LGR - 3DFX Voodoo2 PC Card in a Macintosh 6400/180
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ม.ค. 2011
- So the Voodoo is an amazing card for older PCs, but what about the Mac? Is it even possible to run a PCI 3D graphics card made for Windows under Mac OS? This is just a quick overview and a test of a 3Dfx Voodoo2 PC card being installed in a Mac Performa 6400 computer, using special Glide extensions. Quake is used for benchmark purposes, because it's awesome.
Yes, there were Macintosh versions of the Voodoo cards made, but those are somewhat hard to come by. But this is the testing of a card without the Mac BIOS, originally made for PCs! - บันเทิง
"The Macintosh is weird" **Demonic music randomly starts playing**
I love how most of this video is mainly him getting lucky and having *just* the thing he needs to get around each obstacle.
Haha, LGR's a Mary Sue.
@mocthezuma Same here. That's when I started getting serious about PCs and gaming in general. My first card was a 12MB STB BlackMagic Voodoo2 PCI card. I bought it specifically to run Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit at maxed settings. It was pure bliss.
Cool stuff PowerPC Mac. And. 3dfx videos. Upload some more in Future Clint
I bought an 8mb Diamond Monster Voodoo 2 for $350 back in the day just to play Quake 2. Totally worth it!
"So... in theory... COME ON. FOCUS. .... Yeah." Sounds like my life
I am impressed. Now I understand why there's still a lot of fans of this card.
Very probably I'm as old as you :) I am impressed because I had a Pentium 233 but because it didn't had a AGP, 3D games were always a problem
The Macintosh acts haunted because you have auto play turned on.
I love my Voodo 2 at its time! It has beautiful graphics and colors. I still miss it!
180 MHz PowerPC 603 was unable to deliver decent performance because it was emulating 68k Mac Toolbox code, and it didn't have enough cache to do this in a reasonable amount of time.
This. Basically all the other architectures of that era were more efficient than x86 so lower clock speeds or even RAM amounts didn't actually make half as much of a difference as you'd expect.
There's a reason why basically every x86 CPU went to being a RISC CPU with a translator internally around this time.
As MacOS evolved, less and less of the code was 68k based, but there was still a notable amount of it in 8.6. This particular model could officially run up to 9.1, and up to 9.2.2 (the last version of MacOS 9) could be installed using third-party software. It was theoretically possible to install 10.0-10.2 on this model, but in practice it never really worked, and 10.3 removed support for the PPC603-series chips completely.
Also, @TheDemocrab, There is a big difference between the Motorola 68k series processors and the x86 compatible processors. The PPC Architecture was certainly more efficient than x86, but the Macs (and PPC Amigas running 68k software) were not emulating the x86's unless you were running an emulation program like SoftWindows or VirtualPC.
Years late to the party, but this has a 603e - the cache is bigger than on the 603 and the 68k emulator fits, so this isn't the reason. Launching SimCity 2000 slowly is probably the hard disk performance, or the disk starting to fail, since min specs for SimCity 2000 on a Mac is 16MHz and colour. It's dog slow on 16MHz, but it runs well enough at 25MHz.
Quake... I can't remember what performance is like on this class of Mac. The 603 family were budget CPUs, so generally a 180MHz 603e would be only equivalent to a 100MHz 604 family chip, or something like that (I'd need to look up benchmark figures).
Takin my back bro... I had a Power Mac 6500/225 (same form factor as your 6400) with a Voodoo 1 card back in the late '90's. I loved that thing.
On the contrary, there are indeed a few Mac Voodoo cards, although what I show is not one of them. For instance, the Voodoo 3 2000 card had a version with a Mac-specific ROM, and to use the PC version of the card on a Mac you need to flash the ROM, otherwise you will not get any output on a Mac. There was also the later VoodooMAC 5500.
Would never have thought about trying that. Thank you for the upload.
Nice to see some good early PPC coverage, it's usually just 68k stuff
I had the 16 MB version of this card. It was the first ever GPU I ever bought and I bought it specifically to play Half-Life with and it was a game charging for me, literally.
