@ Malik The Matrox G450 in my experience is somewhat lacking in the Direct3D side of things, DOS Compatibility is great though.
I can't speak for the G400 (Apparently it's faster then the G450)

The best options IMO are the Rage 128 or Standard Riva TNT2 (Non M64/Pro/Ultra).

I did a fresh Dos 6.2 install and copied the latest version 1.4 of keen4e to the disk. Also tried every option in the bios 🤣

Are there any tools / programs I can try to solve this with my Voodoo 3 PCI:

kool kitty89 wrote:

Ie, is there any reason why the Voodoo 3 is worth having over the 5? (aside from cost/ease of procurement) And from the comments above, it definitely sounds like the 3 is worth having for flexible DOS/windows compatibility.

How do the late/final release drivers compare (Rage 128)? Several cards/GPUs of the late 90s started off with poor/mediocre driver support (or even lasting for much of the mainstream market life), but several of those also got major improvements and updates later on .....

You also mentioned the Savage 4 being interesting for S3TC support, but that would only be significant for a handful of games with specific support for that, right?

AFAIK there aren't any Win3 drivers for V4/5. If that's important it might make Voodoo3 appealing. Voodoo3/4 are also a much more compact than V5 and don't need auxiliary power so there's that too.

I imagine whether you can stand an old ATI card will depend on what games you want to play. I can think of several that won't look good unless you have Glide. I know of some that will look and perform best on NVIDIA OpenGL. What does Rage 128 do better? I can't think of anything. It may not even support some of the more esoteric features but I don't remember offhand. Videos coming eventually....

S3TC is indeed of limited use but it is very nice in the games that support it. You get access to far superior textures. And S3 MeTaL is competitive with Glide in Unreal and UT. I can't believe I settled for D3D in UT back in the day. Oh the naivety! 😀

@e-man:
you have discovered the single reason I never recommend a voodoo3 for DOS use 🤣
been there myself and I just ended up using another card... (riva128)

.. and back on topic, I just tested my AGP Riva128ZX under win3.11 with the driver from nvidia... works GREAT, speedy and no problems with high resolutions/depths (tried up to 1280x1024/16bit). One more reason riva128's are just awesome... 😀

swaaye wrote:

I imagine whether you can stand an old ATI card will depend on what games you want to play. I can think of several that won't look good unless you have Glide. I know of some that will look and perform best on NVIDIA OpenGL. What does Rage 128 do better? I can't think of anything. It may not even support some of the more esoteric features but I don't remember offhand. Videos coming eventually....

Are the 3rd party drivers/APIs/games with specific RAGE support compatible with the 128? (that might be an advantage for games that worked better with those drivers -like Croc's BRender- though if it only works with Rage Pro and earlier cards, that would nix that advantage too)

I ended up putting Win 98 CF card in, installing the voodoo 3 drivers and tried this game again with win 98. Same issue.
Next I installed Dosbox and tried again, but on a pentium 1 - 166 (withouth MMX) that means you're playing in slow motion, but the colors were correct.
And if Commander Keen would be the only game that has issues.. Alley Cat (CGA game) has some issues also. And who know what other great games I might discover that will not be playable.

@Keropi Unless there's a workaround for this issue I'm done with the Voodoo 3

That's weird Keen 4 has those issues on your Voodoo3. My AGP Voodoo3 3000 doesn't go crimson with the game, and it even scrolls properly.

I had an agp voodoo3 2000 and I definitely don't remember keen3 doing that to me... that almost looks like the analog VGA color signals aren't getting from the card to the monitor to me, though it doesn't seem to really be what's happening there.

Abnormal colour tints are common in defective video cables and if the graphic signal is sapped by a concurrent VGA splitter or in some cases, when running concurrent S-video connection if there is one on the card.

But:

Both e-man and Markk seem to have resolved their issues when the whole system is slowed - e-man via running in Dosbox on the P166 and Markk by turning of the sec. cache when he was running with a Matrox G200.

And I suppose both had problems in Commander Keen only?

e-man can try disabling the L2 cache to see if this problem goes away?

If it's a cable problem, the problem should be cropping up in any game. But this is not the case here.

I guess Commander Keen is screwing up the graphics tint at higher CPU speed?

Is this happening with all Commander Keen series?

had the same issue with my agp/pci v3s and various systems... I just gave up on them and never looked back since I found my new favorite dos vga 🤣

kool kitty89 wrote:

swaaye wrote:

I imagine whether you can stand an old ATI card will depend on what games you want to play. I can think of several that won't look good unless you have Glide. I know of some that will look and perform best on NVIDIA OpenGL. What does Rage 128 do better? I can't think of anything. It may not even support some of the more esoteric features but I don't remember offhand. Videos coming eventually....

Are the 3rd party drivers/APIs/games with specific RAGE support compatible with the 128? (that might be an advantage for games that worked better with those drivers -like Croc's BRender- though if it only works with Rage Pro and earlier cards, that would nix that advantage too)

Looking around, it seems the Rage Pro is the newest/fastest card capable of native rendering of old Rage-specific (including ATi CIF based) games, so that definitely wouldn't be an advantage for the Rage 128.

OTOH, that does make the Rage Pro more interesting and special in that it's the highest performing card capable of playing those early Rage-specific versions of games (some of which are among the best versions -like Mechwarrior 2, arguably better than the Voodoo version and definitely better than the software/ViRGE/Matrox versions -and the DirectX based re-release has broken gameplay mechanics that ruin the game in some cases).

