3dfx Voodoo 3 3500 TV: Video, Radio, BIG DONGLE

[@PatrickTorsell]

I bought a Voodoo3 3500 TV on eBay for my first PC build in 2001. The dongle was missing. After months of 12-year-old me researching and finding pinouts, it turned out that the DVI-like output was called a “P&D” port. That tidbit of knowledge allowed me to source a P&D to VGA adapter, which worked great until I found a “pod” dongle on eBay a year or two later. Man, what a legendary video card. Still kicking myself for getting rid of it years ago.

[@PatrickTorsell]

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_Plug_and_Display

[@PatrickTorsell]

@LGR if you’re not going to use it, name your price and I’ll buy it. I used that card to capture stills of LCARS panels to recreate them in Illustrator, to run Project64, and so many Win98 games. Would love to recreate that first PC I built.

[@Bobsmithgeorgette]

Insanity, lol.

[@MunksMusic41198]

To many trees

[@glitchwrks]

There's a common Dell part number that adapts from P&D to just VGA, a lot of us are running those on V3 3500 TVs now to not have to use the giant blue tadpole :P

[@thepropcollet]

"It wasn't working the past few days, but now its working fine." -Windows 98 summed up in one sentence.

[@barrymckockinner9292]

You're thinking about windows vistas

[@camotech1314]

No, Vista never worked ​@@barrymckockinner9292

[@MR-zk3fy]

@@barrymckockinner9292 Vista was temperamental at first but by last revisions was just not comparable to 98 in goofiness. Even at the beginning I'd take its schizo behavior first.

[@forcedtoregister100]

You having driver issues and having to reinstall the entire OS really brought back old memories

[@renstimpy9313]

I used to reinstall Windows every week for a year, until win2k came along

[@forcedtoregister100]

@@renstimpy9313 I would reinstall Win 98 SE monthly

[@mabs9503]

Yea I was just wondering how many people that "weren't there" seeing him have all these set up issues and thinking it's a hardware age issue or something else while not realizing that's just how it was.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@renstimpy9313 I didn't reinstall every week, but I did do it fairly regularly starting from my first 486SX with DOS 5 and Win 3.1. Much more than I needed to, sometimes just because I was bored, and sometimes it really was just easier than trying to troubleshoot something that went wrong. Installing it all again in exactly the same way often did the trick, and that's just how it was. I didn't mind any of that. I just enjoyed tinkering, and liked that "freshly installed" feeling anyway.

[@MrDuncl]

To add to the fun try burning a DVD when you have completed your video. I made a stack which would play fine on a computer but looked awful when played on a DVD player. After spending several £hundreds on different capture cards I ended up just plugging the camcorder into a standalone DVD recorder.

[@uNpOpuLArOpInION69]

Just heard from Jeff Geerling about hurrican Helene and the destruction of LGRs house. I'm glad to hear Clint is safe with his family but I think he can need our support right now! Consider joining his Patreon if you havent yet. Cheers to Clint: Thank you so much for all the years of cozy entertainment and interesting oddity! Your content always cheered me up during bad times and helped get me through them. I hope now we can give back a little bit and help you recover from this.❤We got your back! All the best to you!

[@BatCorkill]

I bought this brand new back in the day. My friends and I used to make movies and used it to capture video from our camcorder. Edit: now I know where I got my copy of Unreal, I knew I didn't buy it retail and couldn't remember where I got it.

[@BatCorkill]

Just a follow up. We had such a difficult time using this that my friend bought a Sony Vaio computer that had FireWire and that computer worked flawlessly for video capturing.

[@vespasian606]

@@BatCorkill Similar experience. To put it bluntly it was a dog. I also had the 5500. It was not much better. At least it got me started and all the cables came in handy further down the line.

[@EdwardWeissbard]

@@BatCorkill I can imagine the FireWire interface on the Sony Vaio was great. Loved the Sony Vaios

[@CubeAtlantic]

i haven't heard of that brand since I was possibly a young kid, tbqh.

[@markwarner5554]

I went to a LAN party once and came home with a burned copy of Unreal on CDR. I have no recollection of ever talking about it with anyone, or of having it given to me. It was just sitting in a jewel case in the bag I used to carry my mouse and headphones and shit. I had never heard of it before I found the CD, and I have no idea who stuck it in the bag, but I loved the game.

[@GetOnMyHypeJP]

My mom made a whole bunch of money back in the day when I was a kid, and she let me build my own PC. I saw one of these in a PC shop around the time and thought it was the coolest shit ever. The giant dongle brings back so many memories I forgot about. I ended up having to sell it months later because it had lots of compatibility problems and would crash a lot and I'd get interference while using the TV-out. I believe I ended up getting whatever the best voodoo was at the time to replace it. Thanks for unlocking some of my old memories. It still blew my friends minds when I busted out emulators running off my computer, playing on my tv, using these weird clear blue Intel wireless controllers that were shaped like a U. Those controllers were super comfy, and I miss them lol. Forgot about all this stuff. I also ended up buying a later model when they changed the name to All-In-wonder but had similar issues.

[@metafuel]

Your mom is awesome

[@Aeduo]

Whatever those controllers were sounds worthy of an oddware episode.