Half Life on Voodoo 2's run great. Especially on Voodoo 2 SLI.
Gotta have a powerful CPU to take full advantage of it though.
Voodoo2 never came in 16mb variants. 12mb maximum.
He probably had a voodoo banshee
The Voodoo 2 is not a GPU, it's a 3D accelerator. The first GPU was the nVidia Geforce, coined the term "GPU" in meaning the video processor had hardware T&L on the same die.
Excellent video. It really shows the massive difference in graphics quality between the old 2D cards and the 3Dfx cards. It was the same giant leap forward on PC. I didn't ever have a Mac back then, but I can remember clearly being completely floored the first time I saw 3Dfx in action on a PC.
@R33Racer That's the thing: I didn't have to flash it at all! It's just a bog-standard PCI Voodoo2 card built for PCs, and it works on a Mac with PCI!
For some reason, the text and status bar were much larger on the 3DFX version than on the regular version.
And back in the day, you would be accused of heresy for having an Amiga and Atari ST laying on top of each other like that!
See these are the games that got me hood on Overwatch. LGR you rock!
Wow, the nostalgia!!! I remember ordering my Microconversions Voodoo II card for my Beige G3 “Gossamer” Powermac G3 in December 1998. Later on when the Q3Test betas were out there was 3dfx support on the Mac… the graphics looked SPECTACULAR to non-3dfx OpenGL and software rendering. I miss 3dfx card support in Mac OS!
This is pretty awesome that the pc vodoo card works in that mac. That card also made a huge difference in gameplay!
Very cool. I remember when I first installed the Voodoo2, my first 3D card, after saving for the summer. Absolutely blew me away.
The moment when you see an old Voodoo 2 Card an get instant goosebumps. Ah lovely times!
That Mac was AMAZINGLY powerful in it's time. That is a powerpc chip with a good amount ram and the speed compared to a pentium was astounding. And EXPENSIVE.
actually, after hearing your comments about your mac, i realized, you aren't running power pc software. you need to find ppc OS and software.
@indignantatheist I love all of the above too! :D
Thanks, glad you're enjoying the vids.
We used to have a Powermac 6400 once. My father brought it over from Germany, and since we had some 220 V outlets, it and the monitor worked. Costa Rica is 110 V/60 Hz, however we had our old and current house wired to support a few 220 V outlets, we just couldn't use the in Germany standard type F or "Schüko" plugs (because no hardware store in the country has them), so to use German plugs, we need adapters so they fit the standard type B plugs, the same ones used in the US.
i once had a 6500/250. it had a Zip Drive. i love these old Macs. another great video man.
I like the inclusion of the UT music in these vids. Not only that but its always nice to look into the past and see what these old boxes could do for the most part lol, this is an interesting project :D
If you look on your CD player option on the thingy at the bottom there is an autoplay fonction that is enabled
On more common (or normal ;)) systems when autoplay is enabled it just shows you what is on disc,
here also for some reason it starts to play music
@AlfredRusselWallace As long one does not full embrace becoming one of "those people" it's all good, right? ;) I actually planned on reviewing Marathon a while ago, but got outbid on the floppies I was hoping to buy. I'm still on the lookout for a version of Marathon to review, perhaps in one of those later bundles that came with several games in the series. I've never given it a full playthrough so a review gives me extra incentive to finally do so!
I LOVE UNREAL TOURNAMENT! I love classic UT music. I love your videos.
More tinkering videos please, these are fun to watch, and I learn't something new today!
@gamewizard Even though I'm running the 3D games off the Voodoo card, not the onboard chipset? The Voodoo shouldn't be bottlenecked by the 2D card at all.
Unless you're referring to performance before the Voodoo is installed, which obviously makes sense. That's why I installed the V2 though :)
This vid was epic! Just the kind of thing I get up to in my own man shed. My beard grew another man-inch watching this
One of the happiest days of my life so far was when I got my 3DFX Voodoo 2 card. Everything went from being amusing to becoming amazing. Good memories.
