I made 3Dfx Voodoo2 work on a modern PC!

A breakthrough! Using a PCI-e to PCI adapter, I was able to connect my old 3dfx Voodoo 2 to a modern PC running Windows 10.
64-bit Voodoo2 drivers:
www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic...
Fix for mapmem issue:
www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic...

[@fourthhorseman4531]

I remember going to a LAN party shortly after getting my Voodoo2 card. A lot of the guys at the party had not yet seen any 3D acceleration on PC games. I remember one guy seeing the intro/title screen for Unreal, the castle fly around scene, and saying, "You can't do that on a PC! You can't do that!" He was totally floored. Those were good days. :)

[@bjornna7767]

Unreal was an unreal experience back then, yeah! Though, it also looked fantastic in software mode.

[@Anubisviech]

@@bjornna7767 In my opinion, Glide is the most beatiful renderer for that game. Its not even that hard to get it running emulated with nglide on modern hardware. All those reflections and stuff that the software renderer is not capable of.

[@bjornna7767]

@@Anubisviech Ofc, I'm with you, yet it was also astonishing what the classic Unreal could deliver w/o 3dfx/Glide. We'll play it on the next LAN with modern Engine and Wrapper, as well as HD Textures. Still looks good today (!)

[@slimebuck]

i remember getting the doom 3 E3 demo from a MirC chatroom like years before it came out, played it on a voodoo3 3000 When I showed that demo to people, they had NEVER seen anything like it

[@davidbanner9001]

Unreal was the first game I booted up on my first Voodoo card. It really was a thing to behold at the time.

[@Zerbey]

It's hard to describe to younger people now what a huge leap it was going from regular graphics to 3D back in the 1990s, the difference was absolutely mind boggling. I had a Voodoo 1 and a Voodoo 2, the latter being a pretty major performance boost - 800x600! Nice trip down memory lane!

[@fuzzblightyear145]

yeah i remember those days. Had a Voodoorush, then a voodoo2. was mindblowing at the time. The fact that every couple of years there was like a quantum leap in CPU and GPU power. Every 2yrs was a new gfx card (back when they were affordable, not like today), VRush, Voodo2, Geforce2GTS, GEforce4Ti, GF6800, GF8800, GTX460, and STILL running my 10 yr old GTX 980!

[@WardenWolf]

Had an S3 Virge built into my PC, and then got this on top of it. Pretty badass for its time.

[@orangehatmusic225]

Moto Racer!

[@user-ir2sy9ut1e]

@@WardenWolf Agree.it is so bad!

[@vladimirrodionov5391]

After the first few minutes of 3dfx Tomb Raider it felt like the Moon landing for graphics.

[@skumflum7511]

Awesome, dude! I worked at a computer shop in the mid-1990s after school. The owner let me buy hardware at purchase price instead of receiving a cash salary. Living at home with my parents, I didn't care much about money, only computer hardware. I remember I was one of the first at a big LAN party to have a Diamond Monster 3D (3Dfx Voodoo 1), and everyone gathered around my monitor in awe. You knew it kicked in when you'd hear a distinct click sound (there were actual relays on the card). Awesome times.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Right on! Those were the best of times :-)

[@Matt-dk3wl]

I worked at a PC shop in the 90's too! I had every CPU from P60,75,90,100,120,K6200,233,266, all the way up to probably the Athlon series where I then went off to college and moved away from that job. It was so awesome to be miles ahead of the normies, it's like we were doing magic to some folks. I remember visiting some family and they were playing Goldeneye and those graphics were terrible, just terrible. When they came around I showed them network quake2 and nobody could believe it.

[@HenrySomeone]

@@Matt-dk3wl Just an up to date cpu didn't make you miles ahead of "normies" though. I had P200 in like 96 too and as soon as I slightly bragged about it, there was another guy with a P233. Having the very first Voodoo close to release though, that's a different story...

[@andlinux]

@@HenrySomeone True

[@sadev101]

so basicly you worked for free. you paid the wholesale price. he bouught at wholesale. so that cancels things out. and for that you worked at his shop... looking back on that it does not seem fair

[@nickram81]

I was in highschool in the late 90's so I got to experience the switch from software to hardware accelerated gaming. As well as going from a 56k modem to a cable modem. Both experiences were like what I imagine seeing color TV for the first time was like.

[@lemagreengreen]

That's great, had Voodoo2 SLI back in 1998 and fond memories of gaming back then. Great community effort to bring drivers to x64 Windows, would not have guessed that was possible!

[@davidt3563]

Those were the days! Miss my old build with my SLI Black magic Voodoo2s.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

@@davidt3563 100% agree! Great memories of those days 😎🥹

[@111elf1]

i got twoo orchid voodoo 2 (plus a voodoo 5 2 gpu pci)

[@pwnmeisterage]

Rewriting 32-bit code for 64-bit compatibility is actually rather routine. But drivers can be tricky because of exacting hardware timings. In theory you could rewrite them without the hardware, but in practice you'll never get things working properly without having the hardware on hand to test and tweak the new driver code.

