VOGONS


First post, by xjas

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I found this driver on an old ATI Rage CD-ROM. It purports to be an optimized MiniGL for Quake 1 & Quake 2 for Rage Pro-based cards.

I don't have a Rage Pro in anything set up, so I haven't been able to test it out. I can find very little info about this driver online. Googling "ATIQUAKE.EXE" only yields three results right now, two of them junk sites.

Grab it here:

Filename
ATIQUAKE.7z
File size
1.08 MiB
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304 downloads
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

Is this anything interesting? Or is it more commonly found under another name? If it's worth archiving 'properly' I'll upload it on Vogonsdrivers. The exe & readme file in the archive are untouched as they were on the CD. Those two files are all that was there.

atiquake.jpg
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atiquake.jpg
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3432 views
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Reply 1 of 42, by nali

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I had a Rage Play, and I remember playing Quake 1 OpenGL with this card.
But I can't remember if it needed a specific binary, or just the OpenGL glquake with an Ati opengl32.dll ...
I also remember I was not impressed with the result, since I also had a Voodoo1 😀 Image quality and speed were not as great as with the 3Dfx, on a Pentium 233 MMX.
But at least, it worked.

Reply 2 of 42, by vlask

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Ati Rage Pro cards have full OpenGL 1.1 support at last in latest drivers. So these minigl drivers maybe been for use early after release, when driver had not OpenGL support ready....

Not only mine graphics cards collection at http://www.vgamuseum.info

Reply 3 of 42, by Blzut3

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I would be curious to know if by any chance that CD has the NT 3.51 driver for the Rage Pro? ATI's website at the time acknowledges that a 3.51 driver for the PCI Rage Pro exists but only on the CD or via reaching out to support. The only copy of it I've seen so far is the one on Dell's website, but that lacks the OpenGL files which supposedly exist.

Reply 4 of 42, by lost77

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I did some quick testing with this miniGL today. Pentium II 333Mhz and Rage 3D Pro 4MB. 640x480 Resolution.

miniGL beta3 (May 1998):
Quake: 19.1 Quake II: 15.6

5.30 Drivers (June 1998):
Quake: 27.0 Quake II: 23.9

5.40 Drivers (September 1999):
Quake: 29.3 Quake II: 23.7

Some Rage XL Drivers (February 2002):
Quake: 29.8 Quake II: 23.9

The miniGL worked with the default Windows 98 SE drivers that don't contain a hardware ICD. Basically it was a way to play Quake with hardware acceleration for a few months or however long between beta 1 and the first full ICD. This might work with other OpenGL games as well (readme mentions bugfixes for Hexen II).

NOTE: There might be much less difference in speed with a slow processor. The readme mentions Pentium 133 as a minimum requirement. Maybe someone can test that.

Reply 5 of 42, by nali

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Way slower than a Voodoo ...
When I bought my first computer, it was the Pentium 233 MMX, with a cheap Trio video card.
I quickly wanted to upgrade the video card, and hesitate between a Rage Xpert Play or a Voodoo. I choose a Voodoo, since OpenGL was supposed to be available soon. Same price both.
Good card, but OpenGL never arrived ... So I also bought a Voodoo 1 😀
What I loved with this card was the Tv-out. I worked without activating anything in the driver panel. Just plug to a TV and it works like a regular screen.
It was a really good card, but had trouble to be as good as a Voodoo.
I remember I played Quake 1 640x480 at 40 fps, with a few tweaks. Much more than 29 fps with a Pentium 2 333 Mhz.
And nicer too. The Rage Xplay makes every gun shot a "square!.
I'd like to get another one anyway 😀

Reply 6 of 42, by xjas

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Cool stuff, thanks for looking into it guys! Interesting about the MiniGL. I doubt it's that useful these days, but maybe nice to have from a historical perspective.

I uploaded the whole disc here, so have at it. It does have the NT3.51 drivers, along with OS/2 and Windows 3.1. It also has some hardware MPEG decoder/playback software and a bunch of gloriously cheesy '90s MPEG sample clips which take up most of the space. There might be other stuff on there too; I haven't explored the whole thing.

I wouldn't have thought there'd be "lost" drivers for such a common video chip. Hope this proves useful.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 7 of 42, by Blzut3

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xjas wrote:

I uploaded the whole disc here, so have at it. It does have the NT3.51 drivers, along with OS/2 and Windows 3.1. It also has some hardware MPEG decoder/playback software and a bunch of gloriously cheesy '90s MPEG sample clips which take up most of the space. There might be other stuff on there too; I haven't explored the whole thing.

I wouldn't have thought there'd be "lost" drivers for such a common video chip. Hope this proves useful.

