VOGONS


First post, by legodude

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Newbie

I desperately wanted a Voodoo2 in my childhood but ended up with Diamond Stealth II S220 (Rendition Vérité V2100) instead. Years later, I got the retro bug and ended up with a Pentium Pro system and found a "tested working" Voodoo2 12mb on Ebay for a good price. It was of course not working, with crashes whenever I tried to run any glide games. After trying different drivers for a while, I became more concerned about a hardware problem and started poking around in earnest. With Vswitchzero's Youtube video to help set me in the right direction, I got some disappointing results from mojo:

initial_error.jpg
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I started poking around and realized there were loose pins on TMU 0... a lot of loose pins. I'm old enough that the Voodoo2 came out in middle school, so I needed help in the form of a cheap digital microscope. After a first pass there was some success:

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Progress for certain, but all the way. I got distracted by checking all the resistor packs, but another careful inspection revealed even more loose pins. After even more rework:

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I rebooted into Windows 98 and fired up GLQuake, I've never been more excited to see a splash screen:

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In the end, there were about 20 loose pins, all on TMU 0. I've played a little bit of GLQuake and it is very satisfying. The Ebay seller refunded about half the purchase, so much for "tested working."

Reply 1 of 1, by Thermalwrong

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Rank Oldbie
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Another one saved 😀 Congratulations on the fix!

It's great that the seller did give a partial refund too - 3dfx cards aren't cheap now but lots of them are starting to fail from bad solder joints on the QFP chips and worse faults.

Now you get to enjoy it - pairing it with a Pentium Pro sounds like an interesting setup.