I don't have any of the ones you're missing but I will see if I can find someone with them.

Are you sure you can't get a Virge patch for any of the regular releases? I've found patches for several of the other games.

"S3D on board"... the seal of slowness death no one wants to see. 😁

I have a Destruction Derby/ Descent 2 OEM S3D combo (they even mixed the cd tracks from both games on a single disc. Descent 2 has even SHORTER mixes of a select bunch of songs)

unfortunately i can't offer it, but what I might try to do is a 'diff' if there is no s3 patch for DD.

Thanks both for your responses.
Unfortunately, there's no patch for the games I mentioned. Trust me, i've literally roaming the web for ages seaching for these specific versions, with no luck. 😢 Destruction Derby for the Virge was a specific bundle that shipped on boxed Diamond Cards, along with Descent II, as leileilol pointed out. As you may also know, MechWarrior 2 spawned different specific releases for the then popular propietary APIs. More info here on the s3d one. MW2 had specific CD releases for the Voodoo, 3D Rage, Mystique, PowerVR and ViRGE. More info here, 1st question. 2nd question states that there was never a upgrade patch released for any version.

The only games that I know of that had patches available to them are the ones that are more easy to find: Terminal Velocity, Tomb Raider and Descent II. There's a patch also for Time Warriors, but it was a 3rd party one, meaning the game originally shipped with s3d support on the retail version, so no official patch. It was buried deep within the web, here. For the polish version.

leileilol, is there a possibility you send me the executable from your DD/D2 combo cd ? "maybe" that's all that is needed to convert my retail DD into an s3d one. Or maybe you want to trade it for something ? I'm really sorry if i'm misunderstood what you said, it's just that english is not my native language so i'm still not very familiar with it.

Again, thanks for your replies, I feared no one would be interested in this chip.

No offence unmei220, an s3 virge was my first 3d card too, I can understand you love it (first love is important to everyone) but I never liked it for a simple reason: it was slow as hell!

Wargods has no specific s3 .exe but s3 is the only card in all these years that the game direct3d supported and recognized. 😀 If I find other games, I'll keep you informed 😉

S3 virge was my 1st 3D accelerator too, Croc used it and was really nice...

I know it was slow... painfully slow, but it's part of history, and thanks to cards like that, all eventually evolved into what we have today.

It was thanks to that card that I get into modding, overclocking... you know, want to learn how stuff worked. In those times I had no other alternative, as it all was stuff that my dad bought for me, my first PC. So I had to live with it. 😀
First started trying to get some more performance of it, using mclk... I also remember how I enabled and disabled CommandDMA and CheckUV in Windows all the time, trying to find the optimal configuration. Then learned that the cpu could be overcloked too, then started to learn about BIOS options... etc. It all lead to other things that kept me learning.

And so, i'm so fond of those times, and somehow I find it really sad that all this stuff seems to be forgotten. I'm talking about the ViRGE. You see, it's easy to find, buy, patch, etc, games based on the other accelerators of the time (3dfx, matrox, ati, rendition, etc), but it seems nearly impossible to find anything related to the ViRGE, even knowing that there wasn't TOO MUCH stuff released for it... well, maybe that's why it's hard to find something related to it...

That's why i'm trying to gather the most I can of it. I think this will become more valued in the future, and I don't want it to be forgotten.

I might have the S3 version of MW2 if you are interested. Around Thanksgiving I will have time to find it.

Thank you Hater Depot. I would be really insterested in it.
Do you want me to send you a PM around that day (is it the 25th?) so you remember to look for it if you have time ?

So, doing a quick summary, it seems that at least some of the really hard to find games exists somewhere, which is really good news 😀
leileilol seems to have the DD ViRGE OEM version.
Hater Depot maybe has MW2 S3 ViRGE edition.

Thank you so much!

Well you came to the right place to find collectors of all things related to '90s PC gaming.

unmei220 wrote:

Thank you Hater Depot. I would be really insterested in it.
Do you want me to send you a PM around that day (is it the 25th?) so you remember to look for it if you have time ?

Yeah, otherwise I am liable to forget.

