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Voodoo3 in System 7

TylerEss

Well-known member
All,

Wanted to report the findings of my experiments with Voodoo3 PCI video under System 7 in PCI PowerMacs. The readme file says that the drivers require MacOS 8.1, and they actually mean it.

The card works fine for 24-bit color up to huge resolutions, but without acceleration. The 3dfx Graphics Accelerator INIT loads with an X through it, and fiddling with version numbers in ResEdit doesn't help it to load.

I looked through a dump of the graphics accelerator itself, and it seems like it depends upon some shared libraries, such as InterfaceLib, that don't exist back on System 7.

One could probably grab the correct libraries out of the MacOS 8.1 system file and build 'em into a shared library file, but I don't know much about the shared library manager, and would have no idea how to go about that.

Final report: Voodoo3 video is inexpensive and extremely fast for MacOS 8.1 and above, but would need major hacking to operate with acceleration under System 7. It does work in 7 as a very large, dumb framebuffer, if that's what you need.

 

TylerEss

Well-known member
..so surprising that the system requirements are actually legit
Yeah, I know. Considering that most of the time the system requirements are based upon "Well, what's the oldest computer we want to legally have to provide support for..." instead of any real technical requirement.

 
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