VOGONS


First post, by gmipf

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M system:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+
MB: Asrock K7VT6
GPU: Geforce 6200 AGP + Orchid Righteous 3D (HW rev D)
RAM: 2x 1GB DDR 400Mhz
OS: Win98SE

Whenever I try to run any glide game, the following screen appears with different artifacts:

voodoo1_on_k7vt6.jpeg
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Already tried Need for Speed 2 SE and Frogger on Win98 and Super Mario 64 on DOS (compiled for glide), always the same result. I have also installed the voodoo card in a much newer Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 and tested SM64 in FreeDOS from USB. Works fine there.

Is this issue somehow known?

Reply 3 of 15, by Munx

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I believe that Voodoo1 and 2 cards do not work with Athlon CPUs. Not sure about Athlon XP. I recall having to use fastvoodoo drivers to get Voodoo2 working on my SlotA motherboard.

My builds!
The FireStarter 2.0 - The wooden K5
The Underdog - The budget K6
The Voodoo powerhouse - The power-hungry K7
The troll PC - The Socket 423 Pentium 4

Reply 4 of 15, by gmipf

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@Munx: Does this also apply to Athlon 64 754 & 939 socket boards/cpus too? I wanted to get another board/platform because of this and wanted to upgrade to an Athlon 64 4000+ singlecore. Maybe I should better go with Pentium 4?

Reply 5 of 15, by Doornkaat

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Munx wrote on 2021-01-18, 20:34:

I believe that Voodoo1 and 2 cards do not work with Athlon CPUs. Not sure about Athlon XP. I recall having to use fastvoodoo drivers to get Voodoo2 working on my SlotA motherboard.

I have used reference drivers with a regular 900MHz Thunderbird Athlon and VIA KT133 chipset with both Voodoo1 and Voodoo2 cards before. This used to be my test system for at least two years. SLI had always been dodgy though.

Voodoo1 and Voodoo2 cards tend to be divas. I have one that doesn't work above 66MHz FSB and one that will crash any of my systems with a CPU faster than 350MHz. It's a Guillemot Maxi Gamer 3D from 1996 iirc. I have also had cards that refuse to work with certain motherboards and one even refused to work with a certain PC case.
The popular Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo1 has revisions A up to at least G so I guess the design had a lot of optimisation to be done to it. 😅

I know this explains nothing and isn't very helpful but I concluded for myself that some of the cards are just very picky about the rest of the system and there isn't really much to be done about that.😒

Reply 6 of 15, by gmipf

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My Orchid card is the latest revision I think. Luckily I could verify that it is running on my very fast system (FX9590 at all core 4.5Ghz). The problem is, I don't want trial and erroring by buying a different mainboard every time. xD

Reply 7 of 15, by Munx

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gmipf wrote on 2021-01-18, 20:39:

@Munx: Does this also apply to Athlon 64 754 & 939 socket boards/cpus too? I wanted to get another board/platform because of this and wanted to upgrade to an Athlon 64 4000+ singlecore. Maybe I should better go with Pentium 4?

Ive seen videos on YT with Voodoo1 running on A64, so I dont think there will be issues there.

Keep in mind that certain games (liko Turok for example) will have texture artifacts if you run a Voodoo1 with anything faster than a Pentium 2

My builds!
The FireStarter 2.0 - The wooden K5
The Underdog - The budget K6
The Voodoo powerhouse - The power-hungry K7
The troll PC - The Socket 423 Pentium 4

Reply 8 of 15, by appiah4

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Voodoo 1 is speed sensitive as well as going haywire on some FSB speeds.

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 9 of 15, by bloodem

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As others have said, the behavior is normal. With a Voodoo 1, you need to keep things as period correct as possible. You might get lucky and get it to work on certain newer platforms, but it's only that... luck 😀
And, frankly, the card is very weak... at 640 x 480 in many games it's a serious bottleneck even for a P MMX 233. Not sure why you would want to use it on an Athlon XP 😀
On the other hand, a Voodoo 2, should work fine even on ultra overkill PCs.

