i just had some problems with this as well, except i'm using windows 95 and was trying to update to dx6. that seems to have been a troublesome release, apparently there were seperate versions for win95 and 98FE. the regular package downloaded from the internet would not run, so i had to dig out a dethkarz cd and install from that. after that lost D3D acceleration on the voodoo. i then reinstalled dx6 and selected the voodoo driver it offers, and D3D is useable again, might need 3d control center/3DCC to get there depending on primary card though. by the way, the D3D test in dxdiag is silly, forcing you to sit through a slow software rendered version first. i just test with PCPBenchD3D 2.10, which offers switching between devices if everything works properly, or hellbender demo.

if you look at those falconfly drivers, they all say DX5 including the very final one (in the readme), maybe they hacked up that specific driver to work better on later DX versions. incidentally it also offered me an AWE64 driver update, though i'm pretty sure i had installed the creative update with the 12/97 driver date. so i guess these directx releases have driver versions you can't get elsewhere.

so on DX6 i can run the turok 2 demo, the problem is now the turok 1 demo in glide refuses to run. so it really does seem like these cards are trouble once you go past DX5 and older drivers. the key thing to try is a driver cleaner pro 1.5 run though, because that driver deinstallation under 9x seems to leave a lot of remnants that could cause trouble. i do have to wonder how people made do with these cards back then, it seems ideally you didn't update the drivers and directx version at all.

auron wrote on 2025-01-17, 22:40:

i just had some problems with this as well, except i'm using windows 95 and was trying to update to dx6. that seems to have been a troublesome release, apparently there were seperate versions for win95 and 98FE. the regular package downloaded from the internet would not run, so i had to dig out a dethkarz cd and install from that. after that lost D3D acceleration on the voodoo. i then reinstalled dx6 and selected the voodoo driver it offers, and D3D is useable again, might need 3d control center/3DCC to get there depending on primary card though. by the way, the D3D test in dxdiag is silly, forcing you to sit through a slow software rendered version first. i just test with PCPBenchD3D 2.10, which offers switching between devices if everything works properly, or hellbender demo.

if you look at those falconfly drivers, they all say DX5 including the very final one (in the readme), maybe they hacked up that specific driver to work better on later DX versions. incidentally it also offered me an AWE64 driver update, though i'm pretty sure i had installed the creative update with the 12/97 driver date. so i guess these directx releases have driver versions you can't get elsewhere.

so on DX6 i can run the turok 2 demo, the problem is now the turok 1 demo in glide refuses to run. so it really does seem like these cards are trouble once you go past DX5 and older drivers. the key thing to try is a driver cleaner pro 1.5 run though, because that driver deinstallation under 9x seems to leave a lot of remnants that could cause trouble. i do have to wonder how people made do with these cards back then, it seems ideally you didn't update the drivers and directx version at all.

Wow... I'm glad to know it isn't just me at least.

I am still suspicious of the card, but honestly, hardly any of the games and demos I have from 1996-1998 seem to support the Voodoo card specifically. Any time I look one up it turns out that I need some specific version of the game, some patch or some crazy autoexec.bat entries.

Like you said, I also wonder how people coped with this insanity at the time. I seem to recall less trouble using a Rendition Verite, but I know that support for that is even more limited. Though I guess in the context of late-DOS time period, we were all used to having to jump through at least some hoops to get games working, and they generally ran like utter garbage but we just lived with it. I guess if it was the only way to achieve smoother gameplay it would have been worth the struggle back then.

I wasn't actually tinkering with 3D acceleration on my own PC until I got a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI in 1999 (the Verite was in my brother's system since 1996). I did realize later that the integrated Velocity 128 in my gateway should have been more than capable of 3D acceleration in most of my games, but it just didn't have the right drivers installed and I didn't know what I was doing at the time. By the time of the Voodoo3 I think we had pretty much reached the point of "everything just works" as long as the hardware was capable of running the game at all.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-01-18, 14:50:

Wow... I'm glad to know it isn't just me at least. […]
Show full quote

Wow... I'm glad to know it isn't just me at least.

I am still suspicious of the card, but honestly, hardly any of the games and demos I have from 1996-1998 seem to support the Voodoo card specifically. Any time I look one up it turns out that I need some specific version of the game, some patch or some crazy autoexec.bat entries.

Like you said, I also wonder how people coped with this insanity at the time. I seem to recall less trouble using a Rendition Verite, but I know that support for that is even more limited. Though I guess in the context of late-DOS time period, we were all used to having to jump through at least some hoops to get games working, and they generally ran like utter garbage but we just lived with it. I guess if it was the only way to achieve smoother gameplay it would have been worth the struggle back then.

I wasn't actually tinkering with 3D acceleration on my own PC until I got a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI in 1999 (the Verite was in my brother's system since 1996). I did realize later that the integrated Velocity 128 in my gateway should have been more than capable of 3D acceleration in most of my games, but it just didn't have the right drivers installed and I didn't know what I was doing at the time. By the time of the Voodoo3 I think we had pretty much reached the point of "everything just works" as long as the hardware was capable of running the game at all.

