171–180 of 241 posts
I remember the Voodoo 2 SLI. I know it stands for something slightly different now but at least its a small remnant of that past. I wonder if nvidia actually got much ip out of the acquisition.
I recall purchasing two of these in the late 90s for relatively little money. Both cards could work in conjunction and it radically changed how games looked—really amazing how much of a difference it made. I can distinctly recall the difference in crispness, and how disappointing it was that didn’t apply to everything I used or played (3DS Max, CAD, etc). They were the first thing I ever sold on eBay, sometime around…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what you have in mind... generally speaking Windows software keeps working. PCs aren't speeding up much anymore, but what functionality is lost? I can still run (and i do run) software from the mid and late 90s on the Windows 10 PC i bought four months ago.
On windows 10, I was unable to install "Flight Simulator 2004" that I bought in 2007. Have you tried to install Word 6 (mid 90s) or visual studio 1.52 on windows 10 ?
There are solutions, however.
For 16bit Windows software you can try https://github.com/otya128/winevdm which provides 16bit emulation and pass-through of Windows API calls to a mix of Wine and Win32 native calls. It isn't perfect but it can run a lot of Windows 3.x software. You can either drag-drop the executable on the emulator's exe file or use the supplied registry files to install it system-wide.
DOS software tends to work fine under DOSBox or vDos (a DOSBox fork explicitly made for text-based DOS applications).
Now i'm not saying you cannot find cases where stuff do not work, but in my experience most stuff work out of the box or with little tweaks.
It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the to…
As manufacturers continue to make increasingly questionable design choices, it's natural that users will become hesitant. You can get a possibly not-that-much-faster system, at the risk of losing functionality that has worked for a long time. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. ...and most if not all of your existing hardware and software would continue to work unchanged, i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what you have in mind... generally speaking Windows software keeps working. PCs aren't speeding up much anymore, but what functionality is lost? I can still run (and i do run) software from the mid and late 90s on the Windows 10 PC i bought four months ago.
On windows 10, I was unable to install "Flight Simulator 2004" that I bought in 2007. Have you tried to install Word 6 (mid 90s) or visual studio 1.52 on windows 10 ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing. Staff moved fast on a PC market, which was affected by the transition from PC being a mere toys to serious devices. These voodoo boards were a mere joke in comparison to what SGI could provide, so the PC market was catching up, hence it moved fast through the well trodden path. I mean, all these voodoo and nvidia guys already worked for SGI or similar companies and just brought to the PC market the technolog…
"Just", as if taking tech from a $4,000 card and making it available for $400 isn't an enormous feat of engineering!
This was a primitive texturing accelerator without T&L, without 2D, just a texturing unit. $400 was even a high price for it.
[1] https://hsto.org/files/c34/cb5/939/c34cb59393e04c77af072be74...
Oh man, nostalgia levels through the roof! I remember buying my first 3D 'accelerator card' as they were called back then. It was a Voodoo Banshee card. The Banshee had an onboard 2D video chip, so it didn't have the VGA passthrough cable. I bought the card at a trade show (the Dutch audience here will remember the 'HCC dagen'). That's where you could buy them cheap. Not sure if it was actually cheaper, internet wasn…
I also had a Voodoo Banshee. I put it in my AMD K6-2 with 192MB of RAM. This was right around when Windows 98 came out.
My friends all had similar rigs. We were on the quest for max frame rate in Halflife, TF1, and original CS. It was a different time back then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On windows 10, I was unable to install "Flight Simulator 2004" that I bought in 2007. Have you tried to install Word 6 (mid 90s) or visual studio 1.52 on windows 10 ?
16bit Windows software will not work natively on 64bit Windows. However this isn't a recent change, this is happening since the introduction of 64bit Windows and consumers started getting 64bit Windows already for more than a decade ago. There are solutions, however. For 16bit Windows software you can try https://github.com/otya128/winevdm which provides 16bit emulation and pass-through of Windows API calls to a mix…
I got one of these cards - confirmed it was indeed hella fast (even for large meshes of small triangles), and then dropped into SoftICE a few times, winding up at this code:
https://github.com/sezero/glide/blob/glide-devel-sezero/glid...
My thoughts were - "Wow, somebody gets it!" - Very tight triangle setup, and a simple PCI register layout that means that the setup code just writes the gradients out to a block - the last write pushes the triangle into the huge on-card FIFO.
That performance, along with the simplicity of glide, made it a a no-brainer to drop all other card support and focus on that exclusively.
Blast from the past. I have extremely fond memories of moving into my first apartment in 1999 and having friends come over to play Quake on the “voodoo box”. I had three PCs, a 10BASE-T LAN, and one machine that had been upgraded to a 3dfx card. We would play rock, paper, scissors to determine who got to play on the 3dfx box and spend many an all nighter playing till the sun came up. Those were the days...
I still have my original Voodoo card. It's the one piece of computer hardware I've never been willing to throw away. I still remember spending 8 hours downloading the Quake demo and having my mind blown. The only other time that holds a candle to that is when I got the GLQuake version. No other game has ever taken me on a ride like that.
