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3dfx Voodoo Graphics Gets Windows XP x64 Support
ryszards writes, "GlideXP author Ryan 'Colourless' Nunn has turned his insanity up a notch with a driver that allows running the 32-bit NT Glide .dlls for a Voodoo Graphics board on Windows XP x64. Already supporting Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo 2 on 32-bit Windows XP, adding XP x64 to the mix lets even more folks reminisce about the good old early days of consumer 3D acceleration hardware. Any excuse to fire up GLQuake one more time!"
Really, GLQuake? you want quake-glide - it talks glide natively instead of through the OpenGL Wrapper. Or better yet Unreal/Unreal Tourment. Those games never looked better than when they were running on a Voodoo 2.
Judging by the thread, it seems Vodoo opened up the sources to there drivers since he talks about how they were written.
Can someone please explain in detail about this? It would be news to me if said sources were actually available, and I simply didn't misread the thread.
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Absolute insanity... although, I guess this proves that Voodoo cards aren't just legacy hardware.. they're supported..
You're a partial faggot. Salesman.
Any performance improvements? :D :D
Has anyone tried it on a system with 4GB+ of RAM?
Has anyone bothered to make a Glide Emulator for some of those games that only supported Glide. There's got to be 1 or 2 Montezuma's Return fans out there :/
not that i mind much, but who uses voodoo 2 these days?
That's one of the real practical benefits of open source - old peripherals keep working practically forever, whereas commercial closed-source vendors have no incentive to port their old drivers to new operating systems and machine architectures.
Wow linux had to wait 6 months to get this driver, it only took XP x64 7 1/2 years!
Yeah, and only the first 6 years of that timeframe was spent waiting for the x64 edition of Windows XP
Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition released on April 25, 2005 by Microsoft is a variation of the typical 32-bit Windows XP operating system for x86 personal computers.
Oh wait, the linked article doesn't even say anything about x64 support for the Linux 3Dfx driver. So what exactly are you trying to say, again?
Your webpage says you released them in 2005. No biggie, though, and yeah, you're definately crazy.
That's news to me!!
.. i will be able to play duke nukem forever on windows x64?
I remember the good old days, when you got a free copy of POD Racer with your 3DFX Voodoo card, and then your eyes popped out with the visual brilliance of the 3D accelerated graphics :)
:) //ends nostalgia trip and thanks the lord for his nVidia 7400 Geforce Go
Even today, very few games have made me react like I did ("OMG lookit that!") to the Voodoo driven games of yesteryear - did anyone here run Unreal 1 in "software" and then in "glide" and compare the experience?
Back then, we thought that the Trident, nVidia Riva TNT and Cirrus Logic graphics cards were crap compared to the 8 MB overpowered Voodoo 1, which let you run games full screen at 512x384
well tell your debian then to install, the latest ATI or NVIDIA graphics card. Its not anybodys fault that you still have hardware like that old. I mean is good for a collection, but there is no sense using it, unless you just have a console running on your server, and you wont even need a graphics card anyway. Good luck installing them ;)
I'd argue that's not a very much utilized benefit. If you have old hardware you'd be more likely to keep the old software as well. Old software and old hardware will work exactly the same now as they would have 5 or 10 years ago.
If you are going to get new software, you'd probably get new supported hardware as well to get any benefit out of it.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
FWIW, I have a first-generation SB Live card (remember the one with the Live! Drive??) which I've had since 1998. It has and continues to work flawlessly, even in Vista Beta 2.
... there is nothing wrong with my SBLive now, and I haven't really seen much of a benefit to upgrade the card.
Now, RC1 comes along and Creative decides to not release a driver for it. Now, granted, the X-Fi series of cards is far, far ahead and beyond what my SBLive does. However
Besides, the thought of buying PCI anything with PCIExpress becoming more and more common is crazy.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
LOOK GUYS I CAN RUN ULTRAHLE ON WINDOWS XP X64 NOW! OH WAIT, NO I CAN'T...UltraHLE still doesn't work on XP.
I hope it supports using SLI, I still have at least 2 of these gems.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
GLQuake still runs fine on my shiny new nVidia, and at crazy resolutions and frame rates :) OpenGL written applications have a tendancy to work forever anyway, (unlike a certain other API we all know *cough* DirectX *cough*) at least graphically.
;)
There's got to be a better game example for this.
