Thanks all for your kind words on my first video. Today, I take some time to address your top 10 requests. Feel free to add questions/comments below. Enjoy!
I had a Voodoo 2 back in the day and we played the hell out of NFS 2 Special Edition. In your footage I could not make out if that was really the Glide version but I can tell you a sure way to check. On the track Outback, bugs are splattering on your windshield. You do lose the cockpit graphics though.
I would love to see FPS figures for these games, you have the ultimate Voodoo 2 GPU bottleneck showcase on your hands, it would be cool to see how much performance you get in this system vs. something like a PIII or Athlon of the era.
Descent 2 3dfx for dos, played multiplayer, with someone at a high framerate with screen somewhat minimized, it allowed smart mine and smart missile bullets to home better. Descent 3. Not sure if D3 will work on voodoo 1/2 but it's worth a shot.
This is such an interesting approach to retro gaming! Skip the middleman of emulation or waiting for a remaster to come out and use the real thing! I'm quite impressed that you managed to get this literal antique hardware to talk to a modern system. Very cool! I remember seeing a video from back in the day showing a butchered version of Doom 3 running on a Voodoo card. That might be a fun project to dive into.
Oh, the Voodoo magic of this card was amazing, when i firstly got in contact with a Voodoo 2, it was like nothing i have seen before. It was fast at 640x480 and even 800x600 (at some games) and it boosted the graphics to 11 (at least, as far as my childbrain saw it back then, but to be honest it sometimes looked like someone smeared lube all over the screen, a bit blurry). Glad to see, that it still can be used even with a modern system. It is crazy, that the community around those 3dfx cards is still somewhat alive, 3dfx had a big impact.
With SLI you could run a lot of stuff at 1024x768 at pretty good frame rates! as you say it was a revelation, nothing before it had even come close and while the Voodoo 1 was a great card and everyone knew it the Voodoo2 was pretty much essential hardware. Looking back you're right: it's fuzzy, often washed out etc but we didn't really care or notice back then. It was all about that frame rate and when the art was carefully done in consideration of the hardware as it was in later titles a lot of that stuff was overcome.
How amazing James! I played Deus Ex, NFS2, Half Life and incredibly Counter Strike on my dual V2 system + K63-450Mhz, it was tremendous at that time! Thanks for sharing this and hope to see more 3DFX NFS2 and squished bugs on windshield! :D
Video capturing directly from Voodoo2's analog output reproduces that nice 2x2 box filter! That's the thing can never see in usual "screen captures", hence a lot of people thought gamers from that era was watching those dithered pixels all the time...
Probably my 3DFX voodoo 2 Card is lying in my storeroom. I am going to give it a try if I fortunate enough to find it . Thanks for your video. I already subscribed your channel.
I would love to see Voodoo SLI running on a modern PC with PCI slots (PCI did manage to stick around for a lot longer than you'd think, especially on OEM systems). Seeing a dedicated build with something like this up-and-running would be super neat to see. It would be fun to see how far you can take this concept. You can get USB floppy header adapter cables (I use one for a black 3.5" Sony drive in my main rig), SATA IDE adapters could be used for era-appropriate CD-ROM bays, you can still get modern cases with 5.25 bays (such as the Fractal Design Focus G), and you can even pick up PCIe cards that add PS/2 ports back into the PC. I would absolutely love to see a true Frankenstein's monster of a PC done in this way (I may have to give this a go myself since I have a Voodoo 2 SLI sitting around waiting for an opportunity to be used). Connecting this setup to a CRT monitor with a GTX 980Ti (the most powerful GPU to have true analog video support in the form of DVI-I) and a VGA switcher (used to switch effortlessly between the Voodoo and 980Ti on the monitor) would be the icing on the cake for this cross-generational system. I challenge you now to make this possible. If you don't do it, I will (of course, if you need help, I'd be happy to assist). Cheers! :D
@@jamesfmackenzie At least for me I waas able to use Nvidia Control Panel on aan older version of the driver to manually specify 320x240 at 60Hz or even something like 480i. Arguably the goal of the project is to try to restore as much "true / native" functionality as possible with as modern hardware, so having "real" analog VGA out is both more compatible and more in the spirit of the project :D
thanks again for this great video. I have a voodoo three in my new windows 98 se build. I ordered half life c.i.b on ebay after watching this video, coming all the way from stratshire to Canada. I’m not sure where that place is but it’s likely over close to your way across the pond :-)
Try running ' Motorhead ' at max settings. One of the first games to make use of TRUE transform & lighting rendering. An awesome racing game that was ahead of it's time.👍😁
Back then (from 1998 dec.) i used a Voodoo2 12MB + (S3 Trio 4MB) with an AMD K6-2 3DNow! 350 (at 400Mhz) until year 2000 i think (In 2001 i buyed a GeForce 2 MX 400) and i totally satisfied whit it at that time in all games. So almost ~3 years... With the Glide and the AMD 3Dnow! the Voodoo2 its was an another level.
