VOGONS


Voodoo 2 difficulties.

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First post, by Baoran

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I'm building a pentium 3 pc and first I did put just geforce 2 mx card in the agp slot and installed dos 6.22.
I have 2 identical diamond voodoo 2 cards and I wanted to try playing lands of lore 2 with 3dfx. I install the cards and install the sli cable.
I install the game and update it to 1.30 to get 3dfx support. After that I run the game and it starts but no 3dfx detected so I just think that I probably need the glide2x.ovl file.
I copy glide2x.ovl from diamond drivers to the game directory. Version 2.54, I think.
This time 3dfx is detected, but when I try to turn on hardware acceleration, I just get black screen and computer is frozen.
I try few different versions of glide2x.ovl, but it still doesn't work. Perhaps one of the voodoo 2 cards is broken, so I try them one at the time, but that doesn't change anything.
I decide to try what would win98se think about the voodoo cards. I install win98 on another partition, I install driver for geforce 2mx and then I install Fastvoodoo2 4.6 for each of the voodoo 2 cards in device manager.
After the reboots, I check the display properties and everything seems to be working and SLI is detected too. The demos that came with the Fastvoodoo2 4.6 drivers seem to be working too.
After that I try dxdiag and it says that 3d acceleration is not available for the voodoo 2 cards.
I try to run lands of lore 2 again with the win95 executable and it s same again and I get black screen and freeze when I try to enable hardware acceleration.
Same thing happens if I try running the dos executable in dos mode.

Anyone has any ideas of what I could try or do I just have to give up?

Reply 2 of 30, by Baoran

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I did mention in the post that I did try the cards one at the time. I did put back both of them after I noticed that one at the time didn't make any difference when starting the game.

Reply 5 of 30, by Baoran

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I got dxdiag to say that 3d acceleration is availlable after installing directx 7.0a in windows.

After copying glide2x.ovl version 2.50 to the game folder, I got this when enabling hardware acceleration in the options menu instead of just black screen that I got with newer and smaller glide2x.ovl files.

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Reply 7 of 30, by meljor

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Any physical damage on the cards? Check ALL the tiny legs of the three 3dfx chips to see if none of them are touching each other (shorting). This happens A LOT imo as a lot of these cards were just laying around in some boxes for years, maybe bumping into other cards or something. I have straightened a lot of them pins with patience and a needle.

Always start with one card when you have troubles and go from there. No need to try 2 if even 1 doesn't work, it just makes it harder to fix things.

Dxdiag says direct3d works, did you test direct3d with a game or 3dmark99 or something like that?

asus tx97-e, 233mmx, voodoo1, s3 virge ,sb16
asus p5a, k6-3+ @ 550mhz, voodoo2 12mb sli, gf2 gts, awe32
asus p3b-f, p3-700, voodoo3 3500TV agp, awe64
asus tusl2-c, p3-S 1,4ghz, voodoo5 5500, live!
asus a7n8x DL, barton cpu, 6800ultra, Voodoo3 pci, audigy1

Reply 8 of 30, by Baoran

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I have not tested any benchmark or game yet, but those spinning cubes in dxdiag work. I'll see if I can transfer something there. I have not noticed any damage and one of the cards is my original voodoo 2 that I bought in 90s and I have stored it safely. I got the other one about half a year ago and only thing I can see is that it has some corrosion in the bracket and it isn't as shiny as my original.

Reply 9 of 30, by Justin1091

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Hi,

I have the same motherboard and also had voodoo2's installed in it. Also tried Lol2 😀 With older glide games and a fast CPU, you need the glide2x.ovl from newer 3dfx drivers.
You can try the original Diamond drivers, but you need to set your CPU speed to around 400 mhz (easy to do in BIOS).

I had exactly the same error message as you, it was because my 800mhz PIII was too fast.

After copying glide2x.ovl version 2.50 to the game folder, I got this when enabling hardware acceleration in the options menu instead of just black screen that I got with newer and smaller glide2x.ovl files.

You don't need to do this, the game looks inside your PATH variable (C:\DOS under DOS 6.22 or C:\Windows under Windows 9x) for glide2x.ovl. Just delete the glide2x.ovl from your Lol2 directory, grab the latest 3dfx reference drivers and install them in Windows 98. Then launch the DOS version of the game and it should work. Btw, the Win95 version uses Direct3D, not glide.

You can also try to disable emm386.exe as this sometime doesn't work for me with dos glide games. Lol2 doesn't need it if I'm not mistaken.

Reply 10 of 30, by Baoran

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I already tried newer drivers and those just gave me black screen and computer froze without any error message. My cpu won't go below 500Mhz in bios with locked 7.5x multiplier, but I can try that.

It passed 3dmark99 in 800x600 resolution with score of 5875
it passed 3dmark 2000 in 1024x768 resolution with score of 2702

Reply 11 of 30, by Fusion

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I can second the need to REM your emm386.exe in config.sys under DOS. None of my Glide games (Carmageddon, Screamer Rally, ES:Redguard) work with it running.

Pentium III @ 1.28Ghz - Intel SE440xBX-2 - 384MB PC100 - ATi Radeon DDR 64MB @ 200/186 - SB Live! 5.1 - Windows ME

Reply 12 of 30, by Baoran

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It actually works. Thank you so much for helping. I didn't think it could be about being speed sensitive because I tried to slow it down with "throttle F -c" command earlier and it didn't change anything even if the game was so slow that it took minutes to get to the options screen. It worked with 2.50 glide2x.ovl in the directory and when I slowed down the cpu to 500Mhz in bios. I am sure it would work with newer ovl files, but now that it work, I don't want to change anything.