I hope my old Voodoo hasn't been thrown out. Like to see it in action
I have an SB Live!Value! card fitted with S/PDIF adaptor from Hoontech; installed in my mp3 jukebox, it works brilliantly with my home cinema system. It took a lot of pain to get the right driver installed which correctly enabled the s/pdif connectors, so I am wondering whether it'd ever work if I upgraded to XP or MCE, I am guessing not, from your comment.
I think the main focus of the article should really be the poor driver design and the huge security problems.
Two services, both of which are running as privileged users, which directly map memory and IO space to a user-space process without any significant checks being done on what is asking for access or what it's asking for access to in a common driver running under a networked OS.
You might say why have a glide card in a server but just how many drivers for other hardware use this same sort of rubbish to interface to their hardware without us knowing? How many still do it under XP, 2003, Vista etc.?
Every time you install a device driver you are really granting complete machine access to the driver, without audit, without checks. Even in XP x64, he's shown that the ability to create such a driver (one that has privileged access and will grant it to any software that asks for it) requires only a trivial re-compile of a badly-designed driver, using publically available source code, and an install.
Have people known about this particular driver issue for a long time? Although deliberately introducing malware onto a system via this method would of course require the administrators co-operation, how many third-party device drivers, services, etc. can be subverted to provide that level of access to any software that asks for it?
That's the scary bit - the fact that the author must be a bit mental to want to run a VooDoo on an XP x64 machine is re-assuring in comparison.
voodoo cards owned everything. yes it was a fact they didnt use bleeding edge hardware but to make up for it the cards where so dammed fast the first to support linking rember the 2x vodoo 2 setup we all loved. not to metion 3dfx glide made opengl seem slow. it was a sad day when they died.
Quake whas not designed for OpenGL, and the initial graphics cards where a quality decrease. Whas speed that whas much better.
Nowdays the GPU also enhance eyecandy, so GPU based games can look better, but the first cards where design for speed.
Imho, the first Quake2 screens look like crap because of that, designed for crappy 3d graphic accelerators. Even the mp2 format is "liquid" so render like crap.
-Woof woof woof!
I'm really convinced that this guy have invoked the true malevolent power of voodoo forces to achieve such insane act - the word "Windows" in the title has no pertinence to my declaration.
Linux's 3dfx driver has supported x86, amd64, sparc, alpha, ia64, ppc, and more for quite awhile.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
I just got done moving and was unpacking my "computer parts" box and found that I still have a Voodoo 5. Time to put it in my new gaming rig and fire that baby up.
32bit colour and T&L may not have set the world on fire when they were released, but that's hardly surprising. Since the hardware was new, no software yet took full advantage of them.
It's different today. Try running modern games without T&L today, even on a modern CPU, and watch your game crawl - if it plays at all. And see if you can get a gamer to play in 16 bit without noticing the difference (and complaining). The TNT and GeForce chips set the scene for modern graphics, just like the Voodoo & Voodoo 2 did in their time with real 3D acceleration, dedicated texture units, SLI etc.
3dfx made many mistakes, which resulted in them simply being out-innovated and out-executed by the competition while they struggled with their consequences of their poor business decisions. They showed the way, but Voodoo 5/6's multichip approach was never the right direction for the mainstream future.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Yeah, but I never quite could get the Voodoo 3500 TV driver working correctly on a 2.6 kernel. I got it working a bit on the 2.4 kernel, but it was still a little buggy. There may be support in Linux for popular hardware, but things like the voodoo 3500 are the reason I still think it would all be so much better if manufacturers released open source drivers. At least then the community could fix this stuff when the manufacturer lost interest.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm with you on this one. I see no real tangible benefit to upgrade from a Live! sound card. Most of the latest advances in sound card technology concern new technologies that, in the grand scheme of things, don't matter for s**t if you don't play games. And even if you do, an SB Live! is still good enough unless you want/have more than 4 speakers. I don't really care about these 3d sound effects, but maybe I don't yet know what I'm missing out on.
For the record, I also still have a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI that I use for a secondary display on my P4 rig. Again, I guess I could go out and buy a newer PCI card to use for a second display, but if my old one works, why should I? It's nice to know that should I ever upgrade to an x64 rig, I can still take my dual monitor goodness with me.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Best damn video card ever! Did I say EVA! Yeah I said best damn card ever....