[@Zerbey]

Also a nice testament to the backwards compatibility of the PCI standard.

[@clintthompson4100]

I still have my Voodoo 3 3000 card. Nice to see when others still love the older hardware. Awesome job.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

100% agree! I love playing with this old hardware. And I’d still love to get a Voodoo 3 even in 2023 😂

[@Darxide23]

Honestly, I think that's still the best version of the Voodoo ever. I wish I still had mine.

[@DJShadesUK]

@@jamesfmackenzie I think I still have my Voodoo 3 3000. Somewhere. In a box. In the loft... but I ain't venturing up there lest I get badgered into sorting out the rest of the crap thats up there too!

[@arthurmann578]

@@YoureUsingWordsIncorrectly Same with me only I used a couple of screws instead of the zip tie! The first card I bought only lasted 2 weeks before it burned out and when I got a free replacement I immediately installed the fan after learning about the overheating problem on them. Still works fine today though I very rarely use it now. 👍👍

[@tomcutts9200]

I actually managed to burn out at least 3 Voodoo 3s, once in the middle of a LAN party. Good times!

[@gfdggdfgdgf]

I'm still convinced we'll never see a revolution in graphics as big as going from software rendering to 3dfx voodoo 1.

[@GhtPTR]

The revolution is much bigger and is happening now. We already have path tracing at 60FPS on 4k with some quirks like DLSS. It's only a matter of one maybe two card generations to come before engine like Unreal 5 feature photo-realistic games and that will be the end of the journey. The next step will be getting rid of rasterization, but that's still a long shot.

[@thewhyzer]

@@GhtPTR Next step will be AI generating graphics on the fly given only textual descriptions of the scene. Imagine merely feeding the text of Lord of the Rings in to build the complete game world for a LotR game.

[@GhtPTR]

@@thewhyzer Already waiting for Midjourney generating 3D models. Yep, you're right, AI is the thing now.

[@leokristek9998]

Agree. Now is only evolution,not revolution!

[@rpm10k.]

@@GhtPTR ray tracing is a bs gimmick at this point

[@garyl5128]

Wow, seeing the old Voodoo in action at the end really took me back and gave me some major nostalgia for those days. It was almost like how I felt when I installed my Voodoo card for the first time. I think I might still have that voodoo card somewhere...

[@oblivieon1567]

Got the card, oh wait it doesn't fit. Ok now it fits, drivers... Nope can't install it, oh wait disable this then reboot. Still no dice, oh wait here's a fix. Dang another error. Here's a fix to the fix. Hooray it works! YUP sounds like PC gaming in the 90's to me 🤣

[@dmacpher]

"your soundcard works perfectly"

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Of course! The authentic retro PC experience 😂

[@le9038]

The Plug & Pray Experience

[@T3hBeowulf]

I picked up one of those PCI to PCIe adapters to run my Aureal Vortex 2 based card on a board too modern for PCI slots. It never even occurred to me to try it with the Voodoo 2. That's awesome, thank you!

[@aaron96244]

How's that work out for you? What chipset were you running on and did DOS sound work?

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Very interesting idea! I have an SB Live and also a ESS Solo card. Will try them out with this adapter too!

[@T3hBeowulf]

Sadly, I never got around to properly testing it out. (weee kids. 🙃) I confirmed the card is detected in Windows 10 while fitted in the adapter but there aren't any working drivers for the Vortex2 in Windows 10. I am using a Core i7-980 with an Intel X58 Express chipset. I need to try that system with pure DOS again. I wanted to run Win98 on there but ran into issues with the SATA drivers. (going back, I'll probably try to drop an IDE PCIe card in there and run from an IDE SSD/CF)

[@randomgamingin144p]

@@T3hBeowulf enable ide/ata mode in the bios since you have a cpu before broadwell/skylake edit: you will also need to copy the install files to the hard drive (windows 98 actually lets you do that), and once youve installed, to run games simply dump and copy isos from a usb flash drive and mount using daemon tools. you might need no cd cracks for some games, but generally it will work

[@stefanl5183]

@@jamesfmackenzie These adapters "should" work with most PCI cards because from a software point of view PCIe is backward compatible with PCI. That's why all you need is a simple converter chip, and maybe some extra voltages. The gotcha, as you discovered here is driver support. Luckily it appears someone wrote 64 bit drivers for the voodoo 2 cards. Now, the question is will that be the case with other cards?

[@bingobot]

It was jawdropping to go from software gfx settings to 3dfx in Fifa 98 back in the day, fog and everything!