You have to look at the product release dates to even begin to understand the insanity. The original Voodoo was released Oct 1996, with the Voodoo 2 March 1998 and Voodoo 3 March 1999. Those were very quick changes to processing power.

Back then all cards had their own APIs which each game needed special patches to make work. Until Voodoo came along and swept the market with GLIDE there was no one dominate API to target. Most games were bundled with cards where the card marker paid to have the conversion to give the card something to use.

It's been a while since I used an original Voodoo in Windows. But the 3DFx Wikipedia product entry lists the Voodoo 1 as DirectX 3.0. That might be the reason you are having issues. The Voodoo 2 was a Direct3D 5.0 card. And back in those days you'd have games released as both GLIDE and Direct3D and just use the GLIDE render as it ran better.

The Riva 128 based card you had was about the processing power of a Voodoo 1 and did support Direct3D 5.0. I was running a Riva 128 and Voodoo 1 pair back then until my GeForce 256, and it allowed good compatibility for almost any game. It was a wild time and there were some releases where nine months later a new card with twice the performance was out. But the cards also cost somewhere between 2-3 games in price. So it didn't sting to upgrade every two years or so to keep up.

Run mojo. Post results.

since you mainly referred to D3D, did you try any of the glide demos, like pandemonium/turok/gex? and the env variable thing i'm putting down to the V1 mainly targetting DOS glide games in 1996, but it's not too bad once you get used to making batch files for every game. the hardcoded 1.7 gamma in the 3dfx minigl is a bit annoying though.

i did get both turok1+2 demos to work, these would initially fail with some vxd version error, however changing nothing else and simply running them again, they would work. but i put on the turok 2 full version and that will not launch. also can't get the croc demo to work, black screen for 10-20 seconds and then some kind of directx 5 error. so while most stuff works it seems there is always something that doesn't.

SScorpio wrote on 2025-01-18, 15:26:

You have to look at the product release dates to even begin to understand the insanity. The original Voodoo was released Oct 199 […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-01-18, 14:50:

Wow... I'm glad to know it isn't just me at least. […]
Show full quote

Wow... I'm glad to know it isn't just me at least.

I am still suspicious of the card, but honestly, hardly any of the games and demos I have from 1996-1998 seem to support the Voodoo card specifically. Any time I look one up it turns out that I need some specific version of the game, some patch or some crazy autoexec.bat entries.

Like you said, I also wonder how people coped with this insanity at the time. I seem to recall less trouble using a Rendition Verite, but I know that support for that is even more limited. Though I guess in the context of late-DOS time period, we were all used to having to jump through at least some hoops to get games working, and they generally ran like utter garbage but we just lived with it. I guess if it was the only way to achieve smoother gameplay it would have been worth the struggle back then.

I wasn't actually tinkering with 3D acceleration on my own PC until I got a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI in 1999 (the Verite was in my brother's system since 1996). I did realize later that the integrated Velocity 128 in my gateway should have been more than capable of 3D acceleration in most of my games, but it just didn't have the right drivers installed and I didn't know what I was doing at the time. By the time of the Voodoo3 I think we had pretty much reached the point of "everything just works" as long as the hardware was capable of running the game at all.

You have to look at the product release dates to even begin to understand the insanity. The original Voodoo was released Oct 1996, with the Voodoo 2 March 1998 and Voodoo 3 March 1999. Those were very quick changes to processing power.

Back then all cards had their own APIs which each game needed special patches to make work. Until Voodoo came along and swept the market with GLIDE there was no one dominate API to target. Most games were bundled with cards where the card marker paid to have the conversion to give the card something to use.

It's been a while since I used an original Voodoo in Windows. But the 3DFx Wikipedia product entry lists the Voodoo 1 as DirectX 3.0. That might be the reason you are having issues. The Voodoo 2 was a Direct3D 5.0 card. And back in those days you'd have games released as both GLIDE and Direct3D and just use the GLIDE render as it ran better.

The Riva 128 based card you had was about the processing power of a Voodoo 1 and did support Direct3D 5.0. I was running a Riva 128 and Voodoo 1 pair back then until my GeForce 256, and it allowed good compatibility for almost any game. It was a wild time and there were some releases where nine months later a new card with twice the performance was out. But the cards also cost somewhere between 2-3 games in price. So it didn't sting to upgrade every two years or so to keep up.

Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with the 3D landscape of the time.