This is great! 👍🎉 Having that horizontal bracket space seems quite uncommon though, an easy solution for other people would be to grab a "PCI External Stand" (Very popular for bitcoin miners). It does mean the card would be mounted outside the case but many of them come with fan attachments so you wouldn't need to add any heatsinks to your lovely Voodoo2.
Thanks for the kind message! The answer is yes, but I'm not sure when 🙂My second Voodoo2 is in another country right now, and not sure when I'll get back there to grab it 😂
@@jamesfmackenzie Instead of doing an SLI you could get yourself a single Voodoo3 3000/3500. That would give you better-than-SLI performance with better image quality. I assume it would work similarly, except Windows will actually be able to extend a desktop screen to it also. I went through a nostalgia filled Voodoo renaissance in the last few years, I went through the V2 SLI / V3 / V4 / V5 cards. My favourite of course was the V5. The V4 was too slow to take advantage of 32bit colour (the whole reason you'd want a VSA100 voodoo) But Sadly my V5 died. While the V2 SLI had a 'cool factor' for sure, it was a bit frustrating that Vsync had to be enabled *all of the time* otherwise each card would loose sync with each other, and the display output would go all zig-zagged. The V3 gives you all the goodness of a V2 SLI, but you can disable Vsync to attain better performance overall.
These Voodoo screen captures are breathtaking, esp. Quake, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Unreal! I find that modern engines and software rendering loses something in the Quake II lighting, that Voodoo gets just right. Old magazines of the time talked about how 'beautiful' Quake II was, and I didn't understand what they were saying until just now. I've never been tempted to build a retro PC until now. Let's face it, DOSBOX is pretty accurate these days, and there are lots of 'virtual machines' that let you emulate a Pentium, and there's FPGA for DOS-era machines. But this Voodoo 2 brings something else. It was the pinnacle of x86 gaming at the time, and the flagship in game promotion. If there's any retro PC worth building, it's one with a Voodoo 2. Are there virtual machines that will allow this kind of setup on a modern PC? Maybe what's needed is a repro card of some sort [don't laugh - there are whole repro Commodore 64s and PC Sound Blasters now], or some kind of PC package for those Voodoo 2 era games.
Glad you liked the captures! Thanks! It is possible to play Glide games on a modern GPU, using something like dgVoodoo2. Also, you *can* but repro Voodoo card (and more!) at www.zxc64.com - these cards are awesome but expensive! Hope these open up some options for you 🙂
Even back in 98' I didn't use the loop-cable due to the poor quality. If you had a CRT with two inputs (several had D-Sub and BNC inputs for instance like my Sony Multiscan 17SE2T) you could do the same and simply switch inputs.
Nice list, althou the special edition of need for speed 2 (best way to identify it asides from the logos is that it has the mustang match 3 and the ferrari 355 F1) is the one that take the most advantage of 3dglide.
This is amazing! I was a teenager when the voodoo2 wat peaking and 3Dfx was just the thing to get. I eventually even had an SLI setup running. Playing Unreal in 1024x768 was....unreal. Does SLI work with this? Doe interstate 76 work? What about carmageddon ?
6:09 You tried HL as mentioned on earlier video. But oh, the water is not waving in OpenGL mode like in some another Half-Life version. As I said, i only saw this very very time ago. But it's real.