[@GetOnMyHypeJP]

@metafuel She is! We were pretty poor up until she finished school. So that PC was the first expensive gift I ever received. I felt like the luckiest kid. She made up for the years we struggled after that. I wish I kept all this stuff instead of selling it off in my teens.

[@Sangueffusor]

ATI made the All-In-Wonder, the first model came out in 1996

[@bojcio]

can your mom get me a computer 😅

[@Exnem]

Always love the box art on these old cards.

[@CheapSushi]

I was just about to say the same! I love that "Xtreme / edgy / ambiguous" vibe they had. It made kid me feel like my computer was a magical beige box. I feel like once I got older and knew exactly what all the numbers/stats/spec meant, it kinda took something away from the experience.

[@RandomTechWZ]

Im more nostalgic about the boxes from the 90s/00s GPUs, and my memories of seeing them on the shelves of Best Buy, than the cards themselves.

[@digdugsmug]

I think their box art is still the best.

[@CheapSushi]

@@RandomTechWZ some of the cards had the box art style also on the card itself

[@Decenium]

90s art in general was so unique and fantastic, just gone

[@Darxide23]

While I didn't have the 3500, the Voodoo3 3000 was my pride and joy in a way no other piece of computer hardware has ever been before or since. If I opened my door to one of the upcoming 5000 series cards tomorrow, it still wouldn't top the feeling of owning a Voodoo3 3000 in 1999. Going from DirectX to Glide graphics back in those days was a _transcendental_ experience in ways that words will never do justice. You can't ever know unless you were there. Booting Quake II in Glide mode for the very first time is the closest thing to a religious experience I've had in my 42 years on this rock.

[@jonasgeez2140]

Very cool

[@gigglehurtz3167]

i was there, i remember it was shocking. Going from software render to proper 3d... omy.

[@raelik777]

Yeah, that SD card problem is actually demonstrating one of the BIG weaknesses in that 3dfx capture software: no buffering controls. You're seeing the effect of buffer overrun in action. The incoming video source never stops, so the software has to keep up with it. The SD card through the adapter will only write data so fast, and tends to be very bursty when it does, so when the buffer fills up while the software waits for the SD card to finish its write operation... you get what you see here. If the software let you change the buffer settings (or if it had been programmed to dynamically set one by measuring the write speed of the underlying storage), it could easily work around this problem.

[@FlyboyHelosim]

I don't think it's a limitation of the SD card though, as this type of issue is common with video capture software. I've had the same issues when recording from DVD and VHS to both HDDs and SSDs.

[@MrWolfSnack]

@@FlyboyHelosim Then you are doing it wrong, and probably using a Mac on top of that. I have been ripping VHS footage for 10 years. Never had a problem. Also throw out the SSD's. They are garbage.

[@raelik777]

@@FlyboyHelosim I should have been more clear, the issue isn't REALLY specific to SD cards. I just brought up the SD card because it was what he was using in this video. It may very well have the same issues on ANY storage medium, but it's almost certainly because of either NO buffering (which would be hilariously dumb on 3dfx's part), or a minimal buffer with no easy way to change it.

[@starquakey1]

Lived with this in my University dorms for 3 years as a student. Was how I watched TV + DVD + Gamed as a Student in the year 2000 ish (and preceding years). The dongle was a pain, but was actually useful as a student as allowed the big PC to sit below the chest of drawers, and all inputs on top of desk. Had a VHS recorder on the desk plugged into composite input (yes we still used VHS then as DVD was only for prerecorded stuff). Best memories is one year I had to run a 30 metre run of coax to get an aerial feed at one University campus, as they only put a SINGLE feed per 5 rooms in the shared kitchen, as of course we all watch TV in the kitchen right? (we split it in kitchen for other's wanting TV).

[@IllegallySighted]

I loved this card back in the day, and used it in college. It was actually really convenient for a dorm room, because I could simply use my computer monitor as my TV, and hook my game systems right up to it. I also used to use The TV tuner for recording TV shows. I don't have the box, but I still have this card buried in my closet somewhere. I just can't bring myself to get rid of it.

[@thekernel69]

How was the latency for consoles then ?

[@mintypotato777]

@@thekernel69 if its unplayable with a modern el gato card; this definitely would have been too

[@1480750]

I have the same story except I had the ATI AIW card. also had the Platinum sound card to get the front bay thing I almost never used

[@HA05GER]

​@@mintypotato777I used a cheap generic capture dongle from Amazon for my PS1. I didn't notice any lag it was perfectly fine.

[@The_Magic_of_Zelda]

I never had the Voodoo 3 but had the the Voodoo2 which is a great card in the late 90s. I miss being a gamer in the 1990s. It was a revolutionary decade for video games both console and PC.

[@ferenc-x7p]

Tech was definitely doing some huge steps to something better. I had Voodoo 2 and then my next card was Voodoo 5 and then hopped on the Nvidia bandwagon. It was exciting times and plenty of legendary games were coming out. Many are still played today.

[@cougar2k720]

Same thing, I got the card from Future Shop in Canada, it was so cool, I kept the box and card itself when I move to a new build.

[@PixelPipes]

Loved your take on it, especially as I haven't really seen anyone else in modern times delve into the multimedia features. I'm really humbled by the shout-out... Thank you very much! P.s. I read somewhere you can only feed the dongle live mice.

