First post, by Dario
Hello to everybody.
Having retrieved my old 3d Blaster Voodoo2, i decided to try to bring it to life again.
Not having an old rig where to place it, I decided to try the way of PCI passthrough with Virtualbox.
I'm running Arch Linux on an Asus H97-PLUS motherboard with an Intel i5 4690. The card was only recognized in the PCI slot at the bottom, and correctly reported to the system. I followed the instrucion in the Virtualbox manual and added the Voodoo2 to a Win98 machine inside Virtualbox.
Well, Windows 98 found it and I was able to install the drivers, and it worked... I connected the Voodoo2 to a monitor I had around, and it worked:) 😎
I tried Need For Speed III and Novalogic Mig 29 Fulcrum (between the games I had at the time, when I rocked a Pentium 200 MMX).
The main problem is that the performance is awful:( I got better results (almost 100% speed and minimal stuttering) with the card emulated in PCem... 😐 The card is very slow, managing a couple of frames per second or so...
I know it's completely useless and that there are better ways to enjoy those old games, nonetheless I think that it would be nice to have it work properly, for the sake of fiddling around with vintage hardware:)
The question is, do you have any suggestion?
By the way, I tried to add the PCI device to a Qemu/KVM virtual machine, but it looks like my motherboard is not IOMMU enabled, and I wasn't able to run the virtual machine. I wonder if this is the cause of the slow performance: Virtualbox is able to pass the PCI device, but without the proper hardware support, it's not running at full speed...
If you have any idea, thanks in advance:)
Dario