I'd run them through a tool to do a bitwise compare to see how different they were. There's something like an evens chance that a cosmic ray flips a bit in a semiconductor storage device in 30 years. So single bit error could happen, and there's a lot of those you'll never notice, like a pixel added or missing from a display like the POST message.

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2024-03-21, 17:07:

Hello all! […]
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Hello all!

I took my old 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 out and booting it I noticed it has the very first 1.00.01-SD BIOS, so an SDRAM card.

So I was thinking about updating the bios because <insert reason here> so I headed to https://3dfxbios.cl-rahden.de/index.php?title=Voodoo3 and took the SDR-SDRAM 2.15.09 version (also tried others), with the Flashing tool 2.14 (also tried 2.17) and it basically fails miserably. In the following screenshot you can see the failed flash process. Flashing back the "save.rom" version 1.00.01-SD works perfectly fine, to electrically all is fine.

What puzzles me is that my "saved.rom" version 1.00.01-SD does not have the same md5 sum than version 1.00.01 SDR-SDRAM on the website...is there something I'm missing?

Got the same trouble and lost my original BIOS.
Get it back to life with “GeForce 2MX PCB layout” BIOS from italian 3Dfx funs site.

I made some diff between my saved 1.00.01-SD version and the ones found on 3dfxbios.cl-rahden.de and www.3dfxzone.it. They are all dated the same, for example my version:

Then here are the binary differences between the 3 BIOS files, someone has visibly put their name in the one from 3dfxzone.it, otherwise they are identical. Mine is slightly different:

I wonder if the flashing utility checks for this "0769008EC.W00SN" part or if these 2 BIOS files come drom the same source and this happens to be a particular card ID. I will try to play with these 1.00-01 versions a bit more, obviously the v2.15 BIOS is very different from these.

Edit: it actually is an ID that is written on a sticker on my card.

077300BN