The game is trying to use the Voodoo 2 card. If you don't have the cable for connecting your Voodoo 2 to your primary graphics card then it will display a blank screen. Also you cannot just plug the monitor cable directly into the Voodoo 2 card... It's 3D only and still needs your primary video card for the 2D stuff such as in game menu's and video's etc....

Damn, Thats what I thought was happening.

Where can i get a cable?

Is it just your standard female to male vga cable?

Simon wrote:

Is it just your standard female to male vga cable?

It's a standard VGA cable, though I can't remember from the top of my head wether you need male-male, female-female or female-male. You'll need to check your Voodoo and 2D card's connectors. I tried with a cable that was about a meter long and it worked 😉

These cables should be easy to get and quite cheap.

Silver has no kind of 3D acceleration, it's entirely software based (according to manual ).
Get that cable though, it will be necessary for other games. If that fixes it you're set, if it doesn't pm me to send you a package full of patches for this game.

Hi

I just bought a 0.5meatre male to female vga cable, should be here in a few days

what drivers should i use? I'm running windows 98se and its a creative 3d blaster voodoo 2 ct6670

I use FastVoodoo2 4.6 or FastVoodoo2 4.0 Gold Edition. You can get them from here http://www.3dfxzone.it/dir/3dfx/voodoo2/drivers/windows9x/

Right got it all working sort of But im getting bad performance

I installed the fastvoodoo2 gold driver.

In quake 2 3.20 im getting 11fps @ 640x480

and in glquake im getting 41fps @ 640x480

Any ideas?

did you try updating directx and are you sure you selected opengl and not software rendering in the video settings? ...sorry can't be of more help. One of the gurus here is sure to drop in and help out

well quake 2 was on 3dfx opengl and i used glquake which i assume doesnt have a software mode (And it had a 3d spinning 3dfx logo at the start)

edit: its only an 8mb voodoo 2 not a 12mb but id still expect better performance on quake 2. like 40 or 50fps i would have thought

Well if your integrated graphics card supports OpenGL , it could the case of the games using that instead of your Voodoo 2.
Other than that, software rendering option maybe?

EDIT:

Yeah just read your new post. I really don't know what it could be. Why don't you try the latest official drivers? Grab them here : http://www.falconfly.de/voodoo2.htm
Also, try to update your Mini-GL in both games.
Yeah 12mb only makes a difference in SLI.

Simon wrote:

well quake 2 was on 3dfx opengl and i used glquake which i assume doesnt have a software mode (And it had a 3d spinning 3dfx logo at the start)

edit: its only an 8mb voodoo 2 not a 12mb but id still expect better performance on quake 2. like 40 or 50fps i would have thought

Hmm, quake 2 should perform well on almost anything. Before I had a V2, I was using a Savage4 PCI 8mb (very shitty as you might expect) and gameplay was smooth at 800x600. Same with the V2 - all on a P233MMX.

You've got way more CPU than me, so can't be hardware related I think.

Try reinstalling the drivers. Edit: Try going into device manager and updating the driver from there first.

BTW, this is the latest V2 driver as far as I know.

no luck with other drivers.

Bios settings

pci/vga palletsnoop = disabled
video bios shadow - enabled

then i have tones of hex ranges followed by the word shadow all set to disabled. IRRC this has something to do with making the video faster but i dont know what... should i enable all ranges?

CPU to PCI Post Write - disabled
cpu to pci burst mem. wr - ema;ed
system bios cahcable - enabled
video bios cacheable - disabled
memory hote at 15-16mb - disabled
agp apeature size - 64 mb
pci delay transaction - enabled

should i change any of this?

Try this:
video bios shadow - disabled
CPU to PCI Post Write - enabled

Also see if you have pci latency timing options- most systems the default is at 32. You can try higher settings, i.e. 64.... up to 128 cycles and see how that works out. If you don't have many pci devices then you can experiment with higher settings.

Change only one at a time, and see if there's improvement.

turning off video bios shadow got me another 10 fps on the time demos! But cpu to pci post write makes them crash.

I Couldnt see any latency options

Simon wrote:

.....
In quake 2 3.20 im getting 11fps @ 640x480.....
Any ideas?

This doesn't sound right atall.

I've played through the whole Unreal campaign on a K6-3-400 with a voodoo2 and it played fluently (except for a few very crowded areas maybe, low fps was noticable but still playable).
It's not Quake 2 but it should perform similar.

iirc I used something called Merlin drivers or so...
My OS was Windows ME btw, dunno if that matters

The Quake 1/2 console will say the name of the OpenGL GPU it's using. Press ~ in the game and see if it's running on the right chip. You're definitely not CPU limited. I think software mode would definitely be faster than the numbers you're getting for 3D accelerated!!

Amigamerlin drivers. There's tons a drivers out there actually, Haven't tried them all but so far I've had no problems with the Fastvoodoo2 ones.

If you're really using the right chip, as indicated by the Quake console and still having low fps, you might wanna try the following (in that order):

1) Try using Mesa or WickedGL. They're in one of the fastvoodoo2 4.6 folders.

2) Some other drivers, e.g. Koolsmoky (which is really new) or maybe even the default drivers.

3) How old is your windows install? If its very old- try checking for errors and defragmenting. Scrub your hard disk clean- uninstall any junk.

4) Reinstall your O/S. Windows9x can get really messed up really fast causing all sorts of havoc.

5) Install XP and try your card on it. XP is super stable and lets you narrow down any potential problems without being bugged at the same time by Windows 9x's shittiness. I usually try any new hardware with XP and once I'm familiar with it, only then use some retro O/S. You could install XP, try your card and if it goes well, reinstall win 98 and see if works just as well.

I used to get 19fps on a p90 @640x480 in quake
ps: are you running quake in pure dos, win98 dos mode or winquake ?

ps: winxp with 128mb and a celeron 400 will be slow as hell

its a new install ~1 week but i only added the card the other day after installing it.

quake 1 is using glquake in windows 98.

Quake 2 says its using the voodoo 2 card.

I'm pretty stumped as to what could be causing such low performance.