[@LGR]

Oh thank you, I certainly enjoyed your coverage as well!

[@tanithis]

Wanted one of these because I wanted to hook up my consoles to my monitor. Had an external usb tuner but the input delay was too much to enjoy gaming on it.

[@banguseater]

its good to see you active on youtube again. bring back GPU JUNE next year!!!

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

So many people in community talking that you're fay is that true ?

[@wasitacatisaw83]

Nice to see you getting a mention PixelPipes. Long time subscriber 👍

[@KingPK]

There goes Clint flopping his dongle around again.

[@themac6356]

Hey, at least he’s messing with it in the privacy of his own home. Thank goodness he’s not subjecting the public to his big, blue dongle (he should get that checked, by the way. No one's dongle should ever be blue).

[@gregjones2472]

How many people in the world were watching the Michigan Texas game on a CRT via a voodoo 3 3500 TV dongle? Folks, we may have witnessed a once and only world event here

[@hardeeharharrrr]

😂

[@walterwalter-ql1np]

I love thinking about stuff like this. People like to say nothings new under the sun, but that's not true, you just gotta get a little obsessive over interesting little things like this, and then suddenly you're the only human being to ever watch the Michigan Texas game on a CRT via a voodoo 3 3500 TV dongle

[@bdhale34]

@@walterwalter-ql1np Add enough qualifiers to anything and you can be the first. It's how half these "records" are spouted "First person to do X during a solar eclipse on a tricycle at midnight on the cliffside".

[@walterwalter-ql1np]

@@bdhale34 Exactly, and that's fun!

[@jakethreesixty]

Sounds like ESPN framing stats 🤔

[@FasuloA]

A couple years later I got a ATI X800 “All-in-wonder” and still have it. It was awesome, I was using my PC as a DVR wayyy before it was common.

[@netmuck]

when the lgr video goes up mere moments before my burger king arrives, creating a perfect meal video opportunity. life doesn't get better than this.

[@voodootrois]

22:07 We are supposed to believe that the family had established multiple cinematic camera angles for the purpose of merely documenting the fact that the father and son have played basketball together?

[@bruno-bnvm]

Yes

[@goodchildmusic0]

I had a ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro back in the day. I forgot what capture software I used, but it had Macrovision disabling on it. I used to rent obscure vhs horror movies and record them. ARRRGH, Pirate :D

[@RickBaconsAdventures]

I had the all in wonder 9600 XT. used the heck out of it for YEARS

[@nickwallette6201]

I replaced this (3500 TV) with the ATI Radeon AIW. Just "Radeon," later upgraded to a Radeon 8500, then to a 9700 Pro. I really miss ATI. And 3dfx.

[@williamsmith169]

I was a big 3dfx guy back in the day, but the 3500 TV was the card that made me finally switch to ATI. The drivers were so bad on release that I was actually getting fewer FPS than I had on my previous Voodoo 3 card. Stayed with them (ATI/AMD) for a long time, and didn't change over to Nvidia til a few years back.

[@SirDamned]

Free copy of Unreal inside brought a tear to my eye

[@foxyfoxington2651]

Had a friend in college who had one of these and it's hard to overstate how cool it was in the days before video on a PC was a ubiquitous thing. The demo video at ~21:53 is *incredible*.

[@legacyoftheancientsC64c]

4:34 RIP AnandTech. I remember getting a Compaq Presario 5280 in 1999 to play Everquest and desperately needing something better than the motherboard's built in Rage 3D and happened to come across Anand's TNT2 review. That card was such a beast.

[@bdhale34]

Oddly enough I had a pII 266 back in the day that had a Rage 3D onboard and it had a TNT2 installed in it lol. Played a lot more than people think it could too.

[@EdwardWeissbard]

RIP AnandTech, it was certainly my go to review site in 1999

[@frostedbutts4340]

Oh goddamnit, I'm only just learning this. Don't follow PC hardware as much as I used to but that was one of my favorite sites.

[@Camphlobactor]

This is one of the coolest tech videos on youtube and I'm not exaggerating. I love LGR's passion for old hardware and I respect his dedication to trying out all of its features.

[@RMPANDA964]

I dig anything with glide acceleration. That’s my childhood right there. It’s why I use Qemu with 3dfx acceleration when I want to go back in time

[@voodoomelons]

15 year old me saved for a year straight from my first job at the weekends, and walked into Gateways HQ in Dublin and ordered my first PC, a P3 600mhz with 19" VX900 CRT and a Voodoo 3 3000. The 19" CRT blew everyone away; I remember the sales guy trying to make me put the extra cash towards storage instead, but I wasn't leaving without my 19" monitor. The Voodoo 3 was fantastic, took anything you threw at it, but I do recall 1600x1200 on the VX900 was a struggle with the low refresh rate of 60hz, dizzying flicker, had to drop down to 1280x1024 @ 85hz in Windows to make things tolerable. I used that monitor on some form or another for about 14 years, including my new business at the time. But it slowly started to fail around 2012 and was binned. I remember ordering an additional 128MB of SDRAM from Gateway a year after buying the PC, it was about £220 punt (€490 today). Ah the memories.

