Why I *hate* my voodoo2
Interloper
somebody might be able to benefit from my experiences.
I hate:
1. 3Dfx reference drivers vs. board drivers issues
I *still* don't have the definitive answers because there aren't any!
For Game X, go reference; for Game Y, go board manufacturer. When you
install one of them, it can blow away all the stuff you had set up for
the other.
2. "Make sure you have installed the latest versions of ..."
Just to get Half-life to work involved getting new drivers for my
G200, the Voodoo, DirectX 6, and the game itself! It's still been
less than a year since I got the 'puter - how old can these drivers
be? The *hours* spent locating, downloading, and installing each of
them was agonizing. What if I wasn't on the Internet? Hours would be
weeks and months...
3. Useless voodoo "fan" and support sites.
I go to 3dfx.com to get the latest reference drivers...but wait! You
*must* have Javascript enabled on your browser, otherwise the links
don't work. I was a victim of a hostile Javascript applet once and
keep it turned off for good. Even non-hostile sites use Javascript to
shove commercials in your face. So I go to Voodoo Taxi, 3dFiles.com,
Voodoo Extreme, and when I finally get through the TNT vs. Voodoo
nonsense to the "drivers" pages, I find links that point me right back
to 3Dfx.com Javascript page. No offence guys, but "been there, done
that...". Give me some credit for looking at 3Dfx first.
4. Glide vs. OpenGL vs. D3D
Depending on which implementation the particular game supports, the
game can look fantastic or like my 1985 Atari 800xl games. I haven't
*yet* seen a D3D application that works problem-free *and* looks good.
Warbirds looks terrible. MS-FS98 looks terrible. In order to even
understand what's going on, you have to become well-versed on just
what Glide, D3D, and OpenGL are. I don't want to even care, but this
product *forces* you to care.
New rule: No Glide support, I don't buy it. The OpenGL-to-glide
patches (miniGL drivers a la Quake2) are ok, but...
5. MiniGL drivers
Why do you have to have a different MiniGL for *every* game? Quake 2
played pretty well (the REAL point of all of this) right out of the
box, but Half-Life was a disaster. How many N64 units do you think
Nintendo would sell if they insisted that their customers install new
drivers for every game they sold? And then there's the question of
which MiniGL to use for a particular game. For Quake2, I have my
choice of boxed, 3D NOW!, and latest (until tomorrow, that is) from
3Dfx. Hacked versions of Quake2 for Half-Life, no OpenGL ICD drivers
from 3Dfx (that aren't beta & easy to find, that is)...on and on and
on.
6. This newgroup
a) The V3/TNT2 debate. I don't really care if TNT2's dick is 0.25mm
longer than V3's, but 0.25mm less in circumference. It's just a
pissing contest at this early point, guys. Whichever one "wins" in
the marketplace will probably be the next one I buy.
b) NATO/Kosovo/Melissa. When will we learn NOT to respond to OT
trolls. We on-topic trolls are bad enough :-)
c) Q: "Help!! XYZ doesn't work!" A1: "Gee, it works just fine on
mine!" A2: "Try installing 17 cooling fans, and changing the
following 3128 environment variables, and edit these 1209 registry
entries...". To be fair and honest though, I have received some good
advice in this group.
7. Win95 Hardware autodetect/software installs
Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. I guess that's really
the fault of Mega$haft and not 3Dfx/Creative Labs. Plug & play are a
bit of a myth. The install programs are all terrible - right-click on
a .INF file. Huh? Why not do it via setup.exe? Because the
Setup.exe program won't tell you it is about to blow away some
non-3Dfx regsitry entries!
OK, that's enough for now. The bottom line is that I have easily
spent as much time searching, surfing, installing, uninstalling,
installing again, researching, tweaking, configuring and re-booting as
I have actually playing my 5 lousy games. No other hardware has given
me even remotely as much trouble.
Why did I buy a Voodoo 2? To _PLAY_ _GAMES_! You know...leisure. I
spend enough time at work looking at problems on PC's and I don't need
more of it when I get home. The effect of all this? Voodoo2's are a
lot less $ now than when I bought mine, but there's no way in hell I'm
going SLI. That's just asking for more of the same trouble.
Interloper
E. Abel
there... Worse in most cases.
BTW, Half-Life ran fine right out of the box for me, and I have a Pure 3D 2
Voodoo 2 with old
drivers, etc.. I had zero problems - same with Unreal, Quake 2, Descent
Freespace...