I’ve have two Core 2 Duo machines (both Dell OEM, different models). The Voodoo 2 works on one but crashes on the other with a VxD error. Good luck! :-)
Anybody calling it a fake because of not using the passthrough... head in hands. I remember doing the old swap output for a while back when this card was contemporary! some of the bundled passthrough cables were really poor quality. I really miss this era, I remember the old click of the Voodoo1 and 2 cards when the relay switched the output and that spinning 3DFX logo. Wonder if an SLI setup would be possible somehow?
Would that card run on a Biostar X470GTA mainboard? That mainboard still have a native PCI slot. And I think also can fit a Ryzen 5700X, or G cpu. All goody on one board that board could be? Update: Actually have 2 PCI slots. Good candidate for a voodoo SLI operation. Could be?
@@jamesfmackenzie If you can find one on the used market, grab on it. I myself used a sound blaster pci card and also tested a pci gigabit network card. All was good. Until windows 10 install. :) SB. was the first thing i had to ditch, which made me very sad (and the Cambridge Soundworks system as well)
I'm quite surprised quake 3 ran well on the voodoo 2. I had a voodoo 3 3000, when the game released and it ran it ok, but it wasn't amazing. 8n fact that's what prompted me to upgrade to a Radeon 8500.
I took the same upgrade path! :-) And then 9700 Pro after that You’re right, it runs super well. I assume the fast CPU is helping the Voodoo2 power through :-)
The real question is do the games look different on glide vs directx/opengl, especially on the unreal engine. There are forum posts about this which say the games developed primarily for 3dfx had better textures etc, but it's hard to find any visual comparisons. Not that it matters, but it's an interesting detail.
I prefer the lightning on a Voodoo than in OpenGL. They have more "flares", while the OGL outlines are more brutals and sharp. But I don't remember noticing anything special about textures.
@@jamesfmackenzie I'm honestly amazed I still have both... I used to have 3. One was by Canopus and had a fan on one of the chips. That and a DXR2 hardware dvd decoding card. No idea where they went, probably lost during my move from GA to CO and a few years later back to GA lol
guy using 20+ yrs old gpu (? maybe 3d accelerator) on a win 10 pc, and im screwed in the past 4 hours to be able to use the rx480 8g with my A10 9700APU.tryed everything, i can look up, no luck. :/
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Thanks all for your kind words on my first video. Today, I take some time to address your top 10 requests. Feel free to add questions/comments below. Enjoy!
I had a Voodoo 2 back in the day and we played the hell out of NFS 2 Special Edition. In your footage I could not make out if that was really the Glide version but I can tell you a sure way to check. On the track Outback, bugs are splattering on your windshield. You do lose the cockpit graphics though.
I would love to see FPS figures for these games, you have the ultimate Voodoo 2 GPU bottleneck showcase on your hands, it would be cool to see how much performance you get in this system vs. something like a PIII or Athlon of the era.
Descent 2 3dfx for dos, played multiplayer, with someone at a high framerate with screen somewhat minimized, it allowed smart mine and smart missile bullets to home better.
Descent 3. Not sure if D3 will work on voodoo 1/2 but it's worth a shot.
How did you get NFS2se to run on the Voodoo 2?
Voodoo2: "hey pc, feed me that vga signal."
Modern pc: "what the fuck is a vga?!?"
Really enjoyed that, thanks! Great to see all those classic games again, solid top 10 Qs!
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed!
This is such an interesting approach to retro gaming! Skip the middleman of emulation or waiting for a remaster to come out and use the real thing! I'm quite impressed that you managed to get this literal antique hardware to talk to a modern system. Very cool! I remember seeing a video from back in the day showing a butchered version of Doom 3 running on a Voodoo card. That might be a fun project to dive into.
I love it too, actually making use of PC backward compatibility!
Oh, the Voodoo magic of this card was amazing, when i firstly got in contact with a Voodoo 2, it was like nothing i have seen before. It was fast at 640x480 and even 800x600 (at some games) and it boosted the graphics to 11 (at least, as far as my childbrain saw it back then, but to be honest it sometimes looked like someone smeared lube all over the screen, a bit blurry). Glad to see, that it still can be used even with a modern system. It is crazy, that the community around those 3dfx cards is still somewhat alive, 3dfx had a big impact.