[@ffwast]

My grandma's Gateway P3 500 computer was something like that,I found the sale flyer still up on the internet somewhere with the options to upgrade the 17 inch CRT to the 19 inch and the Voodoo 3 to the TNT2,and she got both of them! More recently looking at the prices I kind of wish she'd stuck with the Voodoo lol

[@warrax111]

1280x1024 isn't 4:3 resolution, so you had basically everything distorted on expensive monitor with 4:3 display. Good job. ;-)

[@devonglide1830]

I used to retail sale computers when this came out. If I remember correctly, we sold about 10:1 Nvidia cards to 3dfx at the time. Maybe it's a false memory, but I'm pretty sure (based on my shitty memory), that people weren't very interested in this card at the time. That said, the 3dfx voodoo 2 card was responsible for me ever even being interested in computing in the first place, so 3dfx does hold a place in my heart.

[@RealJeffTidwell]

Sounds right. 3Dfx struck gold with the Voodoo and Voodoo2. Voodoo2 in SLI in 1998 was a leap forward and the absolute best, but their dominance was short lived. Nvidia TNT2 was on par with any given Voodoo3 performance-wise, better than Voodoo3 in terms of IQ by allowing 32-bit textures in games like Quake III, and they beat 3Dfx by releasing the GeForce 256 not too much later. 3Dfx had to play catch-up. By the time of the Voodoo5 5500 vs GeForce2 matchup, 3Dfx caught up to and perhaps exceeded Nvidia in image quality… with 32-bit textures and the first really good anti-aliasing solution… but the GeForce2 won most benchmarks. By the time GeForce3 launched, introducing pixel shaders, 3Dfx was either bankrupt or in the process of going bankrupt.

[@nalinux]

I was happy with my V3, but when the GeForce 256 DDR arrived it was clearly obsolete.

[@Bigbacon]

this was out WAY before any 3dfx cards. this was pure DOS.

[@drewnewby]

@Bigbacon This card came out in June, and the GeForce 256 came out in December of '99.

[@nalinux]

@@Bigbacon It depend which Nvidia card you speak about. Nvidia before GF 256 were not as good as Voodoo.

[@eileen4524]

Hi Clint, just want to say that I love your videos and have been watching for a few years. I was probably not even alive for a lot of the tech you’ve featured on your channel but i still find it fascinating. Never stop being amazing!

[@RemnantCult]

Watching modern digital TV with a 1999 graphics card with a TV tuner is the kind of thing that gets me up in the morning. I love that. Picture's clear too.

[@MrWolfSnack]

It's only that clear because its squashed to a small resolution. The DTV box he used is not even for HD Digital and was made for SD digital when the transition first happened in 2006/2007. Mostly every TV network now is on HD digital and these converter boxes are obsolete because the picture is cropped off on what channels you do get and then the others are not received at all because the box is not programmed for that signal band, not to mention HDTV's have built in tuners making these converter boxes obsolete,

[@_mattheweli]

I’m fascinated that the note in the instructions mentioned HDTV. Just as Clint mentioned, that really wasn’t even on anyone’s radar that I knew at all…. I wonder if that meant the same thing as it does today. I gotta think it does.

[@StevoBortzLevel99]

My cousin had this and set up his pc in my uncle's living room to play games and watch stuff using his Bose sound system. Absolutely blew my mind. This same cousin also introduced me to Nesticle and Tracker music so yeah, he was a really cool cousin.

[@Luigi_BitAllForce]

Back in the 90's I had an “ATI TV Wonder” very similar to this Voodoo and I can say that besides how amazing it seemed to be able to capture small video clips, the ability to tune in not just one, but ALL the channels on my cable TV service (which was analog over coaxial cable) AT THE SAME TIME and make up a video wall-desk was insane. I enjoyed it very much and your video reminded me of it. Thank you.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yes! Voodoo 3 is such an awesome card 😊

[@CasepbX]

hell yeah brother!

[@krakken242]

I managed to snag one... by some miracle... I used it along side 3d animation, modeling and video editing programs. I brought the next level to my college classes, which were still using video tapes. My teacher was pissed. I had my final done my second week in class while everyone was struggling to put together a single video.

[@SimonCallahan]

Our family computer didn't have this particular card, but it did have something similar. No big dongle, the inputs went straight to the video card. We only used it a little bit, I was able to make an AMV back in the day when those were popular, my brother and I hooked up our VCR to it and recorded a bunch of anime stuff onto the computer and edited it into an AMV (the song we used was My Plague by Slipknot).

[@JPR3D]

Man, I love how bonkers box art and media interfaces were from the late 90s and early 2000s. "Graphic design is my passion, and so is doing coke!"

[@CantankerousDave]

It’s got nothing on Kai’s Power Tools’ interface.

[@JeffGeerling]

9:10 [dongle-induced laughter] haha I see you in the CC!

[@bluespartan076]

hey just reaching out to LGR, hope you are doing ok, many thoughts towards your way for you and anyone else in ashville affected by the flooding there. best of luck and i hope you guys come out on top! Best wishes from Texas!