Interloper wrote in message <3706840...@news-east.supernews.com>...
Liu
news:3706840...@news-east.supernews.com...
> I don't want to start one of those hardware flamewars, but maybe
> somebody might be able to benefit from my experiences.
>
> I hate:
>
> 1. 3Dfx reference drivers vs. board drivers issues
>
> I *still* don't have the definitive answers because there aren't any!
> For Game X, go reference; for Game Y, go board manufacturer. When you
> install one of them, it can blow away all the stuff you had set up for
> the other.
>
I always go reference. I don't care what game company x to say use what
driver. It always works on reference driver on my machine, If it doesn't
work it's not because of the driver.
> 2. "Make sure you have installed the latest versions of ..."
>
> Just to get Half-life to work involved getting new drivers for my
> G200, the Voodoo, DirectX 6, and the game itself! It's still been
> less than a year since I got the 'puter - how old can these drivers
> be? The *hours* spent locating, downloading, and installing each of
> them was agonizing. What if I wasn't on the Internet? Hours would be
> weeks and months...
>
Unfortunetly this is what's going on with the industry. Good thing they're
coming out with driver update programs now. If I can only execute all my 6
update program with one button...
> 3. Useless voodoo "fan" and support sites.
>
> I go to 3dfx.com to get the latest reference drivers...but wait! You
> *must* have Javascript enabled on your browser, otherwise the links
> don't work. I was a victim of a hostile Javascript applet once and
> keep it turned off for good. Even non-hostile sites use Javascript to
> shove commercials in your face. So I go to Voodoo Taxi, 3dFiles.com,
> Voodoo Extreme, and when I finally get through the TNT vs. Voodoo
> nonsense to the "drivers" pages, I find links that point me right back
> to 3Dfx.com Javascript page. No offence guys, but "been there, done
> that...". Give me some credit for looking at 3Dfx first.
>
Can't help on that javascript, cause every site have them. At least it's not
active x. I am waiting for a virus that will open up email attachement for
us, and M$ will said it's a feature in ie6 and make everybody upgrade to it
for $99.
> 4. Glide vs. OpenGL vs. D3D
>
> Depending on which implementation the particular game supports, the
> game can look fantastic or like my 1985 Atari 800xl games. I haven't
> *yet* seen a D3D application that works problem-free *and* looks good.
> Warbirds looks terrible. MS-FS98 looks terrible. In order to even
> understand what's going on, you have to become well-versed on just
> what Glide, D3D, and OpenGL are. I don't want to even care, but this
> product *forces* you to care.
>
> New rule: No Glide support, I don't buy it. The OpenGL-to-glide
> patches (miniGL drivers a la Quake2) are ok, but...
>
Yeah, I didn't even buy any game. I visit warez site and look at some of the
games, most of them are crap. Some company just found out a special effect
and make a whole new game for it. Just because it says 3d or need 3d card
doesn't mean it's good, read some review first. Some review sucked though.
They play for 5 minutes and declare it best game of the year and has a link
to where you can buy the game. Most of the screen shots they put out is in
the first level and they play with the cheat code enabled.
> 5. MiniGL drivers
>
> Why do you have to have a different MiniGL for *every* game? Quake 2
> played pretty well (the REAL point of all of this) right out of the
> box, but Half-Life was a disaster. How many N64 units do you think
> Nintendo would sell if they insisted that their customers install new
> drivers for every game they sold? And then there's the question of
> which MiniGL to use for a particular game. For Quake2, I have my
> choice of boxed, 3D NOW!, and latest (until tomorrow, that is) from
> 3Dfx. Hacked versions of Quake2 for Half-Life, no OpenGL ICD drivers
> from 3Dfx (that aren't beta & easy to find, that is)...on and on and
> on.
>
I always used 3dfx mini gl if the driver provided by the game doesn't work.
> 6. This newgroup
>
> a) The V3/TNT2 debate. I don't really care if TNT2's dick is 0.25mm
> longer than V3's, but 0.25mm less in circumference. It's just a
> pissing contest at this early point, guys. Whichever one "wins" in
> the marketplace will probably be the next one I buy.
> b) NATO/Kosovo/Melissa. When will we learn NOT to respond to OT
> trolls. We on-topic trolls are bad enough :-)
> c) Q: "Help!! XYZ doesn't work!" A1: "Gee, it works just fine on
> mine!" A2: "Try installing 17 cooling fans, and changing the
> following 3128 environment variables, and edit these 1209 registry
> entries...". To be fair and honest though, I have received some good
> advice in this group.