I never would have thought that a game released in 1997 would be speed sensitive in a pc built from year 2000 parts.

Edit: I think I also know now why it didn't work in windows. It probably tried to use the geforce 2 mx card instead of voodoo 2 cards and it seems that directx isn't working with my voodoo 2 mx card. It gave error in both 3dmark99 and 3dmark00 when I tried to start benchmark with that card. That needs some testing.

By the way, does anyone know why throttle didn't help with the voodoo 2 problem but lowering speed to 500Mhz in bios did? I would much rather have a software solution than being forced to go to bios every time I play dos 3dfx games.

Reply 13 of 30, by Justin1091

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Baoran wrote:
It actually works. Thank you so much for helping. I didn't think it could be about being speed sensitive because I tried to slow […]
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It actually works. Thank you so much for helping. I didn't think it could be about being speed sensitive because I tried to slow it down with "throttle F -c" command earlier and it didn't change anything even if the game was so slow that it took minutes to get to the options screen. It worked with 2.50 glide2x.ovl in the directory and when I slowed down the cpu to 500Mhz in bios. I am sure it would work with newer ovl files, but now that it work, I don't want to change anything.

I never would have thought that a game released in 1997 would be speed sensitive in a pc built from year 2000 parts.

Edit: I think I also know now why it didn't work in windows. It probably tried to use the geforce 2 mx card instead of voodoo 2 cards and it seems that directx isn't working with my voodoo 2 mx card. It gave error in both 3dmark99 and 3dmark00 when I tried to start benchmark with that card. That needs some testing.

By the way, does anyone know why throttle didn't help with the voodoo 2 problem but lowering speed to 500Mhz in bios did? I would much rather have a software solution than being forced to go to bios every time I play dos 3dfx games.

Great! Now go and hunt down Belial! You don't need to throttle down the CPU when you use 3dfx's newest DOS glide driver. Grab the glide2x.ovl from the latest driver release here http://falconfly.vogonswiki.com/voodoo2.html (3dfx Voodoo2 V3.02.02) and it should work fine. I think the latest DOS glide release is version 2.53. Newer drivers don't show the spinning 3Dfx logo at game startup, but they should run fine. SLI also works with Lol2.

Personally I never saw the need to use 'Fastvoodoo' or other 3rd party drivers, original ones work for every game I played.

Reply 14 of 30, by Baoran

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Justin1091 wrote:

Great! Now go and hunt down Belial! You don't need to throttle down the CPU when you use 3dfx's newest DOS glide driver. Grab the glide2x.ovl from the latest driver release here http://falconfly.vogonswiki.com/voodoo2.html (3dfx Voodoo2 V3.02.02) and it should work fine. I think the latest DOS glide release is version 2.53. Newer drivers don't show the spinning 3Dfx logo at game startup, but they should run fine. SLI also works with Lol2.

Personally I never saw the need to use 'Fastvoodoo' or other 3rd party drivers, original ones work for every game I played.

I think I already tried the glide2x.ovl from V3.02.02 and the ovl was 2.56 version. It just gave black screen and froze the computer.
The reason I installed fastvoodoo2 was because it has option of showing if SLI is working or not and I was trying to find out if the cards are working at all.

Reply 15 of 30, by Baoran

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I went through all the glide2x.ovl files in http://falconfly.vogonswiki.com/voodoo2.html and only one of them works when the cpu is at 1000Mhz and that is the one from 3dfx Voodoo2 V3.03.00 which isn't the newest based on the description.
Both tomb raider and lands of lore 2 only worked with that ovl file when cpu was not slowed down in bios.

How do you actually know with dos games if they are using SLI and both of the voodoo2 cards?

Now that I have tomb raider and lands of lore 2 working, only one problem remains: Archimedean Dynasty
It only works with 2.50 version of glide2x.ovl and 1000Mhz is too high speed for 2.50 to detect the voodoo2 card. Using Throttle to slow down the pc does not help and it is still not detected. Is there any other software solution that might work so I don't have to go bios to slow it down to 500Mhz to play the game?

Reply 16 of 30, by pyrogx

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Your mainboard has a VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset, right? I might have a solution for the Voodoo2 problems, since I had very similar difficulties with a V2 on a Abit KT7A board (That's a KT133A/Athlon system). I also had crashes in Glide and D3d games, sometimes the V2 was not detected at all. I finally found out that I had to set certain PCI registers of the north bridge to different values, then the V2 started to work reliably both in DOS and Win9x. Unfortunately I cannot remember right now which registers I modified, it had something to do with PCI bus timeout and retries or something like that...I have to look it up...
Maybe that also helps with Apollo Pro 133, the chipsets are quite similar.
Btw, you can set the environment variables SSTV2_INITDEBUG=1 and SSTV2_INITDEBUG_FILE=C:\debug.txt to see what your V2 is doing. There should also be indications whether SLI is used or not.

Reply 17 of 30, by pyrogx

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Ok, got the settings. I have attached a batch file and PCISET utility for setting the PCI registers. Just call this from you autoexec.bat.

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Reply 18 of 30, by Baoran

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pyrogx wrote:

Ok, got the settings. I have attached a batch file and PCISET utility for setting the PCI registers. Just call this from you autoexec.bat.

Do you know that those registers are exactly the same in Apollo pro 133A chipset and in yout KT133A?