[@DudokX]

the Grandma video is brutal. They sent her a video of them being on vacation, having fun and instead of coming to her birthday, they made their own birthday party and sent a video to her. lol

[@LGR]

It is truly bizarre 😄

[@StevenJenkins1]

I walked through a bad neighbourhood across the city I lived in to get one of them on sale somewhere in 1999. I had so many problems with the drivers just as you did, random issues. I’m almost redeemed by seeing it never got better and it wasn’t just me :D I eventually got it working as a graphics card at that time it was really hard to get drive updates (at least where I lived)

[@StevenJenkins1]

And the dongle also drove me crazy 😂 I couldn’t afford to get rid of it so I used it until I could afford to upgrade. Then I sold it some years later CIB to a collector.

[@DerekLippold]

Right? It’s like when he struggled with an inkjet printer - it’s like AH! It’s not just me. They really DO have a problem lol

[@Estolcles]

I had this! It was an upgrade from my VooDoo2. I used to run my Cable and VCR through it... and since my VCR had multiple video/stereo inputs, I had my N64, Dreamcast, AND PlayStation able to be played on my PC (in the long cabled way), and got it to run on my TV. (Which was just as big as my CRT monitor, so I usually didn't bother running the desktop on it.... if I could have.... I honestly can't remember.) So many hours of EverQuest..... RIP Brad McQuaid.

[@EdwardWeissbard]

Thats the way to do it, thumbs up

[@sosemiteyam562]

This sounds like a dream setup for me growing up in the 90s, that is amazing, glad you experienced this!

[@fen4554]

22:26 Ah yes.. The time-honored tradition of having a birthday party for someone who isn't there.

[@Redhotsmasher]

A completely normal birthday party where one person wears two birthday hats while the other two hats sit on the table lol.

[@scaper8]

​@@Redhotsmasher Very typical human birthday events.

[@TerryRed]

This was my first video card in my early days of PC gaming. I remember getting my FREE copy of Unreal Tournament... and my life in gaming was changed forever. Loved the card and became a forever fan of UT. Eventually my last 3DFX card was the Voodoo 5 5000 (to have 3DFX fold not much later).... and people think today's video cards were expensive for what you got :)

[@PCFixer]

I wish we could go back to this era, when manufacturers/companies weren't afraid to make ANYTHING into a PC Card. You had TV Tuners/Radio, a CONSOLE on a Card, the massive Hercules GameTheatreXP with its HUGE audio box, and more 5.25 weirdness than ever. Nowadays, PCs are safe, stable and... well... boring, to be honest. Yes, you can still get soundcards and maybe a PCIe TV Tuner (good luck) but why bother when everything is built into the board and plug'n'play, just works? Thanks, Clint, for bringing us back to the era when PCs were fun!

[@renakunisaki]

I don't know if it counts, but a lot of game console dev systems back in the day were largely "GameCube on a card" and the like.

[@bobbymelbourne4502]

[the terrific closed captioning on the titles]

[@LGR]

[appreciation intensifies]

[@ilovelimpfries]

Bruh, I remember buying the voodoo 3000 like it was yesterday. That box brought back so many memories.

[@BadAnimeGroup]

The very first graphics card I bought myself as a kid was the EVGA Personal Cinema FX 5200, so definitely not the same vintage of Graphics/Tuner Card, but man was the experience revolutionary to me. I bought the card to record footage from my family's older, non-Firewire camcorders, but the end result was that I never had to leave my room to game on either PC or console. I have such a distinct memory of turning off Burnout 3's music and playing my own playlists through Windows Media Player, everything piping through the same speakers, all the while I could record gameplay of all my cool crashes. It felt magical.

[@alexsnider5552]

This was the video card I put in the first computer I ever built. I mowed lawns to earn the money and finally put everything together in the summer of 2000. I loved it! I sooooo wish I still had it. Great video!

[@pcpanikMusik]

Wow. This is now 25 years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday, that I had the choice between a Voodoo 3300 and a ELSA Nvidia TNT2 Pro. I wen‘t for the Nvidia and it was a very quick card. I also upgraded my PII 266 to the PIII 650. I was the king of the hill for one day, with the fastest pc on a big network party. Playing Half Life and CS.

[@damienbalbriggan]

The Voodoo box art has never been beaten! Those were the best days!

[@nephatrine]

saw BIG DONGLE and couldn't help but click the video

[@spyczech]

the shortcut to my heart

[@camotech1314]

Get your mind out of the gutter 😂

[@rickoftherick4610]

Its not a word you hear often these days.

[@Ganondorfdude11]

Expand dongle.

[@FlyboyHelosim]

... and got disappointed when it wasn't attached to a big black man.

[@LanceThumping]

Seeing "3D Gaming at 60fps" being advertised on an old box is really fun.

[@myrandom603]

Happy Friday! Coffee and LGR to kick off the work day - perfect way to start wrapping up the week!

[@DanielErwin-f3p]

I remember buying this card off of eBay back in the day. This was my freshman dorm setup back in 2002-03. It saved A LOT of space and I remember it really fondly. Great for gaming at the time!

[@xskeetskeetskeetx]

I DO NOT miss how janky hardware compatibility was back in the 90's and 00's. We're so spoiled that hardware just plugs in and goes today.

[@LordSenile]

Hardware compatibility today is just as janky in my experience. EVERY new piece of hardware I've ever bought has had some kind of compatibility issue with it that took a long time to fix! These days it's often Bluetooth or Wifi connections that are the main issues, but there's always something that just doesn't work properly from the get go.