[@vBDKv]

I remember when I first got one of these. It turned gaming completely upside down for me. Games were running smooth as butter, and they also looked a lot better. No more pixelated graphics. Quake and Unreal was the most impressive back in the day.

[@dtsdigitalden5023]

It's remarkable that you got it to run on a modern system, with a modern operating system. A labour of love that was, and well worth it by the looks of it. I too had a Voodoo 2 back in the day, and I remember how impressive it was at the time; truly groundbreaking stuff. Nicely done.

[@MrAkaacer]

Well... you have to give it to microsoft and the PCs open architecture. Try and do this on a mac. Lol.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

It's more of a gimmick than anything else. It's a cool hack, but at this point, Glide is emulated in DOS Box, so there's little practical reason for this. Not to mention that a good chunk of the boards have already either died or been disposed of for other reasons.

[@dtsdigitalden5023]

@@SmallSpoonBrigade Sometimes, it's not about the path of the least resistance, especially when it comes to hardware. The path of most resistance, once you get thing to work, can be incredibly rewarding. (But I know, I totally get what you're saying, and where you're coming from). Nostalgia is a powerful incentive. Believe me.

[@retrotech2020]

That is absolutely fantastic. I bought the Voodoo II when it was released and running on my Pentium II 350 it was an absolute dream. Its amazing to see this old beast still running.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Glad you enjoyed it! 😎

[@venoltar]

I still have a voodoo banshee, that I have kept for pure nostalgia reasons, awesome to see a similar generation getting back up and running.

[@UpLateGeek]

No idea how many hours of Quake II I played on my Voodoo2, but it was a lot! I remember when I first installed it, and going from a slow S3 Virge/DX (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro, even upgraded to 4mb), the difference was like night and day. Buttery smooth framerates compared to the S3, and the hardware T&L engine just looked so much better. I probably ran around for 5 minutes in that starting area shooting the blaster just to watch it light up the wall as the round went past.

[@jnordne2]

I got into Voodoo with the OG Voodoo 1. I was at the computer hardware store (remember those?) and they had Quake 1 running on side-by-side machines. One had software rendering, the other running GLQuake. Like you said, it was night and day. I was only like 15 at the time but did some work for a friend's dad, who shortly after bought me one.

[@nvmskullworks4794]

T&L happened with the GeForce 256 however.

[@UpLateGeek]

@@nvmskullworks4794 ah yes, that's right. It must've been some fancy texturing effect or something. Either way it looked way better than software rendering.

[@perry92964]

i had the same set up must have played through that game and all the expansions 20 times, even played them with my friend in co op

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

@@jnordne2 Yes, although 3dFX did get massively lucky that the price of RAM came down when it did. When they announced their cards, they were laughably expensive to the point where nobody was taking them seriously. Then the price of RAM dropped, and the other companies were screwed. It's a shame that PowerVR didn't get to have a second revision of their board for such a long time, as it was the only one I remember that was at all competitive at that stage. In some ways it was better, higher screen res and not needing the goofy pass through cable.

[@mrnobodyinvr9762]

That was my first card and Wow was is amazing in its day. Loved being a part of that era of gaming. So many ground breaking moments came to my eyes thru that card and my P90

[@KapnKuTT]

I ran a PC with a Vodoo 3, including the SVHS Adapter to play Rollcage 2 on my CRT TV and another PC with 2x Vodoo 2's in "SLI". Loved those cards. Interstate, HL Mod's, CNC, Starcraft 1, etc.

[@CRT_sRGB]

Hi, I just wanted to say I really appreciate your keeping this video short and sweet, with no flab. I also played Quake II back in the day... without hardware acceleration. 😄

[@CinePhil101]

The GPU wars from the mid to late 90s was an amazing time to be a PC enthusiasts. The competition made for some incredible technological progress speed.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

Yes, but if you chose wrong, it was rather expensive and embarrassing. And if you chose right, it was just expensive.

[@vladimirrodionov5391]

Still impressive how in the space of just 2-3 years a boring office computer because a first rate gaming machine, a competent graphics workstation with NT 4.0 or an Internet server with Linux.

[@spokoman23]

OMFG, I had a Voodoo 2. This brings a tear to my eye. Awesome job!

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Thanks!!

[@porkch0mp538]

man that brings me back. i remember how silky smooth quake used to run on a nice setup. it was so badass

[@azathoz]

This is a very interesting project. I have two voodoo2 in sli mode on a pentium 2 computer, playing Blood 2 and Incubación right now. I love to play old games on original hardware, but for those not so retro geek as me about the hardware, your approach is great.

[@grast5150]

In my friend group during the early 90s, I was the first one to pick up a Voodoo card because I wanted to play Quake 3D. This purchase amazed about 20-30 people during LAN parties. (Remember those?) It took less than a few months and everyone was running a VooDoo card. I eventually bought a second to do SLI and get even better performance. Ahh the 90s.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Great times!!