1 x PLCC-68 / 2 x PGA132 / 5 x Skt 3 / 9 x Skt 7 / 12 x SS7 / 1 x Skt 8 / 14 x Slot 1 / 5 x Slot A
5 x Skt 370 / 8 x Skt A / 2 x Skt 478 / 2 x Skt 754 / 3 x Skt 939 / 7 x LGA775 / 1 x LGA1155
Current PC: Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Backup PC: Core i7 7700k

Reply 10 of 15, by gmipf

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I wanted a voodoo1 for only some DOS games and best compatibility. Maybe I will buy later a PCI Voodoo3 or higher. I think I'm considering to buy a Pentium 4 industrial board with ISA slot. There are some sub 100$ ones on aliexpress. But don't know which ones to get. Heard most of them doesn't work with ISA sound cards.

Reply 11 of 15, by bloodem

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Unfortunately, for best compatibility with a Voodoo 1, you really need to keep it period correct. Personally, I only use it with Pentium (MMX) 166 or weaker CPUs.

1 x PLCC-68 / 2 x PGA132 / 5 x Skt 3 / 9 x Skt 7 / 12 x SS7 / 1 x Skt 8 / 14 x Slot 1 / 5 x Slot A
5 x Skt 370 / 8 x Skt A / 2 x Skt 478 / 2 x Skt 754 / 3 x Skt 939 / 7 x LGA775 / 1 x LGA1155
Current PC: Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Backup PC: Core i7 7700k

Reply 12 of 15, by gmipf

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So have tried some settings with setmul. Since I had unlocked my Athlon XP 3000+ to an mobile Athlon XP with unlocked multiplier several years ago, I could set the multiplier as low as 3x with an FSB of 63Mhz. With 189Mhz I still got artifacts on my Orchid Voodoo1. Then I have tried disabling the L1 cache and the artifacts were gone and I could run every game on the Voodoo1. But without the L1 every game is ultra slow, even at 2100Mhz stock speed. Is there a way to just disable the L2 of my CPU? Maybe that could be the solution. Unfortunately setmul can only disable the L1.

Reply 13 of 15, by bloodem

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66 MHz FSB? 3X multiplier? Are you sure about that? To my knowledge this is not possible. All the Athlon XP boards and CPUs I had would only go down to FSB100 / 5x multiplier. Even if somehow you managed to get the multiplier down to 3x, I still don't see how you could lower the FSB to 66.
Regarding the L2 adjustments, some motherboards like the Asus A7V600 / A7V600-X have this option (however the minimum FSB is 100, which is still problematic for Voodoo 1)

1 x PLCC-68 / 2 x PGA132 / 5 x Skt 3 / 9 x Skt 7 / 12 x SS7 / 1 x Skt 8 / 14 x Slot 1 / 5 x Slot A
5 x Skt 370 / 8 x Skt A / 2 x Skt 478 / 2 x Skt 754 / 3 x Skt 939 / 7 x LGA775 / 1 x LGA1155
Current PC: Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Backup PC: Core i7 7700k

Reply 14 of 15, by gmipf

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On my Asrock K7VT6 BIOS I can set the FSB as low as 50Mhz but below 63Mhz it will not post and only if I set the DDR memory to 400Mhz and multiplier to 10 it will post. If the CPU is below 600Mhz or the memory below 400Mhz it doesn't post with 63Mhz FSB. After boot in DOS or Win98 I can set the multi to 3x with setmul to get below 200Mhz CPU speed.

Still odd that it's working on my 4x 4500Mhz FX-9590 system.

Reply 15 of 15, by bloodem

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Interesting! Too bad it doesn't have the L2 cache toggle, that would've made this board extremely flexible! Regarding setmul, were you able to confirm with third party software that the multiplier was indeed switched to 3x?

1 x PLCC-68 / 2 x PGA132 / 5 x Skt 3 / 9 x Skt 7 / 12 x SS7 / 1 x Skt 8 / 14 x Slot 1 / 5 x Slot A
5 x Skt 370 / 8 x Skt A / 2 x Skt 478 / 2 x Skt 754 / 3 x Skt 939 / 7 x LGA775 / 1 x LGA1155
Current PC: Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Backup PC: Core i7 7700k