Right swaaye, I came to the right place to find them. Funny thing is, I had this in mind (creating a thread asking for the games) from some months ago, but never decided because I feared no one would care, or that maybe I would have my thread closed because it wasn't the correct forum to post some requests...

Hater Depot: ok, I would send you the PM. 😀

Also, I have some other request, forgot to include it on my previous posts. This is not a game, so there is the possibility that someone still has this buried deep between their HDDs.
What I'm also looking for (is also ViRGE related) is the Brender Rendering Demo. The following i'm going to copy and paste from the now gone S3 Planet website, which will do better in explaining than I:

1Brender Rendering Demo - [746k]
2This program is a demonstration of the ViRGE Brender driver, a 3D engine written by Argonaut software. It clearly shows the ViRGE is able to put around a couple of polys with a convincing frame rate!

The name of the file was virgedemo.zip, but I hardly doubt anyone will have it with that name...

If anyone has the time, and wants to read something, i'll also copy & paste the S3 ViRGE History, also from S3 Planet web. Maybe it'll be a good read for someone (Sorry for the long post):

• S3 ViRGE History
  Last updated 16th November 1997
  
  
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  The S3 ViRGE range of chipsets have been given a hard time since the cards flooded the markets back in 1996. Knocked for their poor 3D capability, people seemed to ignore how cheap they were compared to the rest of the market.
  
  This is still the case today, even though S3 have 48% of the consumer 3D accelerator market according to a JPA report - I would estimate there are more than 7 million ViRGE owners out there. So now we come to the puzzling part: why are there so few native full-games available?
  
  Surely with the massive customer base that the ViRGE family has, it would be worth porting a game to ensure a few extra sales? Apparently, no.
  
  The insults keep on coming - check out the newsgroups and you'll see the insults flying around (usually out of context, of course), telling ViRGE owners that their card is nothing to be proud of and the like. John Carmack put the boot in by claiming that the ViRGE could only run Quake at 5fps, and of course everybody laughed along with him. The general consensus of developers is that the ViRGE is a 'decelerator' that shouldn't be touched with a very long bargepole.
  
  I for one think that they are totally, and utterly wrong.
  
  Let us look at the facts - a 4Mb ViRGE card now can be had for about 30 quid. A 3dfx card will cost at least 100 quid, and thats just for fullscreen 3D. Notice the slight difference in price there? I estimate there are at least 3 million gamers with ViRGE cards out there, this has to be a good reason to develop for it. Secondly, the ViRGE isn't any as near as slow as people like to claim it is. I firmly believe the ViRGE is capable of pushing 250,000 polys/sec with a fill rate approaching 10 megapixels/sec. And of course, the new ViRGE DX/GX chipsets have a much better fill rate than the old ViRGE.
  
  The ViRGE DX/GX chipsets have vastly improved 3D, and do actually beat the Verité V1000 in Direct3D performance now. But the thing is, the Rendition cards get developer support. Look on the web, I bet you'll be able to find at least 10 games with Verité patches not to mention 100-odd Verité support web sites.
  
  When the ViRGE was launched, it was probably released with the worst set of Direct3D drivers ever produced. If this was due to a rush to get the chip onto the market, someone at S3 made a very grave mistake - the poor D3D drivers is one of the biggest reason why ViRGE cards have gained such an unfair reputation.
  
  Even the CL Laguna D3D drivers, with their polygon shearing and warping, don't display such staggering depths of ineptitude. The initial drivers only supported a fraction of what S3 claimed the ViRGE could perform; this was a really bad idea. Not to mention the performance - a ViRGE with 100% ASM drivers would still not be all that quick, but the initial release's peformance with D3D was abysmal.
  
  This was highlighted when S3 took their first steps in June 97 to release some D3D drivers that actually supported most of the what the ViRGE could do. The press release claimed "more than 40% increase in performance", and strangely enough, they did - how were the drivers improved so much? The only conclusion can be that the original drivers were rather poorly written, as indeed they were.
  
