VOGONS


First post, by McMick

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This wasn't an official demo, and it may not even have been 3dfx specific, but I probably found it in a link in the daily news on 3dfxmania.com when that was a thing, sometime in mid-1997. I don't remember much about it except that there were 3 or 4 "scenes" and one of them was a floating, spherical blob of water that rippled and undulated as it hovered over a wood floor or board of some sort, while the camera slowly rotated around it. Does this ring a bell to anyone?

Reply 1 of 8, by mrau

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3dmark 2k?

Reply 2 of 8, by Davros

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Its not a 3dfx demo
It's an nvidia demo called bubble

wireframe = w
change number of polygons = 2, 3, 4
use cube environment map = c
use circular environment map = s
show environment map = t

There is also lightning (uses an nvidia extension maybe register combiners so will crash on an ati card)

Guardian of the Sacred Five Terabyte's of Gaming Goodness

Reply 3 of 8, by McMick

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Thanks for the links, those are pretty cool! But unfortunately, they are not the demo I'm talking about. The demo I remember came out in '97 before nvidia was a thing yet. At that point they only had the Riva 128 cards out. This was a DOS demo, not Windows; also the demo I had was much more primitive, and instead of the blob reflecting light, it was clear and only sort of "refracted" light. The wood floorboards or whatever were pretty low res and there wasn't really anything else in the scene. The other important part is that this demo did other things too, but I can't remember what they were. There were different "scenes" that it would play (it was a rolling demo I think). It was really the first cool thing in hardware-accelerated 3D that I'd ever seen, just as the Diamond Monster 3D cards were starting to sell well. It's obviously pretty obscure, probably written by a college student or something, and maybe I'll never find a copy. BTW speaking of which, does anyone remember "Funky Quadratics"? I'd like to see that again as well.

OH YEAH, I just remembered another demo I've been hunting for: This one came out in late '97 or thereafter, and it was a a rolling demo showing a toy train running along a track that wound through a child's bedroom, with toys all over the place. The camera followed it from behind as It would go past all the various 3d rendered toys and soforth. It might have been for Christmas or something like that. This one was definitely from a post on 3dfxmania.com.

Reply 4 of 8, by cyclone3d

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I'll edit here if I find downloads for other ones you are looking for.

Anyway, here is Funky Quadrics
https://web.archive.org/web/20010614012129/ht … ming/index.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20010615212757/ht … quadricsV09.zip

Here is the link to the 3dfxmania site before it closed down.... finding places to download the stuff from is challenging to say the least.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010411225807/htt … 0/screensavers/

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 5 of 8, by McMick

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Thanks for the links. FunkyQuadratics was updated to SuperQuadratics, which means it's better in every way, except now it won't do fullscreen 🙁

I suppose these demos are going to be very diificult to find, since I found the links to them on 3dfxmania, which wasn't archived before it was changed to 3dfiles.com, so everything before late 1998 is gone forever. Curse you, Internet Gods!!!

What really sucks is that I used to archive this stuff to CD-ROM, but many of my oldest CDs are no longer readable due to inferior media or normal aging or whatever. Bit-rot I guess.

Reply 6 of 8, by cyclone3d

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McMick wrote:

Thanks for the links. FunkyQuadratics was updated to SuperQuadratics, which means it's better in every way, except now it won't do fullscreen 🙁

I suppose these demos are going to be very diificult to find, since I found the links to them on 3dfxmania, which wasn't archived before it was changed to 3dfiles.com, so everything before late 1998 is gone forever. Curse you, Internet Gods!!!

What really sucks is that I used to archive this stuff to CD-ROM, but many of my oldest CDs are no longer readable due to inferior media or normal aging or whatever. Bit-rot I guess.

It may not be the discs, it may be the drives that you are trying to read them with.

We have a lot of old stuff archived to CDs where I work and a lot of the time I have to use a specific system to read the CDs with.. which is my work laptop. The ones that have issues were burned years ago and most likely at full speed which doesn't help either.

Another place you might be able to find some of them are on the simtel.net archive:
http://simtel.site/

I looked on there but didn't see a lot of them.. but I also don't know the .zip file names of them either.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 8 of 8, by McMick

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Thanks for that. i didn' even think to check demoscene stuff. However, I don't believe it was a demoscene thing, as I remember no music with it (that's like a rule for demoscene stuff, right? It has to have melodramatic techno-pop music?). I wasn't downloading demoscene stuff back then, unless it by chance came through 3dfxmania, which is where I downloaded nearly 100 percent of 3D stuff back in the '97-'98 era. It really sucks that the internet archive didn't start sooner.

At ANY rate, compared to some of those demos in your youtube link, this demo looked kind of amateurish. The only reason it's even important to me is because it was the first really cool hardware-accelerated 3D thing I saw on a home PC. The only other things I'd seen before this were those 3dfx split-screen comparison demos, which really didn't impress me all that much.

Anyone remember the train in the bedroom thing?