[@tigheklory]

I'm just hoping you also put a PCI to ISA adapter in that adapter and plug in a AWE 64 Gold.

[@Aeduo]

There's a chance the TPM to ISA adapter might work. :p

[@symol30872]

That's awesome. I still have 2xVoodoo 2's lying around. I mostly play retro games on my retro PCs but it's pretty incredible that this works at all.

[@Kuimera]

This brought me back.. dude you made me feel really old ! Great job on putting that thing to work!

[@Franku40keks]

Really good video and I appreciate that it's not half an hour long, like other creators. Just interesting and straight to the point. And you don't want to sell me nordVPN.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it :-)

[@VintageModernRemixes]

I couldn't click on this video fast enough... what an absolutely brilliant project. It's great to see Quake 2 in all its 3DFX glory!

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Thanks!!

[@JazAero]

I still have my Voodoo cards never thought I would see the day they would go back into a PC

[@user-ir2sy9ut1e]

i miss my Voodoo1.that is my first 3D card

[@pierrebegin6262]

25 years later and it is still working on a PC! Awesome!! I remember having 2 ATI Voodoo2 in SLI. I kept this setup until 2005, it was powerfull for its time.

[@lordhostile]

As someone who had SLI 12MB Voodoos, so glad to see how you were able to get that classic hardware working. Now you need an 16bit ISA Creative AWE32 Card w/8mb edo memory for that hardware wavetable! Cheers from Las Vegas!

[@KRIS_W86]

Lucky bastard lives in LV😆

[@ATSNorthernMI]

There were epic games released back then that I loved playing on the Voodoo2. Unreal (gold), U.T., Tomb Raider, and Drakan Order of the Flame. Not many people knew about that game and it was one of the most epic experience I had with PC gaming. There was also emulators that ran N64 games with the Glide plugin beautifully and with great speed. Friends and I would play countless hours of 007 golden eye, Mario 64 and Zelda Majoras mask with the Voodoo2.

[@jamminwithmatt5313]

Voodoo2 was my first EVER graphics card and I will never forget going to PC World and picking it up from the self. My all time favourite memory of this card and the pc was playing Soldier Of Fortune, my mum had to buy me the game and I got it for Christmas and I'll never forget my mum telling me about the warning she got from the manager of the shop as she was about to pay warning her it was very graphic in the violence and no one under 18 should be playing it, she still bought it. What legend my mum is for that!

[@bricaaron3978]

Well, you've piqued my interest. I have to try Soldier of Fortune now.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

I love stories like this! Those were great times :-)

[@ugzz]

I had to check the date to make sure it wasn't April 1st again... I cannot believe this worked! AWESOME! I had a voodoo card as a kid.. so the sky is the limit, i'd love to see any and everything you can get working! I think the first two games I played were Tomb Raider and Quake 2, but then I found glide patches for Carmageddon and Need for speed II Se.. so much goodness!

[@MikeBaas]

Maybe try to see if SLI works next?

[@spavatch]

Not sure if there’s a case with two vertical card mounts.

[@PauloRAgostinho]

I thought the same! With two riser cards and a case with dual vertical mounts or a motherboard with PCI

[@SolidSonicTH]

You're tempting me to do this when my B350 motherboard arrives... It has two PCI slots built straight on the board and I've got two SLI'd Voodoo2s in one of my retro PCs.

[@christopheoberrauch784]

This is exactly what I would like to see too. The challenges never run out.

[@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles]

@@SolidSonicTH do it! do it!

[@Turktien]

Super impressive! I have 2 Voodoo 2s (one needs work) and it's currently in my 486 for silliness while I get ready to do a K6-2 build.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Thanks! I used my Voodoo2’s on a K6-2 rig, and then an overlocked Celeron 450A. Great times!!

[@jnordne2]

I tried putting my voodoo card in a 5x86 133 machine. Quake 2 was still too slow to play, but it worked.

[@Turktien]

@@jnordne2 I had the best luck with Tomb Raider and Resident Evil

[@ricardoconti3868]

Congrats for your effort overcoming so many issues.

[@spressne1]

Kudos man! Tenacity and perseverance to make that happen! Thank you for your efforts!

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Thanks!!

[@WalrusFPGA]

Awesome! Never thought something like this would work. Would love to see Quake 1 with transparent water on the voodoo2, running on a modern PC. (needs the maps re-VIS'd, but you can find archives of those pre-prepared instead of doing it yourself)

[@Jenny_Digital]

For me, it was Tomb Raider. It was the first game I could get to work on my first PC build, before it even had a hard disk. Before long I had Windows 95B and a 3dfx card and was playing it so much nicer than in software. I can’t remember which generation of 3dfx I had but that doesn’t matter all that much, the magic was there.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

This was one of the first games I fired up! 100% agree - the 3Dfx version of Tomb Raider is the best by a long way - love it!