Can watch this over and over again :D
@huhabab Strangely, no! All I had to do was plug the card in and use the passthrough, and it was already working in 2D. Once the extensions were installed, 3Dfx was available. Wild stuff.
@VarntvarThePriest Ahhh, that makes sense! I had seen attempts at trying a Voodoo3 card in a Mac and they failed, then after flashing the V3 BIOS with a Mac version it worked. I was surprised that wasn't the case with the V2, but that makes sense so thanks for the clarification.
@vracerua Don't get me wrong, I'm totally cool with Reznor doing what he likes with my ear space! Just not when I'm trying to make a video, haha. Yeah, I had the CD audio Autoplay on, which it seems it is by default on Mac OS 8 and I didn't know that.
I was in elementary school and jammed a piece of cheese in the floppy drive of one of these for fun.....man, the principal was pissed. XD
that track 3 is so awesome.
and so is quake.
and so is this video.
Thank you for playing ridiculously awesome obscure UT99 tracks in your videos (this and your monthly re-caps)
I remember buying one of these when they were new for $250, but had 32MB. That was an upgrade from an 8mb voodoo card & made a huge difference at the time!!! I upgraded to play Need for Speed, Midtown Madness 1 & 2 at the time. I also remember buying a 40gb Hard drive for $200 because only had a 4gb one on that machine which was I think 366MHZ, had 64mb of ram, and didn't have enough money for a K6 processor in the end. That card served me very well & was impressive for me at the time coz I saw a huge difference in my setup (win 98Se).
@jacksonutton It depends on what you mean by "the mac". If you mean the original Macintosh, then yes. If you mean this particular model or any other Macintosh machine, then no, not yet!
@OneEyedJack1970 It is similar, yes. You can actually make one from a 3.5" floppy drive cable.
@jacksonutton It has no problem connecting to the internet, either dial-up or broadband ethernet.
This video is ancient by internet standards, but it must be said. "...Trent Reznor is invading my earspace" is one of my favourite lines ever.
Love the jungle in the BG!
I said it was "one of the earlier Power PCs"... because that's what that Mac is: A Power PC. Look it up, it was a specific type of Macintosh. I only called it that because, well, that's what Apple officially called it.
Congrats on making a boring subject actually quite interesting. If this was made by someone else, I don't think I would of watched the entire thing.
You're a natural at reviews, good job, keep up the good work.
Drum'n'bass in the background, I find fitting for the timeperiod of the technology this video depicts.
@Zontar82 Yes it is! It's the classic A500.
@brigcam It was actually getting a well-deserved rest! The thing has just spent the previous afternoon enjoying a long session of "Apidya".
@psyjax Haha, I figured that out eventually! I knew Quake used Redbook audio (used to LOVE playing the soundtrack to it and many other games on my CD player back in 1998!) but I had no idea how to set CD autoplay on Mac OS 8 so I was thoroughly confused. PCs were the same way with many CD-ROMs, where they used a direct cable connection either to your speakers or to your sound card. I remember having BSODs on Win9x and my CD audio tracks from a game would still be playing...
@bsg4000 They did release one, yes, but it's quite hard to find. I've actually never even seen one for sale in the past couple years I've been looking.
@psyjax Whenever I can grab them, yes! Just got that one a few days ago for my Amiga, it's kind of weird seeing a game that looks so much like a PC DOS game run on an Amiga. Like a step backwards almost, but still a cool game.
Excellent vid!
@homg85 Not sure where you're getting that I'm dissing on it. If anything, this video is praising some of the awesome things it can do. Sure, I say it's "weird", but I'm a lifelong PC user so that's how it goes for me personally.
15 years later I'm still happy that I gave them the idea for that... ;)
@dbozan99 I frigging love Spectre! It's one of the handful of Macintosh floppy games I own and I'm quite happy to own it as I have many fond memories of it from when I was a kid.
