Sure there are some Glide games like NFS 3/4 that support EAX to nice effect. However, I've found that you need Windows 9x and Creative VXD drivers (Live, Audigy 1/2) for the EAX in some of these games to work properly.

A3D was also popular around that time. For this a Vortex 2 card works well. Interesting info about EAX and Windows 98. Another reason to build a 98 gaming PC 😀

Not that I'm a big fan of EAX, but I've had no problems with my SB Live! and Voodoo2 installed together in my Win98 machine (no conflicts/errors/etc that I've seen yet). They also seemed to play perfectly nice when it ran Windows 2000, but note that Windows 2000 means Glide-only for the Voodoo2, and may defeat the purpose of having such an old card (if whatever game you want doesn't work outside of 9x).

I'm not sure if Audigy 4 would be a good candidate for a 9x machine though - does it even have drivers for 9x? (I couldn't find them in a quick search on the Creative website)

Yeah I don't think Audigy 4 has 9x drivers.

Vortex cards (A3D) are amazing but they don't support EAX. So really the best way to go is to have a Vortex 2 and another card for EAX games if that matters to you.

swaaye wrote:

Yeah I don't think Audigy 4 has 9x drivers.

Vortex cards (A3D) are amazing but they don't support EAX. So really the best way to go is to have a Vortex 2 and another card for EAX games if that matters to you.

They do have Windows 2000 drivers; dated Oct 2006. So in theory you could do Voodoo 2 + Audigy 4 under 2k, using the 3dfx beta drivers for the V2. Not sure how useful of a machine it would be, as 2k may be a problem by itself.

Voodoo2 works perfectly in WinXp with the same retail w2k 1.02.02 driver. And yes, there are glide games with "Win9x only" behavior, but only few can't be tweaked.
To be precise - Le Mans 24 Hours, Nascar 2000, Nascar Revolution and Ultimate Hunt Challenge still have critical WinXp bugs. 2 more games lack intros (Andretti Racing and Cybergladiators) but the game itself works ok. All other problem games work with some tweaking.
So, if you need the "glide + EAX" setup - you can use ANY sondcard with the EAX support.

Ok, that's something to think of - thanks! If it's just NFS I might not bother, as ideally I'd quite like to get another Voodoo 2 12MB and run in SLI.. I'm short on PCI slots, unfortunately

Descent 3 is another game with glide and eax/a3d support.

I do have an SB Live sitting around - had always thought it was useless, but maybe I could use it. Pretty certain I don't have an A3D, but I do need the AWE32 for DOS games and MIDI

..although thinking about it, I'm not sure there's a lot of point in Voodoo 2 SLI. There aren't many exclusively Glide games, many look better in Direct3D, and even the ones that are absolutely DOS and propeietary 3D only (Tomb Raider) may well be better played with the hugh res pacthes and GliDOS. I'm mostly looking for games like Tie Fighter or SCUMM games where emulating isn't quite the same..

I've just realised some of the games I loved in Glide (Quake 1 and 2, TR 3,2) are fully supported by Direct3D

Gamecollector wrote:

Voodoo2 works perfectly in WinXp with the same retail w2k 1.02.02 driver..

Not entirely. The W2k driver is also not "retail" - it's a beta driver. I've had it (and third-party modified drivers) give all sorts of issues in Windows XP (especially with ATi cards), to the point that I don't even bother with Voodoo2 in XP anymore. I'd much rather go with Win2k or Win98 for a Voodoo2. 😊

ynari wrote:

..although thinking about it, I'm not sure there's a lot of point in Voodoo 2 SLI. There aren't many exclusively Glide games, many look better in Direct3D, and even the ones that are absolutely DOS and propeietary 3D only (Tomb Raider) may well be better played with the hugh res pacthes and GliDOS. I'm mostly looking for games like Tie Fighter or SCUMM games where emulating isn't quite the same..