[@noname-uf4je]

I watched the videos playlists on this channel. You have very unique! content. thank you for all yours videos!

[@ceres4881]

TNT2 Ultra owner here, you are absolutely right, these were the glory days of 3D gaming

[@jamesfmackenzie]

😎

[@enilenis]

Have Voodoo's up to 5500, but running them on modern hardware? That never even crossed my mind. So good to know, that this option is available. Having a time-appropriate machine is better, but this is just great! Too bad most computer cases won't have this extra slot for the card. That design to me is equally amazing - them putting it in, as if knowing that someone was going to do this one day.

[@phattjohnson]

If someone's got a Voodoo card they want to use, upgrading to a case like the one in this video seems almost mandatory! I want to go hunting through old PC parts in my parents' shed now.. maybe there's something floating around from the 90s :P

[@AngelusNielson]

This was the graphics card in the first personally owned PC I ever owned. Good times.

[@TAGMedia7]

This video did not go the direction I thought it would. That's amazing that it worked!

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Me too! 😂

[@nutbastard]

I remember when my dad bought one of these. We were an all Mac household, but the Mac version was significantly more expensive, so pops bought the PC version and then managed to flash it with Mac compatible firmware. I have no idea how impressive / easy / difficult that is to do, but yeah, he pulled it off.

[@eh42]

I'm just amazed that the PCIe patch cord works - I can't imagine the electrical noise it has to deal with, never mind timing delays from increasing the signal path!

[@kurbeco]

Very impressed that it worked in Win10. Recommend you add cooling to the Voodoo2 if you use it for longer periods, it’s been seen that when not held back by CPUs from 1998 that they run a lot hotter

[@nutbastard]

Is there not a way to throttle it back in software, or force a CPU cap? Seems more straight forward than rigging a cooling solution.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

This has been suggested by a few people. I have some heatsinks and an IR thermometer on order. Thanks! :-)

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

Crazy that it works, like!

[@jamesfmackenzie]

100%! I was really surprised when the Voodoo sprang to life 😂

[@loadtoad]

The 3DFX Voodoo Card was my very first graphics card boost I ever did, and it really propelled me into my love of computer games from a LONG time ago! Thanks for posting this episode!!! RIBBIT!

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Glad you enjoyed it! 😎

[@mattuw82]

I had a voodoo 2 SLI back in the day! I also had a dual CPU system. Dual everything!

[@laumpolumpio]

I would like to see the San Francisco Rush port that came bundled with the Voodoo Banshee running in glide on a modern PC since that game is very CPU dependant, it should run a lot better than with a Pentium 2/PIII.

[@theantiveganchannel3596]

Core2 duo and higher is a pentium 3( including Pentium M)

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

@@theantiveganchannel3596 I wish the hardware companies would stop the stupid naming schemes. Yes, cache and clockspeed for processors wasn't perfect at the time, but it did give a decent sense of the relative performance, so long as you didn't skip too many generations. Now, it's pretty much a guess, if you're not doing a ton of research, as the names are completely useless.

[@gluuuuue]

This is cool to see. I owned a card of each generation Voodoo and had multiples of I think Voodoo2. Unsigned driver warnings are "scary" but not that scary. Back far enough, none of the drivers were signed anyway, certainly not during the DOS/Win3.1 days.

[@faradiaulia5560]

It is not. It just warned that the driver has not been tested by microsoft official yet

[@stefanl5183]

@@faradiaulia5560 It just means you gotta pay them some money, then they will sign it. It's pretty expensive I think. Also, I doubt they would even deal with someone who's just a hobbyist. You have to be a big company. Anyway, a driver being unsigned doesn't necessarily mean anything "scary". You can just edit the inf file and it will invalidate the signature.

[@SonicBoone56]

Bless the KZbin algorithm for constantly showing more and more retro tech channels I've not subscribed to.

[@johnhenry8611]

This takes me back. Sometime around ‘99 I had a 2 card setup on my AMD K63 400mhz system. It was a AGP Voodoo 3 /16mb card and a PCI Voodoo 2 card with I believe 12mb. They were linked together and gave some impressive benchmarks for its time. But it was short lived because around that time the GeForce came out and change everything. I bought the GeForce 2mx. It was the bottom line GeForce but it destroyed anything I’d owned previously.

[@Magmafire]

It would be interesting to see what benchmark results you get now that you easily have a gpu bound setup.

[@starsiegeplayer]

You might want to add heat sinks to the 3 processors. I had put my old voodoo2 card on a core2 duo PC running windows xp, and it seemed like the more powerful CPU drove the card pretty hard so I needed the extra cooling to keep it stable.

