Well back in the day I had a 3DFX Voodoo and on various PC magazines you would find patches for games. These patches would add 3DFX support. Games like Tomb Raider, MDK come to mind.

Several people tell me that the Voodoo 2 is just as compatible, but needs some environment variables set. I will play around with this in the near future, but confident it will work. Later cards are not that good for DOS support I believe.

DOS Game list: DOS Glide Games List
If the game require a patch, check out www.patches-scrolls.de

Voodoo 2 will work with the DOS Glide games, but may require a batch file to be loaded with environment variables. Other than that the game should load the 3DFX card with no other input.

Voodoo 2 on Glide games (includes environment variables): http://www.3dgw.com/faq/moodys_voodoo2_faq.htm

kithylin wrote:

I also have the original Quake-1 CD-ROM Disc and I believe it supported a 3dfx mode under DOS too.

no, opengl under windows

Thanks guys for all the information, this is a big help.

So other than the environment variables for some games, I just install the voodoo2 (with the VGA cable) and then load the game's patched 3dfx file (in real mode MS-DOS) and then the games go and there's generally nothing else to do?

No, generally there's nothing else to do. What you might wanna keep in mind is that DOS Voodoo driver is actually the glide2x.ovl file. Some games install this file along with the game and the version installed might be an older one supporting voodoo1 only for example. In this case you can safely replace it with a newer one.

Davros wrote:

no, opengl under windows

I found this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYXF_VhAhlI

Indeed, Quake I did to 3D Accelerated modes under MS-DOS (-NO WINDOWS-) However, It looks like it's restricted to some "rendition verte" cards, not voodoo. 🙁 Oh well.

and that's only on certain rereleases it would come with it on the CD. The original releases from 1996 only did DOS quake ver 1.01 and 1.06

With regard to Descent II, use the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org) to view Dorsola's/KieferSkunk's Descent II 3dfx FAQ

http://www.kieferskunk.net/d2_3dfx_m.htm

This page has links to the Descent Network which, unfortunately, no longer work. You can download the latest versions of the 3dfx patches for Descent II here:

http://www.dfiles.de/download/d2/patches/d2_3dfx106b.exe (Unofficial Andy Hanson update)
http://www.dfiles.de/download/d2/patches/d2voodoo.zip

Use the second file only if you have less than 32 MB of memory. The second file also requires that you be running Version 1.1 or 1.2.

I found that both Descent 2 and Carmageddon didn't work (crashed on startup) in DOS using the glide2x.ovl that's packaged with the last official release of the Voodoo 1 Win9x drivers. I had to copy an older glide2x.ovl into the directory of each game to get them to work. I think I used the glide2x.ovl that came with Screamer Rally.

Voodoo 2 DOS Glide compability matrix:
Voodoo 2 DOS Glide compatibility matrix

akula65 wrote:

With regard to Descent II, use the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org) to view Dorsola's/KieferSkunk's Descent II 3dfx FAQ […]
Show full quote

With regard to Descent II, use the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org) to view Dorsola's/KieferSkunk's Descent II 3dfx FAQ

http://www.kieferskunk.net/d2_3dfx_m.htm

This page has links to the Descent Network which, unfortunately, no longer work. You can download the latest versions of the 3dfx patches for Descent II here:

http://www.dfiles.de/download/d2/patches/d2_3dfx106b.exe (Unofficial Andy Hanson update)
http://www.dfiles.de/download/d2/patches/d2voodoo.zip

Use the second file only if you have less than 32 MB of memory. The second file also requires that you be running Version 1.1 or 1.2.

Thanks a lot for that info. 😀 Now I just need to get my paws on a voodoo2.

Will a pair of Voodoo 2's run in SLI mode in DOS?

Also, in general what kind of cpu horsepower is required to get decent frame rates with voodoo's in dos? I have a 800mhz AMD Slot-A Athlon for dos gaming right now.

I've been looking for better but it's difficult to find a faster system with an ISA slot. I did some research earlier today for a few hours, the most I could hope for that's even remotely affordable today would be a tyan Socket-462 motherboard that only goes up to 1.4 Ghz AthlonXP's, and even that maybe not.. probably only early Athlons.

