Reply 20 of 28, by ph4nt0m
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wrote:But I've seen trays of just plain old vas100 chips being sold, not just a few laying around, like they are sold by pallet it seems. Is someone still producing these things, where did they come from, because it doesn't looks they they will run out anytime soon? I have heard several people around the internet talking about having to buy new vsa100 chips to solder on there broken Voodoo 4/5 cards. I know Nvidia owns the production rights to all of 3DFXs old stuff. But maybe they could do a nostalgia fueled anniversary release of the 5500 and 6000. From the looks they don't even have to produce vsa100 chips, they just need need to buy a decent enough stock. 3DFX is a big name in retro PC gaming, I feel like they could easily break even selling reproduced 5500 and 6000 cards that are AGP 8x compatible or even PCIe variants. But at the very least, I think someone could draw up a DIY vsa100 AGP 8x or PCIe board, just buy the parts, solder them here and there, and in the age of the internet a dedicated team of developers can make a BIOS for the card and put it on github, download, flash done. A man can only dream.
These VSA-100 chips are new old stock. They were auctioned off when 3Dfx went belly up. Someone bought them and kept in storage until recently. They are only useful for repairs because there are no open source gerber files, BOM, etc. which could be used to manufacture new boards. I bet NVIDIA will never produce anything 3Dfx related.