[@SkeeterPondRC]

Man. That was awesome. The VooDoo2 was the first GFX card I bought. I remember being absolutely blown away when you could SEE THROUGH WATER in GLQuake 🤣

[@warrax111]

wait, you couldnt see in quake in software mode? I need to go check it

[@paulphillips3783]

Nostalgiagasm - Half Life + Voodoo lead to my 30+ years of PC gaming. World changing stuff! I vividly remember being asked to install Windows 3.11 at work and coming home to Unreal Tournament and HL eye watering gorgeousness. Bit of a step up from Civ! Thanks for the awesome vid James.

[@PolarManne]

Neat! I've also got a Voodoo 2 and a motherboard just old enough to have PCI slots (Asus Q87M-E), and after following the video it worked great! Was kinda funny a 12MB Voodoo running next to my 12GB RTX 3060.

[@phattjohnson]

Haha that's awesome! I just checked and my mobo has no PCI slot so I'll have to go extender cable like this video (assuming I can track my old Voodoo 2 card down..)

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Glad I could help! 😎

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Good luck!

[@ToxicwasteProductions]

I built one pc with windows xp and windows 10 dual boot with native 3dfx voodoo 2 sli support. Yep sli under windows 10. Also managed to get eax working under windows 10 :)

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Amazing! Did the board have native PCI slots? Or did you use bridge adapters like this video?

[@MajSolo]

I like this story. Detective work and not giving up.

[@MycketTuff]

Found my old Voodoo 2 recently, made me happy in the eye

[@MarimeGui]

Combine this with the novel dISAppointment ISA to TPM adapter, one might be able to make a fully functionnal Modern/Vintage gaming PC !

[@jamesfmackenzie]

That’s the dream! I *think* this board has the right TPM pin out for the dISAppointment too. Until then I’ll try SBEMU 😎

[@nalinux]

Next step : using a ball serial mouse with a CH340 Usb adapter :)

[@TheRailroad99]

@@nalinux most boards still have native COM ports, just not the DE-9 connector. Instead they usually have a pin header to connect a slot cover with the DE-9 connector

[@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles]

@@nalinux Windows 10 works with a serial mouse straight away. Literally just plug it in and it works.

[@nalinux]

@@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles Right, you are both right about it ... The more stupid thing is the mainboard I have now has serial and // ports ...

[@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles]

Really great to see! Yes you can emulate a Voodoo but it's just not the same as physical silicon. I still have my two V2's from 98, and the SLI cable. They are in a Pentium 3 at the moment, but it would be awesome to run them in a modern machine. I also have a V3 3000 but it's an AGP card, I doubt it's possible to make that work.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Nice!! Yes I agree on AGP. The reason PCI works is because of the PCIE-to-PCI bridge specification - which is designed into PCIE 😎

[@TheFluffyFreak]

@@jamesfmackenzie If I recall AGP is just PCI with a dedicated connection to CPU/Memory instead of being shared across all of the available PCI slot in round-robin access. That's why you can get APG2PCI adapters which map connector to connector.

[@bricaaron3978]

@@TheFluffyFreak That sounds promising...

[@pencilguin]

I'd love to go back in time and re-live all those hours I spent playing Tribes. I think I may have seen my old Voodoo2 card here in the last year or so....

[@youfirst.]

Wow 23 years ago it was my dream to get one, was ahead of its time playing rollcage cars, unreal tournament.😊

[@phattjohnson]

That's awesome! I'm guessing with dual monitors you totally avoided the need to use the VGA passthrough cable for the '2D' graphics like back in the day 😅

[@SolidSonicTH]

I have a motherboard being shipped to me right now that has two integrated PCI slots and it's even newer than this one (it's a MSI B350 Tomahawk, meaning it even supports all the way up to Ryzen 5000-series CPUs and has native Windows 11 support). I'm going to try this with my SLI Voodoo2s in one of my retro machines and see what I get out of it. This is neat. Did you have your system booted into UEFI for this?

[@GaryMcKinnonUFO]

That 3DFX logo brings back memories :)

[@eileenlucynakurosawa7421]

Incredible. Those 3dfx truly a jewel

[@MaverickBlue42]

I want to see you double it up with two Voodoo2's in SLI mode. 3dfx were the inventors of SLI, until the company eventually met it's demise and got purchased by Nvidia.

[@RETROMachines]

I wish 3Dfx would make a comeback in the GPU market. We need competition more than ever. But unfortunately, I heard they have been bought out by Nvidia.

[@philharrison5]

My first ever graphics card. Well done for getting it working with modern tech.

[@882952]

If I recall correctly, I had two of these in SLI (although that wasn't the term they used). I remember, I kept going to the computer store in the mall, where they had two of these on the shelf, and just drooling and drooling over them, for like a couple months. Finally, I had the ungodly sum (for me, at the time) required to take those babies home, and man it was just shocking to see how beautifully smooth games would play.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Great times!!