With SLI you could run a lot of stuff at 1024x768 at pretty good frame rates! as you say it was a revelation, nothing before it had even come close and while the Voodoo 1 was a great card and everyone knew it the Voodoo2 was pretty much essential hardware.
Looking back you're right: it's fuzzy, often washed out etc but we didn't really care or notice back then. It was all about that frame rate and when the art was carefully done in consideration of the hardware as it was in later titles a lot of that stuff was overcome.
This was amazing! I remember seeing Unreal at my friend's place. My jaw dropped
exciting. i thoroughly enjoyed part 1 😊
Thanks! I enjoyed making it too 🙂
How amazing James! I played Deus Ex, NFS2, Half Life and incredibly Counter Strike on my dual V2 system + K63-450Mhz, it was tremendous at that time! Thanks for sharing this and hope to see more 3DFX NFS2 and squished bugs on windshield! :D
Glad you enjoyed and it brought back some good memories 🙂
Video capturing directly from Voodoo2's analog output reproduces that nice 2x2 box filter!
That's the thing can never see in usual "screen captures", hence a lot of people thought gamers from that era was watching those dithered pixels all the time...
I want a voodoo 2 again, something about that glide you cannot repro with wrappers! Nice work!
Interesting video, like!
Probably my 3DFX voodoo 2 Card is lying in my storeroom.
I am going to give it a try if I fortunate enough to find it .
Thanks for your video. I already subscribed your channel.
Thanks for the subscribe! Good luck with the Voodoo 2 hunt!! 😎
Now you need a second one to do Voodoo 2 SLI
Yes! It was my first thought!
IIRC Motoracer ran great on a voodoo too
I would love to see Voodoo SLI running on a modern PC with PCI slots (PCI did manage to stick around for a lot longer than you'd think, especially on OEM systems). Seeing a dedicated build with something like this up-and-running would be super neat to see. It would be fun to see how far you can take this concept. You can get USB floppy header adapter cables (I use one for a black 3.5" Sony drive in my main rig), SATA IDE adapters could be used for era-appropriate CD-ROM bays, you can still get modern cases with 5.25 bays (such as the Fractal Design Focus G), and you can even pick up PCIe cards that add PS/2 ports back into the PC. I would absolutely love to see a true Frankenstein's monster of a PC done in this way (I may have to give this a go myself since I have a Voodoo 2 SLI sitting around waiting for an opportunity to be used). Connecting this setup to a CRT monitor with a GTX 980Ti (the most powerful GPU to have true analog video support in the form of DVI-I) and a VGA switcher (used to switch effortlessly between the Voodoo and 980Ti on the monitor) would be the icing on the cake for this cross-generational system.
I challenge you now to make this possible. If you don't do it, I will (of course, if you need help, I'd be happy to assist). Cheers! :D
I would love to do this! For the GTX 980i - is DVI-I is required to truly replicate those original DOS resolutions?
@@jamesfmackenzie At least for me I waas able to use Nvidia Control Panel on aan older version of the driver to manually specify 320x240 at 60Hz or even something like 480i. Arguably the goal of the project is to try to restore as much "true / native" functionality as possible with as modern hardware, so having "real" analog VGA out is both more compatible and more in the spirit of the project :D
thanks again for this great video. I have a voodoo three in my new windows 98 se build. I ordered half life c.i.b on ebay after watching this video, coming all the way from stratshire to Canada.
I’m not sure where that place is but it’s likely over close to your way across the pond :-)
Glad I inspired you! Good luck with your new build! 🙂
Had an overclocked 486 DX4-120 with a voodoo 3500 back in the day. Kept up with a lot of machines until mmx instructions came out.
DX4! What a beast 😎
Carmageddon 2 in Glide mode, was like day and night when put against the Software or other API.
Try running ' Motorhead ' at max settings. One of the first games to make use of TRUE transform & lighting rendering.