[@mintymus]

@@LordSenile I build computers as a side hobby and rarely have any issues. What hardware are you buying?

[@Minimal_M]

​@@mintymus That's what I'm sayin 😂

[@MrWolfSnack]

And this is the problems caused when people think they are smart and try and have that mindset with old PC's. I was raised on windows 95 and 98 so I know full well how it works, and I will never use any Windows beyond 7 because I need control over my PC and don't need toddler level preschool lessons for an operating system.

[@LordSenile]

@@MrWolfSnack Yeah, that's often the problem with modern tech, when something doesn't work, it's much harder to actually DO something about it, since so much is just locked away from the user.

[@darkwing7780]

Really awesome that you make these videos and share the experience with everybody. I had a TNT card, but never got to unbox a Voodoo card before!

[@revoltosotintan]

Hello Clint from Mexico!! I love your videos ❤

[@chrissellshomes150]

Clint, it was wonderful watching Texas smoke Michigan live and then reliving some of it again in your video! Well done and HOOK'EM HORNS!!! \m/

[@KevinM491]

"8 million triangles per second" wow

[@marcus_cole_2]

That brings back memories! I can't say much about the PDFx Vudu TV card, but I can definitely talk about the ATI All-in-Wonder card, which was either a competitor or at least very similar. I had two of those cards-AGP and PCI. At one point, I even had a USB TV tuner model. I deliberately bought them back then because all I had was my computer-no TV, VCR, DVD player, or game system. It was just my Dell G1 OptiPlex, with 20 GB of storage, a Celeron 333 processor, 128 MB of RAM, an ATI All-in-Wonder card, a Turtle Beach sound card, a CD player, and no internet. I only had the music, media, and a few games that I owned. Trust me, there weren't many! The TV tuner part was literally the best part of my setup. It was everything I needed for entertainment back in 2001-crappy aerial TV, the ability to record shows, a couple of games, and some music. I think I also had some multimedia like movies or TV shows, but I can't remember clearly now. The first thing I ever bought for my computer was that ATI All-in-Wonder card, and it was the most important part. Nowadays, there's nothing quite like it that also supports today's graphics. Just imagine if the NVIDIA GTX 4090 had a built-in TV tuner for aerial and cable, HDMI input, and radio-it would actually justify how much space it takes up. But now, the best you can do is install three or four different cards, and the all-in-one category seems to be gone. USB and streaming just don't compare.

[@NorthwestBearcat1214]

Out of the millions watching the Michigan and Texas game, I can guarantee you were the only one watching it on windows 98 lol

[@funnyman1122]

Found one of these at goodwill a while back without the dongle, and if you get a dvi 30+5 (also called m1-da) to vga adapter it works plenty well as a normal voodoo card, been using it without issue in my 98 build ever since!

[@DoctorBadvibes]

I had one of these. This was my big purchase before moving away for college. It saved space because it turned my PC into TV and DVR. I even ran my VCR and Sega Saturn through it. Great for Quake 3! I may actually still have it somewhere. I need to look!

[@b-mania]

This was my first video card. The dongle thing was so heavy it broke the pins that plug into the card, so I emailed 3DFX and they mailed me some new pins. I never used the new pins though, because I thought they would just break again, instead I angled my computer against the wall to hold the cable in place. I used the TV tuner all the time even though I also had a TV in my room. I also used the output of the dongle to connect my computer to my TV to play video games on in big screen (though it admittedly looked a lot worse than on a monitor). Max Payne was actually the breaking point when I had to get a new computer. It would play Max Payne, but not well, all the textures in the graphic novel were scaled down because I think the Voodoo 3 limited textures to 256x256 or something. Most of the game was playable until the very end boss, which was nearly unplayable, but still beatable. Mine was running with a 450Mhz Pentium 3. I recently rebuilt my old rig, and found a connector that converts the output on that to VGA and is much smaller, I think it's made by DELL ("DELL VIDEO CABLE M1 MALE TO VGA FEMALE" was the eBay Listing), so I use that and leave the dongle in storage.

[@amirpourghoureiyan1637]

Nice find with that Dell cable! I did some digging and it seems like the M1 cable is for the P&D video connector, a failed video cable standard from VESA that was mainly used in projectors. I think the spec changed over the years so the early cables with analog support are the ones that work with Voodoo3 TV cards.

[@tannarframpton9454]

I was 17 in 1999 and I remember salivating over this card. Great video, thank you for sharing!!

[@obiwanceleri]

I had one of these cards and actually helped Voodoo elucidate the issues - the drivers are FINE. The problem (as you found out) is the SEQUENCE. For some reason if you don't install the drivers in the proper order you'll end up with all sorts of funky issues. I was not much of a gamer and I bought the 3500 for the TV part. To be 100% honest I was very underwhelmed by the video quality. And for the life of me I can't remember where I put the card... I saw how much these cards are going for ... maybe I should try to find it and make a fortune LOL Thanks for the memories!

[@LGR]

Glad it wasn’t just me then, setting it up felt like a magic ritual. Appropriate for a “voodoo” card I guess!