I've just realised some of the games I loved in Glide (Quake 1 and 2, TR 3,2) are fully supported by Direct3D

This is basically what I arrived at with my Win98 build - it still has a Voodoo2 installed, but it's mostly for novelty factor. The nVidia card can generally do anything in Direct3D/OpenGL better and faster, but it's still neat to have the 3dfx card there for the few games that use Glide. 😊

swaaye wrote:

Yeah I don't think Audigy 4 has 9x drivers.

Vortex cards (A3D) are amazing but they don't support EAX. So really the best way to go is to have a Vortex 2 and another card for EAX games if that matters to you.

Vortex 2 cards should have supported up to EAX 2 standards on their last driver release

Yeah 2048 has initial EAX support but it sounds pretty bad. I also think it may be done on the CPU. Those drivers have other problems too. Best to use 2041.

Nothing wrong with using two cards. I guess you can just disable on or the other in device manager? Some games might allow you to select what card to use.

obobskivich wrote:

Not entirely. The W2k driver is also not "retail" - it's a beta driver. I've had it (and third-party modified drivers) give all sorts of issues in Windows XP (especially with ATi cards), to the point that I don't even bother with Voodoo2 in XP anymore. I'd much rather go with Win2k or Win98 for a Voodoo2. 😊

Any example of this?
I use Voodoo2 + Radeon HD 2600 Pro Agp on my nGlide testing PC. Around 300 glide games are tested with a real Voodoo2 + WinXpSp3 + w2k 1.02.02 driver. There are troubles, but they are related to the games (bad Voodoo2 or Xp compatibility).
The only Ati related trouble is - 3dfx minigl rarely forces VPU recover in Half-Life engine games.

Gamecollector wrote:

Any example of this?
I use Voodoo2 + Radeon HD 2600 Pro Agp on my nGlide testing PC. Around 300 glide games are tested with a real Voodoo2 + WinXpSp3 + w2k 1.02.02 driver. There are troubles, but they are related to the games (bad Voodoo2 or Xp compatibility).
The only Ati related trouble is - 3dfx minigl rarely forces VPU recover in Half-Life engine games.

Voodoo2 + Radeon 9550 (and I would thus assume R3xx cards in general) in XP produced consistent crashes in Counter-Strike and 3DMark01 on the Radeon's side (unloading the 3dfx drivers fixed this), and massive visual corruption on the Voodoo's side (it was entirely unplayable). With a 3DLabs VP880, while the 880 was generally OK (the VP880/drivers have problems with XP and i845 chipset drivers, but i815 doesn't seem to have issues), but the V2 would still corrupt in Counter-Strike. The 3dfx menu/config/etc options could also result in a system crash upon changing some settings. I honestly don't remember if I tried the V2 with an nVidia card in XP. In 2k there was no problem with any configuration I tried, and all of the menus worked 100% as they should, just like in 98SE, and the only limitation is the lack of Direct3D for the Voodoo2 in 2k. Personally I'd rather just run 98SE for a Voodoo2 and get D3D support out of it as well. I've tried the third-party D3D XP drivers too - that's a nightmare I don't want to relive. 😵

Well. I have used my Voodoo2 in WinXpSp3 with:
Radeon HD2600 Pro Agp (current config).
Radeon X850 PE Agp.
Radeon 8500 LE.
Geforce FX 5600.
Rage 128 Pro Ultra.
The card works perfectly with all of them. The only tweak is - set fxgpio and fxptl as core services.
Well, I will try to find R3xx for testing.
About 3dfx minigl - the last working version for HL games is the version 1.46. After they have created the "unified 3dfx minigl" (1.46 have 2 versions - hl and q2) - you don't have the mouse cursor in the HL menu and sometimes don't have the menu itself. Even with wrappers, by the way.
Imho, the best fix is to use Voodoo2 OGL ICD (3dfxvgl.dll) for rendering, not the minigl.

For the topic: is there some decent list of EAX 1/2 games? The goal - to compare it with my glide games list...

Gamecollector wrote:

For the topic: is there some decent list of EAX 1/2 games? The goal - to compare it with my glide games list...

I threw most of the **** here. Sorry for the harshness