An awesome racing game that was ahead of it's time.👍😁
Thanks for the tip! I remember playing Motorhead on the PS1 :-)
Back then (from 1998 dec.) i used a Voodoo2 12MB + (S3 Trio 4MB) with an AMD K6-2 3DNow! 350 (at 400Mhz) until year 2000 i think (In 2001 i buyed a GeForce 2 MX 400) and i totally satisfied whit it at that time in all games. So almost ~3 years... With the Glide and the AMD 3Dnow! the Voodoo2 its was an another level.
This is great! 👍🎉
Having that horizontal bracket space seems quite uncommon though, an easy solution for other people would be to grab a "PCI External Stand" (Very popular for bitcoin miners).
It does mean the card would be mounted outside the case but many of them come with fan attachments so you wouldn't need to add any heatsinks to your lovely Voodoo2.
Great idea! Right now I’m looking at how to support Voodoo2 + a legacy sound card. Something like this would work great!!
Any chance we will see an SLI setup? Makes me wish I had kept my 12MB voodoo2 cards heh great vid, cheers!
Thanks for the kind message! The answer is yes, but I'm not sure when 🙂My second Voodoo2 is in another country right now, and not sure when I'll get back there to grab it 😂
@@jamesfmackenzie Instead of doing an SLI you could get yourself a single Voodoo3 3000/3500. That would give you better-than-SLI performance with better image quality. I assume it would work similarly, except Windows will actually be able to extend a desktop screen to it also. I went through a nostalgia filled Voodoo renaissance in the last few years, I went through the V2 SLI / V3 / V4 / V5 cards. My favourite of course was the V5. The V4 was too slow to take advantage of 32bit colour (the whole reason you'd want a VSA100 voodoo) But Sadly my V5 died. While the V2 SLI had a 'cool factor' for sure, it was a bit frustrating that Vsync had to be enabled *all of the time* otherwise each card would loose sync with each other, and the display output would go all zig-zagged. The V3 gives you all the goodness of a V2 SLI, but you can disable Vsync to attain better performance overall.
@@Storm_. I would *love* a Voodoo 3 PCI. Unfortunately they're getting expensive nowadays 😞
2 oldies what probably runs well on voodoo2, and i like them:
-Requiem Avenging Angel
-Recoil
Worth to try them out
Super video, what model of monitor is it?
Thanks!!
The monitor is a cheap 1080p BenQ model - RL2455S 😎
Thank you for your reply :-)@@jamesfmackenzie
can show "Trespasser" in the Voodoo2 ?
These Voodoo screen captures are breathtaking, esp. Quake, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Unreal!
I find that modern engines and software rendering loses something in the Quake II lighting, that Voodoo gets just right. Old magazines of the time talked about how 'beautiful' Quake II was, and I didn't understand what they were saying until just now.
I've never been tempted to build a retro PC until now. Let's face it, DOSBOX is pretty accurate these days, and there are lots of 'virtual machines' that let you emulate a Pentium, and there's FPGA for DOS-era machines.
But this Voodoo 2 brings something else. It was the pinnacle of x86 gaming at the time, and the flagship in game promotion. If there's any retro PC worth building, it's one with a Voodoo 2. Are there virtual machines that will allow this kind of setup on a modern PC?
Maybe what's needed is a repro card of some sort [don't laugh - there are whole repro Commodore 64s and PC Sound Blasters now], or some kind of PC package for those Voodoo 2 era games.
Glad you liked the captures! Thanks!
It is possible to play Glide games on a modern GPU, using something like dgVoodoo2. Also, you *can* but repro Voodoo card (and more!) at www.zxc64.com - these cards are awesome but expensive! Hope these open up some options for you 🙂
Even back in 98' I didn't use the loop-cable due to the poor quality. If you had a CRT with two inputs (several had D-Sub and BNC inputs for instance like my Sony Multiscan 17SE2T) you could do the same and simply switch inputs.
Voodoo like dvd decoder cards like Hollywood/ dxr2/3 rendered on a overlay. You don’t need a pass through.
Nice list, althou the special edition of need for speed 2 (best way to identify it asides from the logos is that it has the mustang match 3 and the ferrari 355 F1) is the one that take the most advantage of 3dglide.
seems to remember ultimate race looking WAY better... :O and with much more draw distance... Absolutely loved the way those cars sounded.
