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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..
Yeah, there are loads of 'em
I used to use a Glide Wrapper so I could play The Sentinel Returns properly on my system.
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
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?
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
Don't know about Montezuma's Return, but I often get a serious case of Montezuma's Revenge after visiting my local Mexican restaurant and I'm not a fan...
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
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
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
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 :/
:(
Dunno about that...
Last time I saw it running on Glide under a recent Windows, there seemed to be a bug where it didn't wait for vsync properly and the CPU got way ahead of the graphics, leading to really ugly control latency. I probably screwed up somewhere
The win32 software renderer didn't have this problem.
-lead programmer of Montezuma's Return
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.
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"?
Yup. There are a number of Glide emulators, but dgVoodoo is the one I have had the most success with (for Red Baron 3D). If it matters, it's also likely the highest performing one since it is a direct Glide to DirectX emulation, whereas most of the others were Glide to OpenGL emulators. I say "if it matters" because on a modern system the overhead of this conversion will make no difference given the simplicity of the games that used Glide.
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.