>
I only look at those threads for laughs. If a game don't work after you have
the latest driver it usually is a winXX problem.
> 7. Win95 Hardware autodetect/software installs
>
> Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. I guess that's really
> the fault of Mega$haft and not 3Dfx/Creative Labs. Plug & play are a
> bit of a myth. The install programs are all terrible - right-click on
> a .INF file. Huh? Why not do it via setup.exe? Because the
> Setup.exe program won't tell you it is about to blow away some
> non-3Dfx regsitry entries!
>
> OK, that's enough for now. The bottom line is that I have easily
> spent as much time searching, surfing, installing, uninstalling,
> installing again, researching, tweaking, configuring and re-booting as
> I have actually playing my 5 lousy games. No other hardware has given
> me even remotely as much trouble.
>
I recomend you backup your registry whenever you install something. You can
always restore it when something doesn't work.
> Why did I buy a Voodoo 2? To _PLAY_ _GAMES_! You know...leisure. I
> spend enough time at work looking at problems on PC's and I don't need
> more of it when I get home. The effect of all this? Voodoo2's are a
> lot less $ now than when I bought mine, but there's no way in hell I'm
> going SLI. That's just asking for more of the same trouble.
>
> Interloper
You should stick to consoles. Most of the people here has pc gaming as a
hobby and actually enjoy the stuff you mention above.
Frank Liu
PeB
Interloper <nob...@home.right.now> wrote in message
news:3706840...@news-east.supernews.com...
>
> 2. "Make sure you have installed the latest versions of ..."
New game or no new game, I check for updated drivers and patches for all of
my hardware/software on a weekly basis.
Don't complain that you have to keep downloading these, start to worry when
there are none around to download!
Regular updates and fixes is a bleesing of today's s/ware, not a curse of
it!
>3. Useless voodoo "fan" and support sites.
Agree 100% . When I got my Voodoo2, I was surprised to see how few good
sites there were.
> 6. This newgroup
As far as the newgroups go, the "my dick's bigger than yours" TNT/Voodoo3
debate is just a standard rehash of the computer wars that went on on BBSes
back in the days of the 8 bit computers. There's always going be some new
technology or product that is going to make people feel a little less
excited (and alot more aggresive) about the product they currently own.
Everyone seems to forget, that whatever you buy today, there's going to be a
better one next week. Another thing that this, and other 3Dfx newsgroups
share with those old BBSes is that along with all the trash posting, there's
an abundance of great help and information being posted.
> Why did I buy a Voodoo 2? To _PLAY_ _GAMES_! You know...leisure. I
> spend enough time at work looking at problems on PC's and I don't need
> more of it when I get home. The effect of all this? Voodoo2's are a
> lot less $ now than when I bought mine, but there's no way in hell I'm
> going SLI. That's just asking for more of the same trouble.
Assuming you bought the VooDoo2 at one of it's higher price points, maybe
you should have invested your gaming dollar into a Playstation or N64. No
offence, but I don't think I'm alone when I say that part of running games
on a PC is the "getting it to run" ritual. Hell if a game runs perfectly out
of the box, I'm liable to immediately start downloading patches, and
fiddling with CFG and INI files just to get it to screw up! Seriously
though, tweaking, fixing, dowloading drivers and patches...that's all part
of the "hobby" of owning a computer. And hell things are a hell of alot
better than they were in the days of DOS. Back then you'd spend a week
fiddling with you autoexec.bat and config.sys files to try and find enough
resources for your peripherals so you could play a 16 colour game that
looked better on a Commodore or Atari, and crashed after 20 minutes of
playing.
Personally I love my Voodoo2. After learning enough commands to get all of
my older Voodoo1 games running via batch files, it has given me flawless
operation. Games like Unreal and Motorheads still make my jaw drop. Yup it
looks like Open GL is going to take over from Glide and next generation
cards like the TNT2 are going to give 3Dfx a run for it's money. But ya know
what? I couldn't give a shit cause I've got a piece of hardware that will
keep me from lusting after a new card for sometime to come. I know that
these last statements have nothing to do with your original post, but I
thought it would be novel on this newsgroup to say something nice about the
Voodoo2.