  Things are now looking a lot better, the Direct3D drivers are some of the best available for any video card, allowing for the problems remaining due to deficiencies in the actual hardware, rather than to a poor driver. S3 have managed to work around the problems (such as lack of HW support for chromakeying) and news is that there is still some room left for optimisation. Oh good! 😀

Some of the S3D games are indeed ok. Some are not so great though, such as MechWarrior 2 which runs very slow. (info)

That post is crazy 🤣. I think S3's biggest problem was their complete inability to put out drivers that worked properly. Not only for Virge, but everything they ever made. S3 continually proved that they had little concern about quality products or addressing their inability to produce good drivers.

Savage 2000 was really the peak of it all because they talked it up a lot and in the end the hardware was partially broken and they gave up producing drivers after only about a year. That card is really not great for any games. I bought one a few years ago and have tried working with it out of curiosity. Even with S3 Metal it has problems! Even at the Windows desktop for that matter! 😀

I'm not sure that D3D ever really worked "well" on a Virge card. Maybe with some D3D v3 games? I'm thinking stuff like Hellbender/Fury3 and Monster Truck Madness here. Very basic games.

I didn't wrote any of that, it was from a long go website about the S3 ViRGE, from nearly 13 years ago... Just posted it thinking maybe someone would find it interesting. But it's nice to read different opinions on the matter 😀.

It's S3 after all, you love it or you hate it... i'm from the first group. Don't know why, but somehow, slow performing, or partially broken hardware/products have much more attention from me than perfectly working ones... 😖
There's always this weird challenge feeling of having the damn thing working right! 😉

Forsaken and Incoming were also good performing D3D games... if you run them with no more than 512x384, and doesn't taking into account all the missing effects, most notable all the lighting ones...

I remember the s3 version of Pod was pretty impressive too (and fast!)
Unluckily I am not able to run it now on a legacy win98 machine, even with s3 virge windows drivers correctly installed.

i've been playing Motoracer on mine 1st Virge/DX 2MB on K6. It wasnt faster, but for sure nicer than sw version (if black smoke is ok for you). But best looking playable game on virge was for me Wing Commander Prophecy. After buying 2MB more memory i could set even nicer space textures (only game, where you can see realy difference between virge with 2 or 4MB).

unmei220 wrote:

Forsaken and Incoming were also good performing D3D games... if you run them with no more than 512x384, and doesn't taking into account all the missing effects, most notable all the lighting ones...

🤣 if you say so.

I think it's cool that it's the only chip that can run Terminal Velocity with 3D acceleration. Tomb Raider looks ok too.

Maybe you should explore the Cirrus Logic Laguna 3D if you're a sucker for barely functional 3D accelerators. 😉

@swaaye: you're forgetting Destruction Derby and Actua Soccer. Those are only accelerated for the ViRGE I think. If someone knows of those games accelerated for other chipsets, please let us know.

@vlask: didn't Motoracer have an option to turn off Z-Buffering ? I remember the ViRGE couldn't handle Z-Buffer + Transparent textures (smoke, dust, etc) at the same time, resulting in the transparencies being black boxes.

unmei220 wrote:

Right swaaye, I came to the right place to find them. Funny thing is, I had this in mind (creating a thread asking for the games) from some months ago, but never decided because I feared no one would care, or that maybe I would have my thread closed because it wasn't the correct forum to post some requests...

Don't worry, the moderation here is pretty laid-back. We usually only lock threads if people are fighting, or if the original issue is resolved and the discussion is going way off-topic, or if the original poster asks for it to be locked.

As far as posts in a wrong forum, I personally try to move those instead of locking them.

Edit: I didn't get into 3D accelerators until the nVidia Riva TNT1. I thought 3dfx was lame for pushing Glide (like Creative with EAX), and I wasn't paying attention to 3D acceleration before that (except maybe from reading stuff written by excited Sierra On-Line people).

HunterZ wrote:

Edit: I didn't get into 3D accelerators until the nVidia Riva TNT1. I thought 3dfx was lame for pushing Glide (like Creative with EAX), and I wasn't paying attention to 3D acceleration before that (except maybe from reading stuff written by excited Sierra On-Line people).

I liked Glide, it worked in a time when D3D didn't.