I got mine when it was cheap and affordable. Unreal Tournament looked awesome and so did my Linux Desktop!
Who else remembers the "Don't worry we will support your Voodoo cards"... Next day... Site not found!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
There's a strange following for the Voodoo series, probably because it's such an iconic brand. There's dozens of custom drivers for the cards - and not just for PCs and Macs (what's a linux?, but for the Amiga, and they managed to get Doom3 working on couple of Voodoo 2 cards in SLi. I wish other cards and brands had this kind of a following, where they bang the most out of the anitquated graphics cards, would be nice to have a community for Matrox Gxxx users or the ti4xxx users
Someone on the linked forum made a joke about Amiga drivers for the voodoo boards...
They're even still being sold!
http://www.vesalia.de/e_mediator.htm
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Does voodoo(2) work as an extra PCI card, for "triple-head" ?
or does it only work in passtrough mode?
As for working with Vista RC1... try just installing the Windows XP drivers.... it works for my Live! 24-bit! (The vista drivers creative puts out worked in Beta2... but stopped working in RC1 for me... so I had to search for solutions)
r d.id=Vista
Also note that there is a lively Vista forum for creative labs owners over here:
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board?boa
Friedmud
I also have an original SBLive card, which works perfectly under 64bit linux, but none of the 64bit versions of windows seem to support it... It also works on 64bit linux on a 64bit alphastation.
I have the same issue with old tulip 10/100 network cards, no 64bit windows supports them, even tho the cards were designed for 64bit machines, and are well supported by tru64 and openvms on the alpha.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
That's still 1 1/2 years, assuming no owners of voodoo cards had access to any of the beta released of xp x64 to begin porting the driver...
What's worse tho, is that 64bit windows is over 10 years behind the first 64bit OS, despite running (in a limited fashion, not taking advantage of 64bit features) on 64bit hardware since early releases of NT (mips, alpha etc)
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Que?
Knock Knock Knock, anybody home?
I remember my old voodoo2 card with some fondness, it worked fine for every 3d game I used it for at 800*600 which was the only resolution my monitor would do non-interlaced. I had no intention of replacing my monitor as I was a poor student at the time with no dosh.
Then along comes that glorious peice of crap that was windows XP. Now all of a sudden my voodoo2 is unsupported. Not by my games mind you, I want to carry on playing the same games i have been without putting up with having to reinstall the OS periodically because windows used to require this every once in while (Windows ME and Windows 95SE were both awful in this regard). But althought windows XP improved on the stability front and no longer required reinstalling once a month it did stop supporting (IE - no drivers available for) the Voodoo2.
So I have to go out and spend a fortune on new hardware which ended up giving me very little in thw wae of a performance boost. Now being that this happened what morons moderated the above article as interesting? It seems the author is unaware that you may wish to upgrade your operating system but then run exactly the same software you were beforehand, possibly because no new software is available that has been written for that OS until a few months after the main OS release.
You still want the new OS however because the old OS was a buggy, unreliable piece of crap that should never have been given away let alone sold. I am convinced the only reason we have a decent version of Windows at present (XP) is because of Linux. You only need to go back and look at past Microsoft performance when they had a complete monopoly, they stopped not only innovating, but also paying any attention to quality control either. If anyone else doesnt remember how bad windows ME was then lucky you, as I was misfortunate enough to pay for a legal, off the shelf copy. It was the main thing that convinced me to switch to Linux I felt wholeheartedly ripped off for paying for something that did not work.
Basically, the parent posted might be right if not for that fact that 8 years ago, the underlying windows OS was totally useless and did not even run well on hardware from the same period. That same hardware could be much better utilised by windows XP as this was specifically written for alot of this same hardware, except voodoo2 graphics cards if u were unfortunate enough to own one as 3DFX has by then been bought by nvidia (or ati maybe, i forget) and the new owners wanted to bankrupt the company.
I dont read
Hey, I'm proud! I worked with Daryl on the 64bit Alpha port of the Voodoo drivers to X windows. (Of course running on the Alpha Linux) I had been on a mission to lobby 3dfx to release the drivers - and wow was I surprised when they actually did.
-Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Granted, in practice using old devices and drivers mostly makes sense for external peripherals, like printers, scanners, etc. If you want a new computer to enjoy new games, or to speed up compilation, there's really no point in upgrading all your peripherals as well. There are also some internal cards that you don't want to upgrade every time you change computers, for example a TV/radio card or a SCSI card that you only use for an old SCSI scanner.
