Hi, everyone.

I just finished a playthrough of the DOS + 3Dfx version of Tomb Raider on my retro build, which is a circa 98/2000 machine that I added a MS-DOS 6.22 partition to for good measure. I have the build details at the end of the post, in case they're relevant.

At the advice of the Voodoo 2 compatibility matrix here, I was using the 3Dfx patch from the Tomb Raider Gold disk plus the RUNME.BAT, without which the game would look completely blue.

When the game worked, it worked brilliantly. Graphics were crisp, smoothing looked great, and the game never destabilized over time. I even left it running overnight by accident and picked up where I left off the following morning without a hitch. Most of the time, though, I'd run the game and see a distorted screen after reaching the menu, or my monitor would go into power-save mode during the logos. I reconnected cables, removed unrelated expansion cards, dropped from SLI down to a single Voodoo 2 card, and even bought a new 3Dfx passthrough cable and PCB SLI bridge (which was DOA). Nothing worked.

The only thing that seemed to work literally 100% of the time was reseating the 3Dfx card. Reseat, as in disconnect the monitor and passthrough cable, physically remove the Voodoo card from the chassis, re-insert it into the same spot, and reconnect everything. The game would start without a hitch for a flawless game session. 24 hours later, I'd come back to pick up where I left off, and I'd get the same distorted/blank screen until I did the reseat ritual again, after which the game would work.

Why the heck does this work?

This feels like "blowing into an NES cartridge," in that it works magically in the short term but I'm probably doing some long terms damage to the card, the PCI slot, or the motherboard by treating it like a credit card swiper. I know that some old slot connectors / cartridge slots get corroded, and inserting/removing their components can clear some of that corrosion over time, but it seems odd to me that the system would just revert back to being cranky after sitting untouched for a day. I also know that these are 20+ year old parts that haven't necessarily aged well, but again, it seems odd that this weird ritual would always work on the first try, no matter how bad things looked beforehand.

It's worth noting that I don't have any issues with 3D games in Windows. Unreal, MDK, and a couple of other Glide favorites all work perfectly on the first try without having to open anything up.

Any thoughts or ideas?

Thanks.