UnRock
and hassle I had to go through to get HL to work on my 3 month old machine.
I still have an ISA modem that refuses to install on my PC. The only real
contender to Microsoft is Linux atm, and have you heard how difficult THAT
is to configure. I think the moral is: we should have waited ten more years
for PC technology to reach the expectations of what we actually wanted it to
do. (oh, and kept little Billy G from playing with his Dad's calculator :)
Tim, theoriginal
Interloper <nob...@home.right.now> wrote in message
news:3706840...@news-east.supernews.com...
> I don't want to start one of those hardware flamewars, but maybe
> somebody might be able to benefit from my experiences.
I was impressed with your passionate, yet fair assessment of the Voodoo2.
You are correct that the immaturity of the industry has created a complex
situation where you have mainstream appeal but still function under
hobbists' rules.
What I mean is that we now have applications (i.e. games) that everyone
wants to play, but only a certain percentage of people can afford (either
time and effort or financially invested).
You fall into the category of "I know what I'm doing, but I'm tired of doing
it".
I too am in this category. I have forgotten more about computer engineering
and science than most people will ever learn and yet I'm still perplexed at
the unfriendly, cryptic, purposefully obfuscating methods and procedures
that programmers and engineers develop to maintain some degree of
'mysterious shaman" status.
I want the "pc as toaster" paradigm and I want it now. Yet, i'm aware that
there are reasons why things are as they are and there are many people who
are working very hard to change them for the better.
All is not awful, as the high user satisfaction rate of V2's will attest,
and there are things that you personally can do to increase you level of
comfort and satisfaction. Can I offer you some advice?
You are jumping in the stream too early, so to speak.
What you should do is delay each software and hardware purchase by six
months at least. Most preferably nine.
This way you are assured that you have enough information to get only the
most stable and desirable of products.
By delaying your hardware purchases you get a cheaper price, with a more
stable robust product. By delaying your software purchases you get a
cheaper price with a more stable, robust product.
You lose nothing. You have software matched to the requistite hardware and
you know in advance exactly what is required to get it to work.
You will gain a more serene attitude towards your PC and you will even get
to build up anticipation for an existing product, rather than vaporware.
Think about it...you are not denying yourself anything but beta hardware and
beta software and beta opinions about both.
Good luck
Bagpuss
better off with a ZX81
>somebody might be able to benefit from my experiences.
>
>
>1. 3Dfx reference drivers vs. board drivers issues
>
>I *still* don't have the definitive answers because there aren't any!
>For Game X, go reference; for Game Y, go board manufacturer. When you
>install one of them, it can blow away all the stuff you had set up for
>the other.
>
>
>G200, the Voodoo, DirectX 6, and the game itself! It's still been
>less than a year since I got the 'puter - how old can these drivers
>be? The *hours* spent locating, downloading, and installing each of
>them was agonizing. What if I wasn't on the Internet? Hours would be
>weeks and months...
>
>
>*must* have Javascript enabled on your browser, otherwise the links
>don't work. I was a victim of a hostile Javascript applet once and
>keep it turned off for good. Even non-hostile sites use Javascript to
>shove commercials in your face. So I go to Voodoo Taxi, 3dFiles.com,
>Voodoo Extreme, and when I finally get through the TNT vs. Voodoo
>nonsense to the "drivers" pages, I find links that point me right back
>to 3Dfx.com Javascript page. No offence guys, but "been there, done
>that...". Give me some credit for looking at 3Dfx first.
>
>
>Depending on which implementation the particular game supports, the
>game can look fantastic or like my 1985 Atari 800xl games. I haven't
>*yet* seen a D3D application that works problem-free *and* looks good.
>Warbirds looks terrible. MS-FS98 looks terrible. In order to even
>understand what's going on, you have to become well-versed on just
>what Glide, D3D, and OpenGL are. I don't want to even care, but this
>product *forces* you to care.
>
>New rule: No Glide support, I don't buy it. The OpenGL-to-glide
>patches (miniGL drivers a la Quake2) are ok, but...
>
>
>Why do you have to have a different MiniGL for *every* game? Quake 2
>played pretty well (the REAL point of all of this) right out of the
>box, but Half-Life was a disaster. How many N64 units do you think
>Nintendo would sell if they insisted that their customers install new
>drivers for every game they sold? And then there's the question of
>which MiniGL to use for a particular game. For Quake2, I have my
>choice of boxed, 3D NOW!, and latest (until tomorrow, that is) from
>3Dfx. Hacked versions of Quake2 for Half-Life, no OpenGL ICD drivers
>from 3Dfx (that aren't beta & easy to find, that is)...on and on and
>on.
