VOGONS


First post, by k9cj5

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So I got my card to work, but I wanted to post this here in case someone finds this useful, but I have some questions Im hoping you guys might be able to answer.

I picked up a voodoo 3 3k agp and all I was getting was a black screen on boot. I tried the Windows 2k method with a second video card and found that the OS picked up to voodoo 3, and it played just fine luckily. It seemed the behave exactly as the cards on vswitchzero's (Thanks BTW) repairathon video. One weird thing to note, when I loaded the GPU profile with Everest Home Edition it was reporting the GPU clock speed to be 143 Mhz, like it was a voodoo 3 2k. More on this later.

So I downloaded the 3dfx flash utility version 2.14, grabbed BIOS version 2.15.12 since my card appeared to be a voodoo 3 3000, with SD ram and it failed with the following error.

Romsize = 80 Bin FileSize =40960
yMan = 1Fh, byDevice = 03h, wRdChecksum = 166Ah, wWrChecksum = EA92h
Error: EEProm could not be written. A valid image should still exist in ROM

I copied the the .backup as to not over write it, and tried to flash BIOS version 1.00.01 for a voodoo 3 3000 AGP card with SD Ram and it failed as well. So, I thought I had nothing to loose, lets try to flash it with the original bios it dumped on the first attempt and it..... worked? Not that I'm complaining but very odd. The card boots up with the voodoo 3 3k splash screen now, and windows 98 picked it up. It benched with no issues. Everst now sees it as a voodoo 3 3k with 166 Mhz GPU/Memory as expected with the BIOS version 1.00.1.

Im probably going to leave it, but I was wondering a couple things. I was really hoping to flash it to the newest version as it does fix some things and why not. Also what program do you guys use to look at the BIOS? Ive heard a hex editor?

Here is all the info about my card
AGP Version with210-0364-003 which according to flaconfly, could be a voodoo 3 2000/3000
Has the Iconic Large Heatsink used for voodoo 3 3k models, also has stickers that state 3dfx3000
Its the model with TV out
On the front it looks like it as BIOS version 1.0 sticker
1999 STB Systems, INC

Ram is labeled
SD Ram VG36171618T
SA2BBU -6

BIOS Chip
Atmel AT49BV512
12JC
9922

The bios file that got dumped was 64KB also.

Is it worth flashing to the newest 2.15.12 ? Also what HEX editors do you guys use? I would like to look at what it dumped originally. Thanks again for your time.

Reply 1 of 1, by lemonlime

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Glad my video was helpful! To be honest, I've never run into issues in any games with the original 1.0.x BIOS versions, but I'm sure there are some fixes included. The 3dfx flashing utility is very finicky in my experience. Some BIN files flash just fine, others will consistently fail with errors like you posted above. I've also had issues where it is happy to erase the EEPROM and then it fails to program the BIOS.

The best known 3dfx BIOS editor is probably Tdfx. I haven't used it much, but I believe it does work well: https://3dfxbios.cl-rahden.de/index.php?title=Editors

Also known as vswitchzero. Check out my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/vswitchzero