Ahhh, yeah. I found this on a MESA FTP site not too long ago and have been meaning to upload it to VogonsDrivers, thanks for the reminder! 😀
It's known as sdk26.zip on that FTP 😀
[EDIT] ftp://ftp.compassis.com/xtra/ftp/pub/Mesa/sdk26.zip

Stiletto wrote:

Ahhh, yeah. I found this on a MESA FTP site not too long ago and have been meaning to upload it to VogonsDrivers, thanks for the reminder! 😀
It's known as sdk26.zip on that FTP 😀

😳 seems like we probly found it on same server, the file name before I recompress it is the same! 😁

Here is DOS samples screenshot that is on the SDK.
Can't put image directry to the post 'cus it too big D:

one of my S3 Virge card
http://imgur.com/4Fqvmen

CUBE.EXE
http://imgur.com/Di5eru0

FAN.EXE
http://imgur.com/IPewucT

STRIP.EXE
http://imgur.com/Ch8eFYy

SHOWTEXT.EXE MAN1555.TEX
like the name suggest, it is texture viewer.
http://imgur.com/IYnr4sU

I have attached fixed compile of samples on the SDK, include local Git repo for see what I change it
and all version of S3D Toolkit Runtime that I can find, DOS, WIN9X and RenderWare.

To compile the sample, you need WATCOM C/C++ 10 or 11 or OpenWATCOM 1.0 (idk if OW1.0 work), MSVC6.
Put the SDK in C:\S3DTK, Set your enviroment of compilier, if you use WATCOM, don't forget to run OWTK.BAT in the SDK directory. For WATCOM, goto SAMPLES\WC\ and run batch files there to compile DOS samples. For MSVC, goto SAMPLES\WIN95\ and run BuildRel.bat to compile WIN9X samples. 😀

MSVC version can be compile and link with VC6, WATCOM version is for WATCOM 10 or 11 and it will not work with OpenWATCOM 1.9 (some change in source file to make the samples compile, but result exe don't work, it give me "init fail...", seems to relate with incompatible change of OW1.9) but version 1.0 can compile and link it, and again I haven't test the result EXE. *lazy* 😜

- Khral

Ah, here's my post of my (re)discovery:
Re: S3 Virge register documentation PDF

More importantly, a while back I found a 1998-era page archived in the Internet Archive that claimed they had "S3 S3D Toolkit SDK SOURCECODE"

If they really had the full sourcecode, that would be remarkable. However, it's much more likely they only had sdk26.zip, the binary libraries and source headers.

I'll see if I can dig up the URL to that page again sometime. I know it was related to http://dmarton.tripod.com/download.html

[EDIT]Got it:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000521134701/htt … d/technical.htm

S3d Toolkit - you'll need this to write native programs for the S3 ViRGE. It will work with either the Visual C++ 5 or Watcom compilers, so make sure you have one of these before you download! It may be possible to get it working with DJGPP or BC4.52, but it won't be easy... [1.7Mb] (sdk26.zip)
S3d Toolkit Source - thanks alot to Raja for arranging the distribution of this. This shows how to access the ViRGE family direct, paving the way for 3D accelerated drivers in the case of currently unsupported operating systems, such as OS/2 and Linux. The source was intended for use in S3MESA driver development, though I don't think S3 will have a go at you if you use it for some other ViRGE project... [2.8Mb]

I tried to get in touch with Tom Browne (former S3 Planet admin) last year but he thinks he lost much of his S3 files due to lost site backups, etc. over the years.

In case anyone is into retrocoding and into Pascal and feels like writing some S3D code, then you may be interested in this S3D Pascal bindings i wrote, together with a bit of documentation (could be better but i'm a bit tired 😜):

http://runtimeterror.com/tech/s3dtk/

It links directly to S3DTKW.DLL provided by the S3 Virge drivers so there aren't any external dependencies - you can think of it as a S3D Toolkit for Pascal.

I've tested it with Free Pascal 2.2.4 (the last version to support Win95 out of the box) and Delphi 2 (though i only made sure it compiles with Delphi 2 as i do not have DirectDraw units that can work with it - perhaps i'll make some minimal ddraw unit with just enough declarations to use S3D... at some point... later).

I've used this yesterday to make a quick and dirty S3D port of a Post Apocalyptic Petra, a 3D game game i wrote for last year's MS-DOS Game Jam (and then after the jam ported to a bunch of other APIs and OSes). The S3D port isn't done yet since it is a bit glitchy, but i doubt i'll need to change the bindings.

Was a complete SDK for S3D ever found? I'm also curious as to whether S3D as a 3D accelerator was accessible under DOS or if it was exclusively for Windows.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-02-22, 22:00:

Was a complete SDK for S3D ever found? I'm also curious as to whether S3D as a 3D accelerator was accessible under DOS or if it was exclusively for Windows.

I didn't try it myself but the linked file in the top post seems to contain headers, a Watcom library and examples for both DOS and Windows.