[@cromulence]

FYI, you can self-sign your own drivers so you don't have to boot up with the driver signature enforcement disabled. Very cool to see that this is still useable in x64 versions of Windows, didn't think we'd see any x64 drivers!

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Thanks for the tip! Assume you self sign and then drop into the root trust store?

[@xandfis]

You might need to be in developer mode too

[@strayling1]

Unreal running on a pair of Voodoo2s in SLI was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen. Give that a try :)

[@Marisueksu]

Oh man going way back. even before AGP gfx cards haha. Very nice to see stuff still works!

[@rivciks5045]

Voodoo 2 😍! Such memories! Goty ut99, system shock2, mk4, etc

[@agevenisse3252]

Interesting video. I had no idea it would work on 64-bit Windows 10. Frame rate comparison (Quake II, timedemo 1, 640x480): Voodoo2 on your 4th gen i5/i7: 57.6 fps Voodoo3 3000 AGP on a Pentium III 1.4 GHz: 182.3 fps It would be interesting to test a Voodoo3 3000 PCI (if it's even possible). The frame rate would probably be the same as with the P3 in Quake II, but in newer games like Max Payne, that use software T&L, it would probably be faster. :)

[@d.r.1402]

Its the old PCI standard slowing it down. They would need to find a AGP to PCIE convertor. Which, supposedly existed, but mostly in Asia.

[@VictorCampos87]

Half-Life 1 had three-dimensional water waves effect that were lost during ports and renderer updates. Last time I saw this was under WndowsXP with orginal HL release and OpenGL renderer. Try running some versions of HL1 and see if the water has that swing.

[@bricaaron3978]

The first time I played Half-Life was on Vista with a GTX 260. I remember the odd-looking pointy-wave 3D water surface.

[@lucky88shp]

Now, you just got me interested in setting a Voodoo card on my machine as well! This is awesome! Thanks & Cheers!

[@elimalinsky7069]

I think the way this was achieved is that the driver forces Windows 10 to think it's using the regular modern GPU to render the graphics (that's why a Glide to OpenGL wrapper is still needed for the output) but actually renders all the 3D elements using the voodoo card. This is also why the OS is so confused about the memory, because it thinks there should be gigabytes of memory available, not the mere few megabytes of the Voodoo it is probably being reported on. I'm still amazed it actually worked. In theory there shouldn't be any compatibility, but the unofficial drivers community is simply unbelievable in what it can achieve.

[@10p6]

I would love to see the Voodoo Banshee working on modern hardware. In my opinion it was the first card that set the norm of what video cards would become.

[@DoubleMonoLR]

I think that would be the Riva TNT from Nvidia, it was released about 6 months earlier, and performed similarly or a bit better overall. There had been other combined 2D/3D cards of course, but this was the first one to push 3DFX. People were disappointed in the Banshee when it came out, as it was considered slower than the older Voodoo2.

[@10p6]

@@DoubleMonoLR The Banshee actually came out before the TNT, and was much cheaper. Also, the Banshee was slower in 3D than the Voodoo 2, but for games that only used one Texture unit (most of them), the games were much faster than the Voodoo 2 as the Banshee ran at a higher clock rate.

[@Squilliam-Fancyson]

2020 hardware? So the Asus Z87-Pro from 2013 made it back to the future?

[@jamesfmackenzie]

I still used this as my main PC until a few months ago 😂

[@digitalmagicAR]

That is aweseome! Never thought that would work. My 450Mhz PII was ordered with a Voodoo2 12MB in '98 and later I added a Matrox G400TV which could pass through allowing me to run either I chose for a particular game. Worked great until earlier this year when the 7200RPM C: failed

[@jackbaxter-williams8059]

Amazing. LGR would be proud. I half way expect him to do a video on this now. I just liked and subbed

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Thanks for the sub!

[@tallblondthing]

Awesome but How did you connect the vga pass through with a 2D card? The voodoo2 needed to be connected to a 2D card from what I remember as I always assumed it didn’t texture fill. I would love to have 3DFx running again :) good work

[@meatpockets]

That’s right, I am not convinced these demos are actually using the card…but Quake 2 looks like Glide to me

[@tallblondthing]

@@meatpockets yes it did look like glide, but yes need to know how it hooks up to 2D card. It needed a 2mb or more dedicated 2D card. I used a 2mb video logic card :).

