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This guy has managed to get an original Voodoo 2 PCI card running on a current PC. He used a PCI to PCIe adapter (didn't know that existed), and then managed to force glide drivers to work.
Quite impressive seeing this working. I still have a couple of Voodoo 2 cards so it's tempting. But they are installed and working in my retro P2 Win98 system so I'm probably not going to bother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s6IoQXBJNo
That you would ever want to do this.....
Pointless in terms of FPS but hey.... I've done that! :shades:
Glide3D did have a unique look about it. The way it textures mapped and lighting etc. So for nostalgia, to see how the directly supported games looked on the hardware is a great retro temptation for anyone with only new hardware, or too young to have been there.
Yeah.... Glide was a thing unto itself. :yesyes:
Breathtakingly awesome in it's day. :shades:
I remember building a p2 system just to be able to setup a Voodoo 2 setup. The first time I ran Quake 2 was amazing. But then Unreal. The gameplay was mediocre but the detailed texturing that only Glide could do at the time was something else. Especially reflections, metal and water.
Indeed H.
My first puter was a PIII 450 Slot 1 affair, with 16Mb AGP Banshee for the desktop & 2 x PCI 12Mb Voodoo 2's in SLI....
Rig and a half in it's day. :shades:
SLI back then, was Scan Line Interleaving. Each card did a different line of horizontal render. Card 1 would do the Odd lines, 1, 3, 5, 7 etc & Card 2 did the Even lines, 2, 4, 6, 8 etc. - This yielded a 95% FPS increase.
When nVidia bought the SLI technology from STB, they called it Scale-able link Interface & was very driver orientated.
The best result I ever saw was 2 x 7950 GX2'2 (Quad Sli on two slots) running the game "Fear" through a DFI Lan Party AMD Mobo with an Opteron 165 CPU. Double the FPS in some areas of the game & the Mobo wasn't even endorsed by nVidia for SLI.
SLI is now of course dead & only for those chasing high numbers in benchmarks like 3DMark & such. Gaming is no longer supported & you have to have high end RTX3090 cards to do it. - RTX4 series have provision for SLI connections on the reference PCB's, but no one has released a card of this generation with the actual connectors, or implemented it that I know of.
SLI on Voodoo 2 also increased the supported resolution from 1024x768 to 1280x1024.
When I first got a Voodoo II I only had one card, which I was initially happy with, but it eventually started to have some issues. It would initially run fine but (I assume as it got hotter) the textures within the game would suddenly become scrambled and look a textured coloured mess. I RMA'd the card, but they said it was out of stock so issued a refund. So I purchased a new one. But then they must have forgotten about the refund because about 2 months later a new card arrived in the post as a warranty replacement. Thank you very much, SLI here we come! ;)
Originally Posted by Harrison:
Now that was a Bruce'ie Bonus if ever I heard one! :D
SLI on Voodoo 2 also increased the supported resolution from 1024x768 to 1280x1024.
When I first got a Voodoo II I only had one card, which I was initially happy with, but it eventually started to have some issues. It would initially run fine but (I assume as it got hotter) the textures within the game would suddenly become scrambled and look a textured coloured mess. I RMA'd the card, but they said it was out of stock so issued a refund. So I purchased a new one. But then they must have forgotten about the refund because about 2 months later a new card arrived in the post as a warranty replacement. Thank you very much, SLI here we come! ;)