I've heard of the DayStar machines, but not the Genesis in particular; I'll have to check it out.
And yes, I am aware it is freeware but as mentioned I have very few floppy games for the Mac and I love owning them so if I could get Marathon on its original disks that would be epic!
What Mac... I can not take my eyes off that Amiga500 leaning casually against that Keyboard in the Backgraound! :-D
Regarding the 67 Hz refresh rate: You should be able to go into Monitors and Sound (on that OS Version) and set the refresh rate to 60 by showing all the resolutions available. The OS might complain about the refresh rate not being supported by the monitor, but I think that would only happen if you were using a Multiple Scan Display monitor.
Which the adaptor makes the video card thinks is attached.
Lovely video. I do have Mac G3 333Mhz + Game Wizard 12MB wiredness in my collection. Thank for sharing
Just picked up a voodoo Rush jazz multimedia combination with 6mb can't wait to try
@MaximumRD It is stupidly addicting fun, yes! Be it software, hardware, firmware or whateverware, it's all good when tinkering and not knowing exactly what will happen.
man voodoo 2 brings back memories...
ahh quake 2... ctf... with hookshot... why cant pc games be that fun now??
Because, MUH REALISM!!!
But realism isn't fun, crazy things like rocket jumping and hand-held nuke launchers are fun!
Whereas I'm usually heavily against any "Ugh the past>anything cuz its in the past", the world needs more good arena shooters.
I'd love for UT or Reflex to really take off. And I'd love for another Doom, the new one was great. I hope they make some more with cool upgrades to it.
Reminds me of when I first put a Voodoo 3 in my Amiga 4000 (with a PowerPC accelerator). I was amazed to see Quake running so smooth on Amiga.
I can spot the Unreal Tournament 99 music in the background. You'll never fool me. XD
YOU KNOW IT OMG YOU ABSOLUTE LEG END
It's awesome to know that I wasn't the only one who recognised that tune.
CTF Facing Worlds map music. Oh the days.
facing worlds
recognize that tune anywhere
One of my Favourites!
HEAD SHOT.
fountainhead DOUBLE KILL
M O N S T E R K I L L
"Take their flag." "Roger that, red leader".
I know I didn't say it before, but this is cool as hell. I think the made-for-Mac cards had some kind of open firmware/built-in driver kind of thing. Having those drivers really helped.
i had one of the gamewizard voodoo2 cards in my iMac back in the day- that along with a 450 Mhz G3 upgrade made it run Deus Ex and Quake 3 arena really well :)
i saw you have carmageddon 2 on there as well, love to see some footage of that!!
Is that Trentz... good good :)
Ah good to see it works :) Those old beasties can still ofer some great things.
Nice. It's awesome that you can use a PC card in a Mac and it obviously makes a huge difference for 3D accelerated games!
Nice video. Like you mention in the video, a little known fact for the older PPC based Mac desktops is that the firmware/ROM on PC video cards can be simply flashed to the Mac version of the ROM. Owners of the later AGP-based Mac desktops in particular (PowerMac G4-G5) can save quite alot of money by buying a flashed card, like a Radeon 7000 to X800 XT if they know where to look. On a sidenote, I don't care for Apple's insistence in the '90s for using proprietary ports, from video to ethernet.
That's a heck of a difference! I installed Unreal on my 6400/180 I thought it did a respectable job! PS I like the ST you have there ;) you just need a CosmosEx or UltraSatan for it :) I have an 8500/120 that was maxxed by someone .. don't think it's got a 3dfx2 in though still it runs pretty sweet! I must do some more with the Powerbook 180c I have! :)
I had a Voodoo card in a Mac clone, the Motorola Starmax 5500 (200Mhz 604e). The onboard video was a Rage II+, which could technically do 3D, but it couldn't hold a candle to the Voodoo. A nice thing about the clone was that it had an SVGA output, making the passthrough cable a snap to install. I didn't have Quake, but it ran Unreal like a champ.