Thanks. Sadly I'm not sure that's the lost driver that may or may not actually exist. Dell's driver is apparently dated a few months later and has files "atirage.sys" and "atirage.dll". (By the way, I don't know if you want to mirror that to vogons drivers. May be the only copy on the Internet for all I know.) In theory if the readme is to be believed there exists an optional OpenGL piece, but given that it appears to be more or less copy and paste from the other driver it's entirely possible the Dell driver is all that actually exists. Definitely good to archive these driver discs as you never know.

It may be a common chip but ATi's driver upload policy at the time seems to have been "only if there's an update." And the NT 3.51 drivers besides I think the Mach drivers didn't get any update.

Reply 8 of 42, by xjas

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^^ does the "Quake" MiniGL work in NT3.5? I wonder if that's what they were referring to. As Lost77 noted, it might run other software beyond Quake, depending on how complete the OGL implementation is.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 9 of 42, by Blzut3

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It's definitely an MCD that they're referring to. What I don't know is if it's the same MCD as for the Rage II which is available on the archived site. They have the same feature support according to the FAQ so it's not implausible.

I can't test myself since I don't have a Rage Pro nor a machine running NT 3.51. But awhile back was curious what hardware a theoretical NT 3.51 machine could use and found that ATi seems to be (hard to confirm with things this old) the only vendor that may have hardware accelerated OpenGL. (All other cards I'm aware of with 3.51 drivers explicitly say that 3D acceleration is not supported.) With that it seems only the Rage II series and Rage Pro had an MCD.

There is however evidence that the Pro MCD does not actually exist since the older page says it's not on the CD and this other OpenGL page which talks about ATIQuake corroborates the Pro MCD being NT4 exclusive.

Reply 10 of 42, by dominik0801

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This is an older thread - I know.
But I just got an ATI Rage PRO PCI 4MB card for my Cyrix 686 system, as a cheap alternative to a Voodoo 1, which is extremely overpriced in my country. The goal was to play OpenGL games, mainly Quake 1, tho.

My problem is, that GLQuake runs absolutely terrible.. for instance, when I go in the hallway to choose episode 2, the whole game has like 3 to 6 FPS. It actually can run smooth, but when I look at enemies or certain things, it drops to an almost unplayable experience. I tried almost everything I found on the internet to get more frames, but it didn't really help, like, setting the resolution from 640x480 to 320x240 won't get me further, maybe 1-2 frames..
My "timedemo demo1" always ends up in the 20-23 FPS range, while a post here claimed to get 29FPS with the same card.

Even tried this opengl from the main post, but it just got worse with that.

Is it a problem with my card? Or maybe with my drivers / settings?
Is it possible, that my CPU is not capable to run this game in OGL? (because in software mode it runs perfectly)

If it matters, here's the specs of the system:
32MB RAM
Cyrix 686 PR-200
Ati Rage Pro PCI 4MB
Windows 98SE.

Reply 11 of 42, by The Serpent Rider

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for my Cyrix 686 system

as a cheap alternative to a Voodoo 1

*chuckles*

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 12 of 42, by matze79

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You need at least a Rage Pro Turbo if you want see some fps.

https://www.retrokits.de - blog, retro projects, hdd clicker, diy soundcards etc
https://www.retroianer.de - german retro computer board

Reply 13 of 42, by Oetker

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I have a Pro Turbo AGP 8MB and it's pretty awful, especially since each driver set has different problems. I would look for a more modern PCI card, apart from performance 3dfx cards were also the most compatible, other contemporary cards are troublesome.

Reply 16 of 42, by darry

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Putas wrote on 2020-07-04, 17:00:
matze79 wrote on 2020-07-04, 13:10:

You need at least a Rage Pro Turbo if you want see some fps.

Why?

Because even the Rage Pro Turbo isn't that great in Quake II OpenGL .

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphic- … il-98,64-5.html

Reply 17 of 42, by matze79

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its the first 3D Card from ATI that at least has "something" to offer 🤣

A real Improvement over Rage I and II

https://www.retrokits.de - blog, retro projects, hdd clicker, diy soundcards etc
https://www.retroianer.de - german retro computer board

Reply 18 of 42, by auron

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dominik0801 wrote on 2020-07-04, 11:57:

Is it possible, that my CPU is not capable to run this game in OGL? (because in software mode it runs perfectly)

the vanilla pr200 is apparently roughly as fast as p90 in quake, which is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for that game, and even more so on higher difficulty settings. an accelerator won't help with this bottleneck.

plugging in even a p166 would make quite a substantial difference compared to that cyrix for quake.

Reply 19 of 42, by dominik0801

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auron wrote on 2020-07-04, 20:52:

the vanilla pr200 is apparently roughly as fast as p90 in quake, which is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for that game, and even more so on higher difficulty settings. an accelerator won't help with this bottleneck.

plugging in even a p166 would make quite a substantial difference compared to that cyrix for quake.

I actually really wanted to keep that Cyrix CPU in the system as a "rare" item, but maybe I will stick in my Pentium MMX 233MHz for some testing.