I have run hundreds of different 3D accelerators on the exact test setup mentioned above (with a separate Windows folder for each type of card to avoid conflicts; and a fresh one brought in each time things get weird). Everything from S3 Virge\DX\GX\VX\GX2, Savage3D\4\2000, ATi Rage II\Pro\128, Matrox M3D\Millennium\Mil2\G-series, Rendition Verite V1000\V2100\V2200, 3DLabs Permedia 1\2, Nvidia Riva 128\TNT\TNT2\Geforce 256, Voodoo 1\2\3\4\5, SIS, Trident 3DImage\Blade3D\BladeXP, Intel i740, CirrusLogic Laguna3D, NumberNine Revolution3D, Chromatic Mpact2, Alliance AT3D, Paradise Tasmania3D...

I have collected and run almost every early 3D accelerator that made it to market on this machine, and yet the first generation Voodoo cards seem to always give me problems. It could just be that they often have hardware problems, but I have never seen hardware problems that manifest in this way. In almost every case a bad card will either cause the system to not boot, cause the system to lock up, not show up in device manager, not accept driver installations, or show artifacts once initialized. For it to seemingly be detected by the computer but the computer has no idea what to do with it, it just seems really weird.

I could drop some really obscure 3D accelerator into this thing that only had 3 broken driver revisions and was meant for DX3\5 and it would just work, but every Voodoo 1 I have tried over the past 10 years has been picky like this.

myne wrote on 2025-01-18, 15:30:

Run mojo. Post results.

I found Mojo included in one of the driver packages and ran it, but the results were kind of gibberish for some reason. I don't know if this means the card has problems or, again, if it is a software issue. I think it is at least partially a Windows issue since the text was all mashed together and unreadable. Probably some incorrect msvcrt or vb file version or something. I have run into that before with other Voodoo 1/2 software.

auron wrote on 2025-01-18, 15:30:

since you mainly referred to D3D, did you try any of the glide demos, like pandemonium/turok/gex? and the env variable thing i'm putting down to the V1 mainly targetting DOS glide games in 1996, but it's not too bad once you get used to making batch files for every game. the hardcoded 1.7 gamma in the 3dfx minigl is a bit annoying though.

i did get both turok1+2 demos to work, these would initially fail with some vxd version error, however changing nothing else and simply running them again, they would work. but i put on the turok 2 full version and that will not launch. also can't get the croc demo to work, black screen for 10-20 seconds and then some kind of directx 5 error. so while most stuff works it seems there is always something that doesn't.

I have actually had a hard time locating anything I already had in my test suite from before 1999 that specified that it included Glide support. I will try to find some other games that work with Glide and run those.

Okay. It seems to be the card.

I dug out another Diamond Monster 3D (this one is a Rev D; the first was a Rev G... if that matters) and while the passthrough seems to not like syncing to my monitor all the time (it has all fresh caps, so it could be the monitor or something else), the card IS detected in the games I have tried! Everything seems to be working fine on the second card. If I swap it for the bad one, with the exact same driver installation (Windows doesn't even show a hardware change), no 3D games will see the card.

What a weird problem. I wonder if the process is this:

While a game is loading, it loads Direct3D\Glide\OpenGL driver.
While the D3D\Glide\OpenGL driver is loading, it checks for a supported card.
The non-functional card happens to be broken in such a way that it is identified by the PC and the passthrough works flawlessly but the D3D\Glide\OGL driver does not "find" it, so programs do not acknowledge that it exists.

That is the only explanation I can come up with. I'm guessing this behavior is so different from other cards because 98% of other 3D cards are also 2D cards, so you know right away if they are broken. Unless I'm forgetting one, the only other 3D-only add-in cards I have worked with are the Matrox M3D, Voodoo 1/2 and Tasmania 3D. Not exactly a huge pool of devices to compare.

Now the fun part.
First, thoroughly wash it.
Test with mojo.
Then start probing for voltages and watching hours of youtube repair videos.

Plug and play only requires some chip to respond with an Id and a basic handshake.
That's your detection.

After that, the rest of the card has to work to get anything useful out of it.

I had a dead one. Was a $0.## ferrite bead.
It can be anything. Usually bad solder or a dud passive. Very rarely a bad IC.

Download 3dfx Glide2 SDK for DOS/Win32 V2.43 http://falconfly.3dfx.pl/downloads/glide_sdk-243.zip and run mojo.exe in DOS without making any entries in autoexec.bat.
As you search for faulty components or soldering defects, you can run mojo.exe in DOS again and see the changes.
***
By the way, does anyone have the source code for mojo? I can't find it anywhere.

Bits und bubs on YouTube has an app for voodoo diagnostics and is working directly with the developer. I can't remember the name or if it's public yet.

myne wrote on 2025-01-19, 08:20:

Bits und bubs on YouTube has an app for voodoo diagnostics and is working directly with the developer. I can't remember the name or if it's public yet.

BuB's channel owner calls the tool "witchеry". The developer of the tool has given it to him under conditions not to share it, probably with pure advertising purposes.

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

I will just start by replacing all the aluminum electrolytics and go from there.

I have done work like this on lots of cards, but the diagnosing can certainly be the tough part if it doesn't work after a recap. Stay tuned. 😁