>
>
>a) The V3/TNT2 debate. I don't really care if TNT2's dick is 0.25mm
>longer than V3's, but 0.25mm less in circumference. It's just a
>pissing contest at this early point, guys. Whichever one "wins" in
>the marketplace will probably be the next one I buy.
>b) NATO/Kosovo/Melissa. When will we learn NOT to respond to OT
>trolls. We on-topic trolls are bad enough :-)
>c) Q: "Help!! XYZ doesn't work!" A1: "Gee, it works just fine on
>mine!" A2: "Try installing 17 cooling fans, and changing the
>following 3128 environment variables, and edit these 1209 registry
>entries...". To be fair and honest though, I have received some good
>advice in this group.
>
>
>Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. I guess that's really
>the fault of Mega$haft and not 3Dfx/Creative Labs. Plug & play are a
>bit of a myth. The install programs are all terrible - right-click on
>a .INF file. Huh? Why not do it via setup.exe? Because the
>Setup.exe program won't tell you it is about to blow away some
>non-3Dfx regsitry entries!
>
>OK, that's enough for now. The bottom line is that I have easily
>spent as much time searching, surfing, installing, uninstalling,
>installing again, researching, tweaking, configuring and re-booting as
>I have actually playing my 5 lousy games. No other hardware has given
>me even remotely as much trouble.
>
>spend enough time at work looking at problems on PC's and I don't need
>more of it when I get home. The effect of all this? Voodoo2's are a
>lot less $ now than when I bought mine, but there's no way in hell I'm
>going SLI. That's just asking for more of the same trouble.
>
Interloper
withdraw item #6, "This newsgroup" from things I hate about my
Voodoo2. In truth, I can't think of any of the NGs I hang in that
don't spin off into OT areas regularly or have flamewars.
Also, "PeB" and "Liu" pointed out the obvious (to everyone but me):
the hobbyist aspect. It's kinda like tinkering with cars, I guess,
where the means of going from point A to point B is the focus of
interest and not the getting there. Since I became a programmer years
ago, I guess I gradually forgot the fun aspect of making programs
work. Hell, my first PC in 1986 was a real live IBM XT that even had
a hard disk (rare in 1986), but it was missing one thing: a case!
The mobo was sitting on a wooden shelf, with the cables and drives
spread out on the shelf. I used it to connect to the VAX at the
university and then would Telnet/FTP around the world from there.
I forgot my own past, when people would look at me strangely when I
tried to describe what my "modem" did for me.
"Tim,theoriginal" suggested I jumped in too soon. Well...I've had
CGA, VGA, VESA SVGA, PCI True-Colour, and now AGP video cards - 5
cards in 13 years. PC's just didn't seem to be good game-playing
platforms. Then I started seeing screenshots etc and things looked
really exciting again (after my Atari XL). I waited through the 3D
accelerator rabble (Matrox M3D and ATI Rage 3D, for example) and
settled on 3Dfx, based mostly on all the "hot" games requiring one.
I was just ranting about all the trouble after I'd made the Big
Decision and got one.
I, too, advise people to buy behind the "bleeding edge". You pay a
nasty financial premium for having the latest & greatest. And it
doesn't last long. Additional advice would be to watch out for the
deep discounting. My experience with Intel means that they are
dumping obsolete inventory when they do that. I knew a guy who payed
$600 for a 387 Math CoPro (for his 386), just before the 486 line was
launched. Two months later they were discounted down to $89 for good
reason.
In closing, I should also have added that when I really want to
impress friends etc, I roll out Half-Life or Powerslide and watch
their jaws drop. Perhaps I don't *hate* the thing, but I'm far from
happy about the way it works.
Thanks to everyone for their replies - I expected flames for baiting
the NG and dedicated websites.
Interloper
Interloper
snipped out of context, on Sun, 4 Apr 1999 12:56:25 +0100:
>you sad miserable git stop moaning and enjoy your computer you would be
>better off with a ZX81
There! That's more like it!!
Er, i missed the ZX80's...I had a 6502 and went straight to Intel
8088. The Zilog CPUs (ie. Z80 in a CoCo3) were pretty good...but only
for playing games!
:-)
Interloper