I went out and bought the Live card. I had it for 1 week and the card fried. Creative told me to send it in and when i did they claimed that it was not a defective or damaged and it should work (it still smelled like smoke) and they sent it back saying it was fine and refusing to fix it even after hours of phone conversations. And yes i tried it in other systems (about 15 or so before i gave up on it).
I guess i just got a lemon.
Wait, you're saying that you "spent a fortune" on a new graphics card because XP wasn't supporting your Voodoo 2 and you're saying you didn't get much of a performance boost? If you were only doing 2D Raster stuff, why did you buy such an expensive card? You could have picked up a well supported older model low end Geforce for almost nothing instead, and it still would have been quite a bit faster than your old Voodoo for 3D work.
I read the internet for the articles.
16-bit is a joke.
You can't do reasonable color blending and lighting with 16-bits of output colorspace.
Supporting 16-bit textures to save space is different, but the pipeline needs to at least be 8-bits wide per channel (10, or better yet 16-bits is preferred).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
They showed the way, but Voodoo 5/6's multichip approach was never the right direction for the mainstream future.
The Voodoo 2 Did the multi-chip approach LONG before voodoo 5's were around, and it WAS the solution and direction to create the future of graphics that we have right now. The 12 meg Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 had three processors on board, and it BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF EVERY OTHER CARD ON THE MARKET. What kind of nonsense are you spouting?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The difference between the Voodoo 1 series and the TNT was debatable.
The TNT2 wiped the floor with most of the Voodoo cards (and was on par with a Voodoo 3).
Although my card of choice was a 3DLabs Permedia 3. I was lucky enough to get one. If the game supported OpenGL, it flew. I remember playing Quake II and Unreal and thinking how much cooler it was than the STB Velocity I used to have. Also it was the only card that played the ports of FFVII and FFVIII with any stability in Windows 98.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I was thinking the same thing. When I had my Dual Voodoo2 SLI set up I was king of the hill playing unreal tournement in 1024x768 mode.
Matrox Millennium + Voodoo 2 SLI = the best
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Just goes to show you. 3dfx fanboys are worse than any other out there. Some still think the Voodoo 5 is the best card ever.
He's right that when the Voodoo 5 came out, multi-chip was not the way to go. It was too expensive and their chips were too slow. A single chip GeForce 2 beat the Voodoos soundly on non-T&L games and annihilated them on ones that did use it. The proof would be in the fact that 3dfx fell from the preeminent 3D company down to something nVidia bought up.
Also the Voodoo 2 didn't have 3 processors on board, it had 3 chips each which was a part of a single unit. One chip did the frame buffer, the two others were texture units. Together they formed what is a single pipeline on a modern card. While separate chips, you had to have one frame buffer chip and at least one texture chip. Adding more texture chips made multi-texturing faster, but not single texturing. In no case did it help geometry.
The Voodoo 5 was different. Each VSA was it's own self contained chip. You could use one or you could use more. However they weren't very powerful. It took 2 of them to make a showing at all against things like a GeForce, never mind a GeForce 2. That was not the right way to go. More chips is a valid in visualization systems (which 3dfx chips were oft used in) but not for consumer desktops. As is seen with the SLI market there IS a small market for it for the ubergamers, but it's got to be optional, not mandatory to get reasonable performance.
3DFX was the last holdout on combining all their chips into a single core logic for mainstream product lines.
Example: in 1996 when 3dlabs designed the Permedia, it was a multi-chip solution (just like their workstation products) consisting of a pixel and vertex processor. In 1997, 3dlabs combined the multi-chip Permedia into the single-chip Permedia 2. Despite being priced mucn cheaper than the Permedia, the Permedia 2 made 3dlabs much more money due to the low-cost, single-chip design.
3DFX designed the Voodoo Graphics as a multi-chip solution (just like their arcade boards), and they were high-priced due to the cost of a multi-chip solution. Even worse were the Voodoo Rush cards, which required 3 chips, and didn't work properly. 3DFX raised that cost even higher with the Voodoo 2, which required THREE chips for a 3D-only solution. They also increased the PCB complexity by requiring THREE 64-bit independent busses.