[@SamariumNickel]

had this 3500 TV capture card back in the day installed in a Compaq presario. Actually remember that AGP and driver thing being a whole issue I didn't really understand back then. brings me back. Don't remember the cable being that stiff but certainly remember it being bulky behind the tower. My mom bought this for me (birthday I believe) at Frys Electronics. Had saved the box for years and year but whoever knows what happened to it since. I watched and captured live TV from it often, Simpsons and the Critic mostly. don't recall the issues you had recording... once I got the card working. But yeah do remember that being a real headache to setup initially. Windows 98 SE and Maybe Win2k. Lots of Quake 3 Arena for sure. Thank you for showing it.

[@_B_K_]

I always find it interesting how companies at the top of their game all of a sudden vanish. Wonder which major companies will be relics years from now.

[@LGR]

Right? Never know what’s next in tech

[@nathanrye]

Ubisoft for sure...

[@WitchyRhia]

i had this card as a kid! by today's standards the dongle is certainly a bit much, but back then it was one of the most convenient things, i remember plugging my consoles in and being wowed by the fact that i could just play them right at my desk, and you know what this explains a lot as to why i've always had a loose disc copy of unreal without any memory of having an unreal box or even a jewel case, turns out i've kept part of my voodoo 3 experience with me all these years.

[@DomRiccobene]

There was nothing quite like walking out of a CompUSA with a new Voodoo card in the bag.

[@CommodoreVic20]

I just can't get enough of your videos. Never stop! ❤

[@MusicFromAnotherTime]

This video definitely has Big Dongle Energy.

[@bgtubber]

Dude! My first 3D _accelerator_ (as they were called back in the day) was a Voodoo 3 AGP. I loved that thing so much! Games ran like cr@p without it and were not fun to play, but once we got that thing, they instantly looked awesome and ran so smooth. Diablo 2, Unreal Tournament, Half-Life, Need For Speed 3, and a lot more felt like totally different games with it. It was such a blast! And the box art! Probably the coolest I've seen. If I knew how iconic they would become, I would have kept it as a collectible. Such a piece of PC tech history. I'm still sad that 3DFX went away. The GPU market could have looked a lot different with more competing companies.

[@nickwallette6201]

I upgraded to this card from a Matrox Mystique. The Mystique was _technically_ my first 3D card, but this ties for that honor, since it could actually do all the 3D things, like texture mapping. I installed this, and then ran the 3Dmark 2000 benchmark and XLR8R demo... it absolutely blew my mind. I now have one of these installed in my Pentium II, using an EVC** to VGA adapter. I still have the breakout cable too, but don't usually need the VIVO capabilities. I used that all the time to play SNES and PlayStation games on my computer monitor back then, though! **NOTE: It's actually not _entirely_ proprietary. It uses the VESA Enhanced Video Connector to output VGA. EVC had dedicated pins for audio in/out, and analog video (composite / S-Video) in, but no video out. It also had pins reserved for other things like USB and Firewire. It was designed to be a single-cable solution from the PC to a monitor, which then had breakouts for all the things you would want to plug in. Great idea, it just never really took off.

[@szpg]

Hi Clint, Thank you for another entertaining video 🙂 I remember when I used this Voodoo to copy rented and protected videotapes. I accidentally discovered that the output from my father's player, when linked through this device to my VCR, filtered the audio and video signals. It seemed to bypass the noise that the copy protection would normally cause. Old times good times 😁

[@LuminalSpoon]

19:01 Wild TWiR Dave spotted

[@Wobble2007]

Love these videos, especially when you combine them with showing off your CRTs.

[@LGR]

Thank you!

[@nicholasorr4230]

21:34 this is the perfect UI, oh my god

[@LGR]

It’s just so beautiful

[@MattJerkhole]

I had no idea you live in so much greenery. That peek out the window was gorgeous. And being holed up in nature with a bunch of fun tech seems like a dream. lol

[@CsendesMark]

17:40 You did not say "ENHANCE!!!!" 😁

[@apekatt2007]

Videos like this is exactly why I'm a subscriber to this channel! My neighbor had this specific card, and I had the 3000 AGP! ❤

[@Knobiknows]

I remember being completely jealous of my friend when he got his first Vodoo3 for christmas and was able to play Unreal Tournament on max resolution

[@FreeTheUyghurs]

Max resolution of... 1024x768! Oh how much screen real estate we thought we had back then.

[@Bethos1247-Arne]

I once bought a Voodoo 3 3500 from Ebay, installed in once, it worked, and I put it back to the box. Was just a thing of wanting to own this beast.

[@seoulpurpose]

Oh man, this card was the first thing I ever bought from eBay! It was used, but still a recent card, and my parents were so sure that I was wasting my money on a "scam". I used the capture feature for years to make skateboard videos, long after the GPU was otherwise obsolete

[@acubley]

03:00 When the MHZ was mentioned I got a mental image of Scotty looking at the Mac in ST:IV and saying "How Quaint!" 🖖

[@BurningFlame1999]

The Voodoo 3 3500 was for a few months the fastest video card on the market, until October 1999 when the Geforce 256 was released.

[@Wang_Thunder]

It was still the fastest card for the majority of major hits on the market, even after the g256.) :)

[@quinnocent]

The 256 wasn't even the fastest for DX games, even if it was the first to be fully DX7 compliant. It would take subsequent cards and newer games for nvidia to really surge ahead.

