus CUSL2
3dfx Voodoo5 5500
SB Audigy (Not Pictured)
20gb HDD

I learned my lesson from the first build, to face the CDrom the same direction as the power cord.. i have a book shelf i am storing these on and if i face the power and cdrom i can put them all on a shalf and hookup everything and run them while on the shelf.

my 9 y/o has gotten into playing the old Alien vs Predator games :)

I have enough parts for one more Retro build - I am thinking a PC for the Geforce lineup (i have the Geforce TNT - TNT2 - 256 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6), i've also got a KYRO2 i want to setup and play around with.. have to see how that goes.
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How can you play X-Wing or Tie Fighter on those without an authentic-sounding OPL equivalent?
 
thehoj said:
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).
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Actually, you can run the latest Firefox in 98 if you install KernelEx, though it might break a few things.
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
How can you play X-Wing or Tie Fighter on those without an authentic-sounding OPL equivalent?
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:)

it does ok.. the audigy dos drivers are decent.. i have a P2 board with an ISA slot that i have been contemplating setting up so i can get a real ISA sound card but not there yet :)
 
I finally have some time off to tinker with my machines some more. I managed to score an original Canopus Pure3D and Spectra 2500(had to look outside the country to get one!). Also found some nice audio hardware. Got a SB16 CT2940 w/ an OPL3 chip for dirt cheap (a rare find - last SB16 I'm aware of to feature the OPL3 and most didn't have it). The hard part is getting games for these systems. Even if you have the game files you need the original floppies just to run the configuration utilities for many of these games. I really want to hear X-COM on the MT-32. :(
 
H-street said:
here is 3dfx Hot Glue PC #2 - this time with included Floppy (for my Xwing and Tie Fighter Originals)

http://www.fifthelement.net/3dfxPC/3dfxComputer2.jpg

Specs are
Intel P3 1k
512Mb PC133 SDRam
Asus CUSL2
3dfx Voodoo5 5500
SB Audigy (Not Pictured)
20gb HDD

I learned my lesson from the first build, to face the CDrom the same direction as the power cord.. i have a book shelf i am storing these on and if i face the power and cdrom i can put them all on a shalf and hookup everything and run them while on the shelf.

my 9 y/o has gotten into playing the old Alien vs Predator games :)

I have enough parts for one more Retro build - I am thinking a PC for the Geforce lineup (i have the Geforce TNT - TNT2 - 256 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6), i've also got a KYRO2 i want to setup and play around with.. have to see how that goes.
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The Kyro 2 seems to be a little better than the GF2 MX.

q3afull.gif

3dmarkfull.gif
 
I'd thought about reviving an old rig for gaming, but with Steam and GOG.com they pretty much take all the hassle out of getting old DOS games to run on a new pc. Plus don't have to hassle with memory management, config.sys and autoexec.bat files. But what the hell, whatever floats your boat.

Just to keep it cool here's a pic of the original voodoo card which I still have.

voodoo.jpg
 
Ok here i think is my last one for a while. (my 3rd Hot Glue 3dfx PC)

this is made more for DOS, still need a cdrom drive for it.. (I've run out of old drives hehehe)

3dfxComputer3.jpg


Specs
PII 400
440BX
128Mb SDRam
40Gb
win98SE
S3 Virge
3dfx Voodoo1 (Orchid - CLick!)
SB AWE32 ISA
some dell sff powersupply
 
Mister Natural said:
I'd thought about reviving an old rig for gaming, but with Steam and GOG.com they pretty much take all the hassle out of getting old DOS games to run on a new pc. Plus don't have to hassle with memory management, config.sys and autoexec.bat files. But what the hell, whatever floats your boat.

Just to keep it cool here's a pic of the original voodoo card which I still have.
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DOS games run great under DOSbox, but there's still a pretty good handful of win95/win98 games that are missing features or running without video acceleration. Really the best kind of retro gaming rig would be a win95/win98 rig.

For example - Dungeon Keeper working under DOSbox from gog - but no video acceleration. Games with Glide support. etc.
 
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very cool stuff. really nice way to keep these retro rigs in a very small footprint and keep the cost down at the same time.

H-street said:
Ok here i think is my last one for a while. (my 3rd Hot Glue 3dfx PC)

this is made more for DOS, still need a cdrom drive for it.. (I've run out of old drives hehehe)

http://www.fifthelement.net/3dfxPC/3dfxComputer3.jpg

Specs
PII 400
440BX
128Mb SDRam
40Gb
win98SE
S3 Virge
3dfx Voodoo1 (Orchid - CLick!)
SB AWE32 ISA
some dell sff powersupply
Click to expand...
 
H-street said:
Ok here i think is my last one for a while. (my 3rd Hot Glue 3dfx PC)

this is made more for DOS, still need a cdrom drive for it.. (I've run out of old drives hehehe)
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Looks nice, gotta love the original Voodoo. :)

EDIT: The Spectra 2500 just came in from Europe!

IMG_0248.jpg


IMG_0250.jpg
 
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Aaron_ATX said:
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?!?!
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I've got a registered copy of tradewars I used to run on my bbs.....I've used it local more recently.
 
Sweet, I pulled my old rig out to post in here:

ABIT SA6 Raid
Intel P3-1000mhz
Micron PC133 512mb
3dfx 5500 AGP
3com NIC
SBLive Platinum

Havent used it in a while, but its running WinMe!
If you guys want, I can post my 3dfx collection, not much but some are still in their boxes!

3dfx4.jpg


3dfx1.jpg


3dfx3.jpg


3dfx2.jpg
 
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