I can't find a Socket-370 board that accepts Tualatin P3's @ 1.4 with an ISA slot for < $200. Some folks charge way too much for older hardware today.

The thing is I've been looking for "More" graphically out of some of my favorite dos games for a while but never really figured out the details as to what worked and what didn't. Even with a "Number Nine" PCI video card (or any agp card for that matter), and a 800mhz Slot-A Athlon, it's not enough to do well with VESA modes in dos, still horridly slow 😒

I'm kind of hooked on ISA because I have a nice Creative Sound Blaster AWE-64 Gold + the 28mb creative upgrade card. Which.. sounds awesome for dos games.

Some AGP cards were horribly slow in DOS. I think the all-time sweet spot for DOS is ET6000 PCI card + voodoo2. As for CPU horse power anything above 200mhz would be ok. V2 max out at around 450Mhz IIRC.

Will a pair of Voodoo 2's run in SLI mode in DOS?

See my link above.

vetz wrote:

Will a pair of Voodoo 2's run in SLI mode in DOS?

See my link above.

I didn't see your link when I wrote that.. nice info to know. I'll have to keep my eyes open for a pair of these sometime soon for my dos gaming machine 😄

kithylin wrote:

Even with a "Number Nine" PCI video card (or any agp card for that matter), and a 800mhz Slot-A Athlon, it's not enough to do well with VESA modes in dos, still horridly slow 😒

#9 did make different cards, some with their own chips, some with S3 or other chips. Which chip does your card use? Did you do any benchmarks of transfer performance in VESA modes?

Mine uses an S3 chip. I can come up with some dos benchmarks, but none of them benchmark "VESA Speed". The most I can come up with is SysChk that does DOS speed period.

Actually, I think SpeedSys does VESA Speed now that I remember.. maybe I need to spend a lot of time today and swap all my cards around and find the fastest one to use.. at least until I get voodoo's.

be aware you can also play descent 2 on a modern machine with opengl
DXX Rebirth
http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/

D2X-XL
http://www.descent2.de/d2x.html
and descent 1
http://www.descent2.de/d2x-descent1.html

kithylin wrote:

Mine uses an S3 chip. I can come up with some dos benchmarks, but none of them benchmark "VESA Speed". The most I can come up with is SysChk that does DOS speed period.

S3 cards are fine. You probably have to some additional utilities: s3vbe20 (unless your card's BIOS already includes VBE 2.0), probably s3spdup and if you want to overclock the card mclk.

I don't know if an equivalent for fastvid might be useful, I couldn't find any, though. (Athlon CPUs do have MTRRs.)

Davros wrote:

be aware you can also play descent 2 on a modern machine with opengl DXX Rebirth http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ […]
Show full quote

be aware you can also play descent 2 on a modern machine with opengl
DXX Rebirth
http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/

D2X-XL
http://www.descent2.de/d2x.html
and descent 1
http://www.descent2.de/d2x-descent1.html

That's mostly irrelevant to my situation. Even if I did get that running, the music and sound wouldn't be the same. Part of the entire reason to play Descent 2 (and these other games) in DOS is their usage of my AWE64 video card and the superior sound it produces, when running older games.

So even if I could run any of these games in windows (or even in an emulator) I wouldn't ever desire to do so, as they would use inferior autio in that setup, and most likely run significantly slower vs on a real system in real dos mode.

idspispopd wrote:

S3 cards are fine. You probably have to some additional utilities: s3vbe20 (unless your card's BIOS already includes VBE 2.0), probably s3spdup and if you want to overclock the card mclk.

I don't know if an equivalent for fastvid might be useful, I couldn't find any, though. (Athlon CPUs do have MTRRs.)

I have a registered version of SCITECH Display Doctor that can enable VESA modes for a wide variety of video cards. The problem will be discovering which ones are fastest @ VESA Modes for now :> It'll probably be a while until I can get my paws on a voodoo2.