[@stefanl5183]

No! The Voodoo and Voodoo 2 cards did not need to be connected to a 2d card. They were actually stand alone devices. The purpose of the pass through was so that you could use a single monitor to display the video from both cards. The Vga connectors on the Voodoo would pasthrough the video from your 2d card whenever the voodoo card was not active for example during boot up and when just running the windows desktop. But when you launched a 3d game and the voodoo card became active, it would internally switch to the output of the voodoo. And of course after you exit the game it would switch back. Alternatively, you could have a separate monitor connected to each. My guess is the reason he didn't use the passthrough here is because modern video cards tend not to have VGA anymore. They tend to have displayport and hdmi. Also modern monitors tend not to have VGA input. So, it would be simpler to just connect an old dedicated VGA monitor to the Voodoo, than to convert back and forth just to go thru the passthrough. The only 3d cards back then that needed a 2d card were the powerVR cards like the m3d. The M3d had no video output at all. After it rendered an image into it's frame buffer, it then had to copy that over the PCI bus to the 2d cards frame buffer. Nowadays Nvidia's optimus technology does similar. That's how with a few hacks you can play games on a Tesla card that has no video output at all.

[@tallblondthing]

awesome all answered in second video I learnt something :)

[@JGreen-le8xx]

Voodoo 2s and 3s were game changers (no pun intended) when they came out. I use to daily a Voodoo 3 3000 and that little 16MB card was a monster punching well above its weight class. After I had upgraded to a Hercules prophet 2 32MB and a Hercules prophet 3 64MB and that Voodoo still gave them a run for their money!

[@adaangoosen812]

True.. Also had and still have my VOODOO3 3000 AGP..My first true Gaming GPU It could play any game of that time...Till COMANCHE3 came out and it couldn't play that game was like freezing and slow motion.. I was Devastated so got an ATI 7500 64mb and from there NVIDIA GeForce 3 and so on...So its been 23 years that I had various NVIDIA cards but my next Card will be AMD again. NVIDIA too crazy with their prices..

[@jamesfmackenzie]

I would love a Voodoo 3 card. My upgrade path back in the day was Voodoo2 > GeForce256 > Radeon 8500 > Radeon 9700 Pro 😎

[@dallesamllhals9161]

..You mean Voodoo(1) was a game changer?

[@JGreen-le8xx]

@@dallesamllhals9161 Technically they all were. 1 2 and 3

[@dallesamllhals9161]

@@JGreen-le8xx ..yeah well...chronologically Voodoo(1) came first 😛 ^I should know 'cause i bought a (Creative)Voodoo² 12MB in 1998. And "she" is still alive 😲

[@Quirriff]

I remember borrowing a voodoo 2, and made Homeworld and Battlezone amazing. It also had steroscopic 3d with those funky old glasses.

[@ray-sattler]

I am looking for a voodoo card for so long, because i want to finally build my dream 90s PC. This is awesome mate.

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Glad you enjoyed the memories!

[@charizard4410]

I was expecting to see the card working in linux, not on windows. Now I'm wondering how well it would run alone without another GPU in the system.

[@DoubleMonoLR]

You wouldn't see anything much of the time, without another gpu(or at least the integrated graphics) The voodoo2 is 3D only.

[@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles]

It can only do 3D environments. You'd have to remote-desktop to it and launch a game remotely for the 3DFX to kick in.

[@charizard4410]

@@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles I honestly forgot about that quirk of the older cards.

[@Henk717]

Nice! In my ultimate multi booting PC I had no driver for Windows 7 when it came down to the Voodoo 2. Time to grab it :D

[@TheRealPulverize]

This Voodoo brings back some memories playing Unreal Tournament .

[@nhiko999]

Oh yes there is one thing I'd like to see, it was a screensaver called "voodoo lights" and this was a mesmerizeing experience. It's awesome that this card still works...

[@edward7792]

That and the voodoo christmas screensavers where the lights are flying around the christmas tree. I tried to find this screensaver online but no luck!

[@DenisLaventure]

I had 2 of them in SLI when they were released! Nothing came close to the speed of these cards for a long time! :)

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Agree! 1024x768 gaming - it was a literal game changer! 😎

[@ljrretropcs]

With this and SBEmu you could make a modern machine playing dos voodoo games with dos sound natively

[@jamesfmackenzie]

100%!! SBEMU works with this PC too 😎

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Full disclosure: I haven’t tried any 3Dfx DOS games yet - only Windows. Fingers crossed!

[@ljrretropcs]

@@jamesfmackenzie Well there is the script for PT2 😀

[@JakeWorrell]

@@jamesfmackenzie I was just going to drop in a comment that it would be interesting to see how DOS based 3DFX games run on this setup. So consider this another vote for a video on that in the future

[@jamesfmackenzie]

@@JakeWorrell there’s a lot of interest in this! Will try it out 😎

[@user-simple988hnday]

Thank you!! With this nice video you wake up my childhood memories!! Thank you again!!

[@jamesfmackenzie]

Glad you enjoyed it! 😎

[@micmacha]

It really says something that that card still works perfectly after around 25 years.