MicroConversions GameWizard for iMac G3

[Quadraman]

http://legacy.macnn.com/thereview/reviews/gamewizard/igamewizard.shtml

Upgrades the video in mezzanine slot iMacs from 6mb Rage Pro to 8mb Voodoo 2. Has anyone ever seen one of these in the wild?

 

[LCGuy]

Hmm, yeah...I remember reading about these back in the day. There were actually only two cards ever made for the Mezzanine slot - the GameWizard, and an UltraSCSI card some company made. Although its understandable, since Apple never said anything about the slot apart from "don't use it", it is a shame that nobody else developed anything for it...since the Mezzanine slot does provide access to the iMac's PCI bus, it would have been extremely neat if someone had developed a PCI expansion chassis for it.

You know, its funny to think....I remember back in 1998 I saw an original Voodoo1 card (the old-skool ones with the passthrough connector that piggybacked off the standard VGA card) in action on a PC for the very first time, and I remember thinking how amazing the graphics were. Despite that, Voodoo1 graphics look almost comical today.

 

[Quadraman]

Glide kicks butt over OpenGL and whatever DirectX (I think they called it something else before it was Direct X) PC's were using back then. I've seen screenshots of the same game running in both Glide and OpenGL and the difference is amazing. Glide resolutions are higher and colors more vivid or at least it gives that illusion. OpenGL looks like crap in comparison.

 

[Osgeld]

Glide was much better at the time, but it was propitiatory so when 3dfx died off, so did glide

course all that good stuff got mixed in to open GL and DX, it wasnt more than a few months on the pc scene before we didnt really care about glide other than GAH! GLIDE!!! which is one of the reasons I still have a voodoo 2 (had 2 in SLI mode but only 1 now)

hm, I still have a slot open on my spare pc, Im going to go play some unreal in GLIDE yea buddy!

and no it was directX from day one when they noticed they screwed up all game performance or flat out functionality in windows 95 with their system resources manager , DX is the entire package which there is direct draw, direct 3d, direct sound, direct input etc, I for the longest time called it a half hearted band aide patch cause we didnt get dos like performance until the late windows 98 days

 

[Quadraman]

Heh, I have a Voodoo 5500 if I ever get around to getting my old DOS game box back together. I have so many projects in the queue that I can't keep up.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Now how would that work? The Voodoo 2 was a 3D-only chip. It didn't have a 2D engine, and used the same pass-through cable setup as the Voodoo 1. Did you route the onboard video to it, then the internal display to it as well? Or did it only draw to an external display? (I seem to recall one mez video card that would only run an external display, not the internal...)

(Ah, a quick search reveals that it has an internal-cabling-only passthrough.)

As for the color looking better, that would depend largely on the game. The Voodoo 2 chip can only do 16-bit color; while the Rage Pro can do 24-bit, so the Rage Pro should in theory be able to LOOK better, even if the performance is worse. (On the PC side, I bought a Matrox m3D back in the mid-to-late '90s, which was the first 3D accelerator that could do 24-bit. Unfortunately, it had lousy game support. But in those games it did support, it looked WAY better than a Voodoo. It also passed all the video data through PCI to your primary video card as an overlay, so no external dongle.)