STB Dell Nitro 3D S3 Virge, basic info. \ VOGONS

STB Dell Nitro 3D S3 Virge, basic info.

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First post, by retro games 100

Posted on 2011-04-06, 21:38

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I'm testing an STB Dell Nitro 3D S3 Virge GX PCI VGA. I notice there's a support page for this VGA, on the Dell website. It's here. They've got some Windows 95 software for it, here. It's called STB Nitro 3D vision: STB Nitro 3D, v. 1.0, A01. I tried it and it works. It's fairly basic - refresh rates, resolution sizes, not much else.

I noticed that Vogons user Swaaye is using this card in his 3D accelerator comparison thread, here. In the notes section for this card on that thread, Swaaye is using the 4.10.01.2122-3.42.02 "FASTD3D" driver. I searched for that long number on DriverGuide, and found the software. For your convenience, it's here. (The file on DriverGuide is called virgew9x.exe - you need to rename it to .zip, and then unzip it.)

I notice inside this "FASTD3D" software package mentioned above, there are setup31.ins and setup31j.ins files. Are these for windows 3.x? If true, I must try this...

Edit: I tried the "FASTD3D" software package mentioned above on Windows 95. It worked. When I use Windows 98, do I need it? On W98, I think this card gets automatically installed. Not so on W95.

Windows 95 - showing Nitro driver version: 4.10.01.2122-3.42.02.

Dell Nitro 3D, with BIOS version 1.3

Edit: Minor correction made to the name of a download file, above.

Last edited by retro games 100 on 2011-04-07, 07:53. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 5, by swaaye

Posted on 2011-04-07, 00:13

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RG100, here is another good place for S3 drivers. 😉
http://www.s3graphics.com/en/drivers/legacy_s … re_archive.aspx

As to which driver to use well I have no idea if one is considerably better than another. I had problems with that FASTD3D release as you can see in the thread. S3 could never write a decent driver for any of their cards.

Reply 2 of 5, by bushwack

Posted on 2011-04-07, 02:42

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I never thought as the drivers being THE issue.

Reply 3 of 5, by swaaye

Posted on 2011-04-07, 04:35

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Heh well the hardware could be a wreck too and part of why they couldn't write drivers that worked well with more games. But it really is the same with the Savage cards.

However the S3 cards do work well with games that use their proprietary APIs so I do want to blame their ability to write D3D and GL drivers. 😉

Reply 4 of 5, by retro games 100

Posted on 2011-04-07, 07:58

retro games 100 Offline

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Thanks a lot for the info! Sadly, those S3 links don't appear to be working. Not at this moment, anyway. Luckily however, you can search for those zip files on DriverGuide, and I've downloaded the 3 zip files that I need from that site.

Reply 5 of 5, by retro games 100

Posted on 2011-04-07, 10:50

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I installed DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 FWG on to a compact flash drive, and then installed the Virge driver for this Dell Nitro 3D card. I got the driver zip file name from the S3 drivers link that swaaye posted above. Its name is w3110505.zip. Inside this zip file is a file called OEMSETUP.INF. When I ran setup from inside the C:\Windows directory, it wanted to find this file. Is this the only way that Windows 3 installs hardware? In other words, must it always locate a filename called OEMSETUP.INF?

I wondered if the more recent driver file found inside the other Windows 9x package (virgew9x) would have been more interesting. These can be seen in the illustration below. It shows a .DRV file called S3_3, which is over a year later in date than the .DRV file found inside the Windows 311 zip package.

Edit: For convenience, here is a link to the w3110505.zip Windows 3 driver package.

virge%20vers.jpg