I turned the draw distance down to get the framerate up 🙂
PS I agree on the sound. Those roaring engines are great!
This is amazing! I was a teenager when the voodoo2 wat peaking and 3Dfx was just the thing to get. I eventually even had an SLI setup running. Playing Unreal in 1024x768 was....unreal.
Does SLI work with this?
Doe interstate 76 work? What about carmageddon ?
try sli, theres a dual pci card out, also incoming was a good game
Can you see if SLI works with it?
6:09 You tried HL as mentioned on earlier video. But oh, the water is not waving in OpenGL mode like in some another Half-Life version. As I said, i only saw this very very time ago. But it's real.
Can you only play games through steam with voodoo or could you play somehow for exmaple the win 98 game of life somehow
Steam is not required - so long as the game supports Voodoo2 it will work :-)
would this work with a voodoo 1 on a core2duo machine with real PCI slots?
although the machine has Windows XP
I’ve have two Core 2 Duo machines (both Dell OEM, different models). The Voodoo 2 works on one but crashes on the other with a VxD error. Good luck! :-)
Loved my voodo 2 it was perfect for Unreal 1 om pc
Anybody calling it a fake because of not using the passthrough... head in hands. I remember doing the old swap output for a while back when this card was contemporary! some of the bundled passthrough cables were really poor quality.
I really miss this era, I remember the old click of the Voodoo1 and 2 cards when the relay switched the output and that spinning 3DFX logo.
Wonder if an SLI setup would be possible somehow?
Would that card run on a Biostar X470GTA mainboard? That mainboard still have a native PCI slot. And I think also can fit a Ryzen 5700X, or G cpu. All goody on one board that board could be? Update: Actually have 2 PCI slots. Good candidate for a voodoo SLI operation. Could be?
That’s an exciting combo! Would love to try it!
@@jamesfmackenzie If you can find one on the used market, grab on it. I myself used a sound blaster pci card and also tested a pci gigabit network card. All was good. Until windows 10 install. :) SB. was the first thing i had to ditch, which made me very sad (and the Cambridge Soundworks system as well)
Can you try to upgrade to Win 11 and see if it still works?
No monstertruck/motocross madness :(
How do you play DOS games? DOS Box?
I play them in real DOS - natively 😎
I'm quite surprised quake 3 ran well on the voodoo 2. I had a voodoo 3 3000, when the game released and it ran it ok, but it wasn't amazing. 8n fact that's what prompted me to upgrade to a Radeon 8500.
I took the same upgrade path! :-) And then 9700 Pro after that
You’re right, it runs super well. I assume the fast CPU is helping the Voodoo2 power through :-)
I had no idea Deus Ex would run that well on a Voodoo 2... I can barely get it to run on my Voodoo 3 but i've got a real weak CPU.
Yep! With a fast CPU the Voodoo2 really powers through! 😎
The real question is do the games look different on glide vs directx/opengl, especially on the unreal engine. There are forum posts about this which say the games developed primarily for 3dfx had better textures etc, but it's hard to find any visual comparisons. Not that it matters, but it's an interesting detail.
I prefer the lightning on a Voodoo than in OpenGL.
They have more "flares", while the OGL outlines are more brutals and sharp.
But I don't remember noticing anything special about textures.
which adapter do you use? can you share a link?
Do you have a 2nd to try SLI?
Unfortunately not anymore :-(
@@jamesfmackenzie I'm honestly amazed I still have both... I used to have 3. One was by Canopus and had a fan on one of the chips. That and a DXR2 hardware dvd decoding card. No idea where they went, probably lost during my move from GA to CO and a few years later back to GA lol
1:09 Ultim@te Race Pro is extremely bland as a racing game. But, get a LAN together and play rabbit mode; then it's a whole different game.
so funny i still play original unreal
!SLI
guy using 20+ yrs old gpu (? maybe 3d accelerator) on a win 10 pc, and im screwed in the past 4 hours to be able to use the rx480 8g with my A10 9700APU.tryed everything, i can look up, no luck. :/
:)