Voodoo5 5500 AGP works with DOS games?

[raphaelmsx]

Hi!

I have an opportunity to buy a cheap voodoo5 5500 AGP.

It is compatible with old dos glide games, like Descent?

If not, what´s the best voodoo card to play dos games? And if I buy this and the 5500 AGP, can I install both cards on the motherboard, use the voodoo5 for winxp and the other only for dos?

Last question: are the cooling fans on the voodoo5 noisy? If yes, can I replace with quiet ones?

Thanks!

[Max_R]

Not at all...
I prefere a Voodoo or Voodoo 2 board matched with the first vga...
You have only one Agp slot in your motherboard so you can't install two Agp card...
Which motherboard have you got?

[raphaelmsx]

ASUS TUV4X...

I was thinking using AGP 5500 for windows and PCI 3d-only voodoo2 for old DOS games... Doesn´t work?

Thanks!

[Max_R]

Uhm... Sorry, I don't remember... I think yes if you use a Glide switcher...
I prefere to use a Radeon or a Geforce with a Voodoo for maximum compatibility with old games...

[Dr.Yak]

Voodoo 5 on DOS Games.

It depends.
- A few games try to directly program the hardware registers (never seen such a game, only heard about it). They only work with the Voodoo Graphics. (Even the Voodoo 2 changed its register and those games can't work with it. You're out of luck with a Voodoo 5).

- Most accelerated DOS games use Glide (All which I've seen). They use a file called Glide2x.OVL (.OVL for DOS is amlost what .DLL is for Windows and .SO is for Linux). Remove any old glide that may still be in your game.
Just use the latest "Glide2x.OVL" that came with the latest 3dfx drivers for Win9x/Me (Win2k and WinXP aren't DOS based and therefor don't have OVL dos drivers).
I found 1 in latest official Win9x drivers.
I don't about latest community drivers.

- A very few games, usually open source, developped with DJGPP compiler use another format of dynamic libraries. They use DXE. You need to get a MesaFX DXE (for opengl) and a Glide2x DXE (3dfx voodoo acceleration for MesaFX). You may find more information at Danial Borca's Website.

Now the best part :
All the bells and whistle of the VSA-100 ALSO WORK IN DOS.
Yes, you can run those pre-Windows games in 640x480 WITH FSAA4x AND PseudoAnisotropic (using low LOD_BIAS combined with FSAA) enabled !
But configuration is a little bit more complex than with windows.
There is no interface for it.
You need to set environment variables to get it working. Like :
SET SSTH3_SLI_AA_CONFIGURATION=4
(this one turn FSAA 4x on).

Most of the variables name are the same for DOS environnement and Windows registry.
- You may have a look in you registry base at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrenControlSet\Services\3dfxvs\Device0\Glide\ and ...\DEFAULT\
- You may have a look in the ".ini" file that came with your drivers.
- You may try to find all ASCII strings beginin with "SST" or "FX_GL" in glide2x.ovl
Because not ALL the same functions are supported in DOS as in Windows, the third method is the best to find out which settings are supported under DOS.
Also note that the Windows interface display different numbers for lod bias (numbered from -2 to +2 in 0.25 steps) than the variables in the environnement/registry (FX_GLIDE_LOD_BIAS is numbered between -8 and +8 in step of 1).

The best is to create a .BAT file with all settings inside.