And, aside from Glide, Rage/CIF seems to have been the most widely supported early proprietary format and having the Rage Pro compatible with most/all such games is a major plus too. (compared to the handful of really worthwhile ViRGE-specific games which are still stuck with the limited performance of the Virge 325/DX/GX/MX/GX2 -with some significant issues with some of the faster variants, especially the AGP ones)

kool kitty89 wrote:

OTOH, that does make the Rage Pro more interesting and special in that it's the highest performing card capable of playing those early Rage-specific versions of games (some of which are among the best versions -like Mechwarrior 2, arguably better than the Voodoo version and definitely better than the software/ViRGE/Matrox versions -and the DirectX based re-release has broken gameplay mechanics that ruin the game in some cases).

PowerVR PCX2 says hi.

PowerVR PCX2 version of Mechwarrior 2 is quite nice indeed. Though the texture filtering acts a little weird (coming and going).

The PowerVR version looks similar to the S3D one in many areas (though it runs a lot smoother -and without the bugs of the GX2 ViRGE).
I can't seem to find many pics (or any videos) of the Rage version, though I'm positive that's the one I played back in the 90s and early 2000s (my dad must have patched it for Rage since the copy I have is just the Vanilla win95 DirectX2 version).

The Mystique version is actually interesting and significantly different in some areas, though it looks pretty bad in areas using low-res textures. (with some of the higher-res textures, it looks pretty nice though) And the Voodoo version definitely has oddly poor/limited textures on it. (especially on the mechs and vehicles)

Rage Pros are also cheaper/easier to find than pretty much any of those other cards (except maybe the ViRGE), not that that matters so much for me since I still have our original one.

I need to report that riva128/TNT agp/pci cards do not play very well in 3.11 when you have installed the nvidia driver. You get awesome speed BUT you also get awesome craches, gpf faults and some rare hard freezings. 🙁 sad but true.

In DOS/9x the cards work perfect.

Will I be able to play VESA mode in game such as Quake, and Build Engine games with a PCI Voodoo3 without corruption?

Both my ATI Rage IIc 4mb AGP and ATI Radeon 32mb AGP cards do some pretty random wonky stuff in VESA modes, and fastvid doesn't work at all with the Rage IIc... i'll assume it's not compatible with AGP cards, and some VESA modes games have severe corruption with the ATI Radeon and most 2D games have a "jerkiness" on horizontal movement, i'll assume in general AGP is not accepted by most DOS games.

I've been using my Diamond Stealth 64 4mb PCI with great success, getting over 70+FPS in Quake @ 640x480 VESA with FASTVID. 😁

However from what i've been reading in this thread Voodoo3 PCI is great for DOS, and supports Win 3.x... my question though is how compatible is it with DOS games in general?

PhaytalError wrote:

Will I be able to play VESA mode in game such as Quake, and Build Engine games with a PCI Voodoo3 without corruption? […]
Show full quote

Will I be able to play VESA mode in game such as Quake, and Build Engine games with a PCI Voodoo3 without corruption?

Both my ATI Rage IIc 4mb AGP and ATI Radeon 32mb AGP cards do some pretty random wonky stuff in VESA modes, and fastvid doesn't work at all with the Rage IIc... i'll assume it's not compatible with AGP cards, and some VESA modes games have severe corruption with the ATI Radeon and most 2D games have a "jerkiness" on horizontal movement, i'll assume in general AGP is not accepted by most DOS games.

I've been using my Diamond Stealth 64 4mb PCI with great success, getting over 70+FPS in Quake @ 640x480 VESA with FASTVID. 😁

However from what i've been reading in this thread Voodoo3 PCI is great for DOS, and supports Win 3.x... my question though is how compatible is it with DOS games in general?

Voodoo3 has great DOS performance but as far as I remember I don't think any drivers exist for Win 3.1. You might run into hiccups here and there with regards to VESA compatibility (example: http://toastytech.com/files/scurk.html) but for the most part you should be good.

ATI cards tend to have some serious compatibility issues with DOS games so I generally stay away from those for that purpose.

Voodoo3 W3.x drivers (unknown quality)
http://falconfly.de/voodoo3.htm

Here are some DOS video card benchmarks (Quake). >60 fps may not be useful if you don't tweak your DOS refresh rates and have a fast CRT. For SVGA DOS action games, I suggest P3/K7 CPUs as minimum.
http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/benchmark … tware-rendering

I would consider using the S3-based Diamond Stealth 64. It has good Win3.x and 9x support, and is one of the best DOS choices.

fastvid is interesting, does it apply to any later intel chips after pentium pro chips?

AFAIK Fastvid mainly sets the MTRR registers. NVidia windows graphics drivers do this too. Some interesting info here: Wiki MTRR. Wiki Write Combining
This Trick works with the Pentium Pro, II, III and IV at least.

However, I wrote this earlier, based on observations with a Voodoo3:

gerwin wrote:

U now use MTRRLFBE by tikbalang instead of fastvid. And I like it much better. Fastvid sometimes detects the LFB size wrongly (8MB?) and turns off other settings when I just want it to turn on LFB write combining. on top of that fastvid is somewhat slow loading. Ski or Die displays properly with "MTRRLFBE LFB WC", so I can just keep that line in the autoexec.bat.

I notice the original site that hosted MTRRLFBE is gone, so I attach my copy here.

PhaytalError wrote:

Will I be able to play VESA mode in game such as Quake, and Build Engine games with a PCI Voodoo3 without corruption?

On my Voodoo3 AGP's I run these games fine. And Keen4 too. The Voodoo3 PCI did not appear to behave any different in the brief time that I used it.

I did notice that if I lower the Voodoo 3 speed to much, like 80MHz, I get tearing on the screen. The tearing is also related to the FSB speed of the system, but I cannot remember if higher or lower FSB tended to cause it.
Either way, it was a combination of both.