What they should have done after the Voodoo Graphics got them recognition was release something like the Voodoo 3 (with reduced clocks), but they put that off in favor of the Voodoo 2 because they could release it earlier. Later, they released the cut-down Banshee, and they made the mistake of marketing it (and pricing it) as a performance product, instead of a midrange part designed to entice OEMs.
Near the end of the year, other competitors released chips that were much better than single Voodoo 2 cards for the same price. The Banshee barely kept up in the price war with the TNT and Savage 3D, and the Voodoo2's price plummeted as a result of that price war. The market for Voodoo 2 cards saturated, and because 3DFX had no way to reduce the build cost (thanks to their multi-chip design), they took losses.
So, by the end of 1998, consumers were left confused by all the inconsistency. All 3DFX fans had to purchase were overpriced Voodoo 2 cards that required a 2D card, and all they had to look forward to was the Voodoo 3 (same performance as Voodoo 2 SLI, 6 months down the road, big deal). The only impressive card 3DFX released in 1998 was the Voodoo 2, but it was only impressive for the first half of the year. 3dFX never saw the "big picture" that was the single-chip 2D/3D card until it was too late.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Wait that defines half my life....
:)
hehe, I might actually try and slap something together.
Love this kind of stuff ever since i found out XP does NOT support the old tape drives off the floppy port for no particular reason. I was convinced it should work so i set about finding a driver(s). Eventually i got a combonation that worked! Then i decided to scrap it as too slow after days of fussing with it. But damnit I wanted to make that choice NOT MS
If you aren't an audiophile or a gamer, there is very little reason to need anything past a Live! card. I have been the owner of two Sound Blasters, an Audigy, and more recently, an X-Fi. I love my X-Fi. However, I play tons of games and listen to a lot of music. Now, I have been very satisfied with the XP drivers. They work great, have great adjustment options, etc. I recently tried out Vista RC1 and was very disappointed. For one, the drivers had no EAX support. EAX does wonders in games, and now I didn't have that. Strike one. Next, the interface had been jacked up. It is no longer easy to use or friendly, but it does have this nice feature of not saving my settings. Strike two. Finally, CMSS-3D wasn't functional. This basically up-mixes all sound to 5.1 so I actually feel 'surrounded' by my music. I listen to music whenever I'm not gaming, so that about killed it for me. So far, I have had pretty good luck with Creative's drivers, but this is an exception. I will give a little credit, as the OS isn't completely supported by much of anyone yet. All that aside, I think they need to re-work their driver system. There are so many different varieties of the Live! card it can be impossible to find your drivers. I think they would do better to have a base 'control panel' and allow you to download a 'unified driver' package like nVIDIA does. This way, there would be no confusion and this single 'Live! Unified Driver' package would have everything you need, no matter which card you have.
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
I don't think the Voodoo 5 is the best card ever, but the antialiasing it did is still better than everyone else's to this very day. Granted, it was pretty slow, since it rendered each frame literally four times from start to finish without taking any shortcuts. But it looked gorgeous. Even something like an NVIDIA SLI rig today only matches the Voodoo 5's 2x AA mode in some ways, and it shows. The Voodoo 5 and 4x AA still spoils me to this day. Sure, all the cards that have some since then have gone leaps and bounds beyond what it ever did in every other way. But AA still sucks today on the very newest cards in comparison. And unless you've actually played games for any length of time with a Voodoo 5 it is hard to imagine. To this very day there are people that argue that AA isn't very important, and lots of people don't even use it because it doesn't help that much in their opinion. Knowing that they never saw a V5's AA, I can totally understand their opinion. Doesn't matter that cards have been more than fast enough to do V5-style AA for years now, or that NVIDIA even owns the 3dfx IP that contains their AA method, we still get crap AA anyways. All the other advancements, I'd never give up. Cards are so good today, and keep getting better and better. It rocks. But I still wish I could have actual good AA. When you can run a game a 10x a usable framerate, it definitely would not hurt to fully render each frame four times to get good AA. And, no, their multi-sample modes are not quite the same as the V5's method. They're obviously doing something different. Their shortcuts, etc, are giving results far different from what you would see with a V5. Now they introduce features such as transparency AA, which just makes me laugh. OK, you've introduced a solution to a problem that wouldn't even exist in the first place if you were doing AA properly to begin with. Thanks. Next time, just do AA properly from the get-go. No excuse for not doing so. Especially when you bought the good method's technology from the competitor you killed off, hehe.