Can you set it in the config file for the game and set it to read-only? (never played this game before, have no idea about it.)

That doesn't seem to have anything to do with the issue. The game is said to be working in Glide in the in-game video options, but to make sure, I set the Glide and Direct3D gamma levels differently, and sure enough, the game was running in Direct3D, not to mention, the absolutely horrible performance of the game. At the same time, the game behaved no differently regardless of whether I set up the game for Glide or Direct3D; the video output had the same gamma levels as it would in Direct3D and the performance was identical, i.e. crap. For now, I could just get away with disabling DirectDraw and enabling it again afterwards, but it is still somewhat annoying to have to do this constantly.

Seems weird that it would be running slow even in D3D- I play it in a Riva 128 just fine.
Not really a solution to your problem but maybe there's something up with the Voodoo to be that slow. There was also a patch released, not sure if it would help.

I did apply the 1.21 patch, but guess what? It made performance EVEN WORSE, and it's not just on this Voodoo 3 3000. I have two other Voodoo 3s, both the cheaper 2000 model and both AGP, which perform just as poorly with Direct3D. In fact, even a single Voodoo 2 with 12MB of RAM is sluggish in Direct3D, but in Glide, it runs quite nicely (not as smooth as the Voodoo 3 3000, but better than in Direct3D).

I should mention I have DirectX 9.0C installed on the computer.

For me the performance on glide is ok, but the only draw ide is the menu are invisble D: ,
I tried to apply an path but it said my version was already updated i_i

Ace wrote:

I should mention I have DirectX 9.0C installed on the computer.

The newest version of DX I install on my retro machines is DX 8.1 - I find installing DX9 on a 3dfx / windows 98 machine can cause a lot of performance / compatibility problems. As such, if a machine uses Voodoo 2 cards I limit it to DirectX 7. If I use a Voodoo 3 / 4 or an nvidia geforce / ati radeon card I install DX 8.1. Did the same thing with my Tualatin / FX5700 / Voodoo 2 SLi build - even if the video card supports DX9, I will not be playing any DX9 game on it under win98 (I dual boot XP for that) so I have no need for it, and DX9 seems to mess with the Voodoo cards in such a way that they only work in glide or only the FX 5700 is detected...

I don't have DirectX 8.1, but I do have DirectX 8.0 since there was a time when I would run Windows 95 on my retro builds and Windows 95 doesn't work with any newer DirectX version than 8.0. Is it possible to immediately downgrade to DirectX 8.0/8.1 or do I have to reinstall Windows to do that?

Okay this might be 3 years late, but I spend the evening trying to get this working.
I have a voodoo 3000.
I have the crash after you try to start the game from the menus.

The only fix I have found for this is to simply open dxdiag.exe up.
AND DISABLE directdraw.
It's that simple!
Working great now running in 1024x768

https://ibb.co/1KH6FJd

https://ibb.co/QMPL9cd