[@Sopaguayaba]

Thank you LGR I’ll be watching this video about 10 time till I watched all of it. I lowkey fall asleep to your videos and you help me relax immediately. NOT A BAD THING!!! I do enjoy the knowledge of past tech! Thank you :))

[@TheObsesedAnimeFreaks]

Party like its 1999, Rip Prince.

[@Icy-nee-san]

I remember the shelves of our local Future Shop being lined with these back in the 90s up here in Canada. I always dreamed how awesome it would be to have one of these. Thanks for reminding me of my childhood dreams.

[@ConstruaIncorpore]

The first time I saw WindVD, my boss installed it on a machine and played the film Seven Years in Tibet... I was impressed with the sound and video quality. Fantastic. The first film I watched on DVD was on the PlayStation 2, Film Matrix.

[@ax14pz107]

The matrix was my first DVD as well. It was amazing how sharp the picture was compared to VHS.

[@nickwallette6201]

I had a Creative DXR2 DVD and MPEG decoder card with a TV out. I went to Blockbuster and rented The Wedding Singer. I took the box off the shelf and up to the counter, and they stopped me to verify: "You know this is a DVD, not VHS, right?" haha It was so new that I guess lots of people didn't notice, or didn't even know what it was yet, and then got home and thought "What the heck is this? Why does this CD have no label?"

[@1blisslife]

This card brings back a lot of memories! I bought it back in the day & still own it. Nice to see you review it. 😎 That rigid chunkster of a cable for that dongle, man o man o man! I was always afraid I'd rip or break the card's connector(but never did). 😂 I bought it for capturing stuff via S-Video/RCA's but also thought I could hook up a game console only to find out that lag existed. I remember being sad about that. On the PC gaming side I was not completely happy with it and would swap between that and my other video card(I remember having a 32MB voodoo) for some games. Just depending on what I was doing. I had all the same problems you had with it & including the green artifacts and the tinny sound. I would record DVD's and boxing fights with it. I never really used the FM feature because I had plenty of radios to do this without booting up my PC. I loved all the features on the capture side of things and used it until the late 2000's. I wish you would've tried the output side of things(it wasn't perfect either).😂 I also wanted to say thank you for stopping at the MiniDisc booth when you came over to VCFSW in Dallas. I never thought I'd get to meet you and bump into you outside & get to take a picture with you along with my MD VU meter car deck at the door. 😊

[@robinmaes58]

Windows 9x is just weird sometimes when it comes to drivers 😂

[@LGR]

No kidding. Still frequently baffles me a quarter century later!

[@nicknellas1287]

I remember having this card, it was the best card ever, period!! It saved me once... So it's 2004, Greece is playing the European Football final against Portugal, as you can imagine, not a single electronics store is open nor anything else to be honest, a couple of hours before the game our TV just broke, dead nothing's working, so I install my card again, I setup the tv tuner and we managed to watch the final in my really crappy 14 inch monitor!! Oh I'll never forget it 😂

[@andrewrainville9453]

"DTV is bad" AMEN. They could have used the extra leftover bandwidth to extend the signal range, but NO. They HAD to use it to cram as many channels and stations into one spot. The whole changeover WWAS A MASSIVE MISTAKE.

[@kibbee890]

I had one of these back in university. I loved being able to watch TV on my computer as I didn't have room for a separate TV in my small dorm room.

[@Ganiscol]

A standalone TV tuner card was a big thing for me in the first decade of the 21st century. I would also use it to watch TV in a small window on top of my favorite MMO at the time, Anarchy Online, to bear the insanity of grinding XP or bridge dull periods during raids and mass PvP events. It also felt kinda cool just having this setup and possibility - so advanced and high-tech! It was great to have a TV tuner card! 😅

[@materialconditional]

Have to admit I was distracted by how much I love your MOMA t shirt. I need to try to track one down in Scotland. This does take me back to the almost uncontainable excitement of getting my voodoo 3 3000 Paired with a k6 2 380 - that was a step from my p120 with no hardware acceleration. Thanks for the video, as always!

[@Ayelmar]

I had one of those! Bought it at Babbage's in Hickory Hollow Mall in mid-2001, during the beta for Dark Age of Camelot, to replace the earlier ATI card I'd bought for Everquest in '99, after I discovered that the older card just didn't have the video memory to render all the textures in DAoC. Should still have both cards in storage, too! I went for the 3500 because I'd played with anancient Reveal (remember them?) TV-500 capture card, and wanted to be able to do some basic video editing as my filmmaking bug was starting to bite. I moved on to bigger, bdder cards through the '00s, but kept the Voodoo around for use in alternate builds, Linux testing, and so on. Sadly while I was doing an OS & driver reinstall on one of those builds, using the v2x CD-ROM drive for the driver disc suddenly turned into two shiny semi-circles in the drive tray 😥 and I just grabbed a spare Radeon from by parts bin, filed away the Voodoo, and moved on.... If I ever have the spare time to get back into the depths of the storage unit and give ithe card another (experimental) try -- if I can track down a copy of the driver disc.

[@jumpyg1258]

Now this brings back some memories. I bought one of these in the mid 2000's. Was the first video card I ever purchased. I also felt the dongle connection in the back was weird.