These cards in a PC owned the place up for UT with the Glide drivers.
wow, massive improvement over the non 3dfx gameplay, much more than the one in the pc's
@tombert256 As long as it has a compatible PCI, a Voodoo1 or Voodoo2 should work just fine with only the extensions shown in the vid! If only I could say the same for my Bondi iMac, I would *love* to get a 3Dfx card working in that thing.
Was going through my old computer parts today and found one of these VooDoo 2 cards. Should I keep it or send it to the recyclers?
I don't recall saying that, but even if I did it wouldn't be factually incorrect. After all, PC stands for "personal computer", which a Macintosh clearly is. If I had said it was an IBM-compatible PC, that would be another story.
It's all good, life is an endless education :)
I had that exact card. I had two of them in SLI mode that went in my 450 mhz gateway. Right when quake 2 came out and the game blew me away how good it looked compared to what quake did without 3D.
you know it's funny how this music sounds like "führe mich" from rammstein from 2009.. i first thought it was something like judas priest/metallica vs doom, but quake and this rammstein-song are more than 20 years apart and still feel the same. i miss these good old 90s shooter metal soundtracks!
Thanks for this lovely video, if you ever think about discarding that voodoo (working or not) remember me cuz i would like to buy it off ya, i lost mine and its kinda a pice of my childhood :)
If I may, PowerPC is the processor originally by IBM (where PC actually stands for Performance Computing), Apple called the computers Power Macs.
Not that it really matters, youtubers just got to do what they do, argue about every minor detail. Usually wouldn't have bothered to say anything but I appreciate video posters keeping up with comments.
not only was what happened in the video awesome also there's two following things
1 when I put my PC version of quake in my mac laptop it took all the music, copied it, and put it in my itunes.
2 I saw the 640-480 graphical setting on quake and adjusted my settings accordingly which were like 300-200 which sucked.
so thanks man and take it easy.
Nice 3dfx upgrade for this old mac and ut99 music
Just got my Performa 6400/200 up and running. Need to try this out. I'm sure a PC Voodoo 2 Card is a lot easier/cheaper to find then an an official mac one.
I had one of these back in the day, it was the Diamond Monster 3D II 12MB PCI one. After i installed it, I booted up Incoming, one of the games that came in the box, it just blew away the pitiful graphics my crappy vga card spluttered onto the screen in slow motion. Such a massive step up in both framerate and gfx quality.
I have webquake for chrome, and I love it. My first fps I ever played.
LemonWasHere I played that aswell. It's good.
More content like this please!
TL;DR for anyone else who was searching for an example - YES, your Macintosh Video to SVGA adapter will work fine with the janky Voodoo 2 loopback setup.
@Borin81 Very nice! I'd love to see your SSI stuff at some point, if you ever care to share any media, be it photos or video.
Crystal Skull was part of the name of the latest Indiana Jones movie, which confuses a lot of searches for the game now! The "Crystal Skull" shown here is a point-and-click FMV adventure game by Maxis, and it is somewhat awful.
I remember playing Unreal (the original) with a Monster Diamond 3D on a Motorola Starmax 5500 (Mac clone.) It had a 200MHz 604e and an onboard ATI Rage II+ 3D. It could do rudimentary 3D, but was unplayable at 640x480. The Monster 3D, with some Mac drivers I downloaded from a Mac Voodoo manufacturer, allowed me to get full 3D functionality. It was a revelation...
is there UT music super low on the background or am I going mad already?
Yea, that's a huge differance. Way more noticable than most of the games in the PC demo you showed.
I'm pretty sure the non-voodo is how it used to play on my old 486 back in the day. Ah, the memories.
Because they weren't on a Macintosh, only on PC. Sure, there was a Mac version of SW, but it didn't have the experimental 3DFX patch (and it is is experimental, after all, not really working that well all the time).
I remember my very first gaming computer had a Voodoo 3. The good old days. :-)
@definitionoflazy For introduction greetings, yes :D