First post, by MotionRelative
This thread is for listing all your Voodoo2 nightmares! Let's solve them and get you back on track. Hard to find and in depth knowledge of Voodoo2's from a 10 year retro PC veteran. So, let's kick it off by listing a reaaaalllly difficult case that we are going to solve together:
So I have five different STB 3DFx Voodoo2 12Mb cards. I’ve tried each one with several different drivers and still have these strange problems. This seems to be specific to playing DOS games such as ‘Tomb Raider 1‘ and ‘The Elderscrolls Adventures: Red Guard’.
Single card:
I can launch games exactly once and play them fine. After exiting the game, I cannot relaunch it. It black screen crashes the system or crashes to desktop. If I go into the voodoo2 tab in display properties and hit ‘system info’ it shows 0’s for all the memory stats. If I close the display properties and go back into the ‘system info’ tab it then registers correctly. I noticed that the screen flashes every time go to the voodoo2 tab, presumably because it is initializing the cards or something, is this normal? It only registers 0’s after exiting these games. Otherwise I can check the voodoo2 tab and it always registers fine.
SLI:
Works most of the time. Sometimes when entering a game I get a black screen but can hear the sound. If I reset my monitor the video then comes back. Games play fine, but the same problem occurs after exiting these games.
Questions:
Does Voodoo2 have problems with newer monitors maybe?
Is the fast Voodoo2 CPU bug at work?
Why does the voodoo2 fail to initialise after exiting a game? Why does reentering the voodoo2 tab correct the issue? Is voodoo black magic to blame?! Haha
System info:
Windows 98SE OEM, Base install no patches.
512Mb PC133 SDRAM
Tualatin 1.4GHz pentium III socket 370
Intel 815 chipset motherboard
Aureal Vortex 2, Turtle beach Montego II
Voodoo2 12Mb SLI
GeForce 256 DDR 32Mb
USB keyboard and mouse
Ideas:
I'm thinking about trying a slower processor and/or down grading the memory to PC100. Other than that I’m lost. Please advise!
