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AMD 5x86-133 + 3Dfx Voodoo 1 troubleshooting

J

jf3player

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Oct 25, 2014
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Location
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
About 2 months ago I got a Zida Tomato Board 4DPS socket 3 PCI baby AT board (SIS496/497) rev 2 off ebay for a new 486 build.

I set the the board up with an AMD 5x86, 256k cache, and 64MB RAM.
Intended video setup is a 4MB S3 Virge paired with a 4MB 3Dfx Voodoo1 (owned both since new in Jan. 1998!).

Other components are an 8GB CF card (primary disk), 8GB IBM IDE hard drive (slave), AWE64, and an Etherlink 3.
OS is Win98SE.

After trying the newest Voodoo1 drivers I could find with no luck, I did a little research and decided to try older drivers (that maybe didn't require a Pentium). Thankfully, Vogons has the original Cardex Dragon 1000 (my Voodoo1 card) disk in their library!

So at this point, if I try the 3Dfx demos in Windows, I'll see the 3Dfx spinning logo start to load and then the system will hard lock (no BSOD, ctrl-alt-del doesn't work). If I try running Jetfighter 3 (patched) in DOS, the sim will actually run for about 10 to 15 seconds and then hard lock.

There are a few things I have yet to try (including wiping the disk and starting over with Windows 95 instead), but I wanted to get this thread started to see if anyone had any thoughts.

Thanks!
 
Since originally posting this, I have tried a few things including moving the cards to different PCI slots, swapping out the 2D card, flashing the BIOS, and removing (temporarily) the compact flash/IDE adapter. Interestingly, that only thing that has worked so far is disabling the CPU's internal cache. Everything loads and runs (albeit extremely slow) fine.

I still have a few BIOS settings to try tweaking, but if nothing helps there, I have a couple other 486 CPU's I could test the system with on the off chance that I got a bad AMD x5.

Thanks!
 
The generic 3dfx Voodoo 1 is a pass through device. You use it in conjunction with a regular video card. A very short VGA cable connects the video card to the Voodoo's VGA input on the backplate. Then your monitor connects to the Voodoo 1's video out.

If it works with the cache turned off, I would suspect that it isn't liking the PCI bus on this motherboard, and it is not a software problem.

You might want to test the system with a RAM tester. It it has a caching related issue, you might try disabling the L2 cache, or reducing the amount of system RAM.
 
This may or may not help, depends on if you switched one S3 card for another S3 card. This is the back of my Diamond Monster 3D disk envelope. It was easier to scan it than retype it all.
Voodoo 1 troubleshooting.jpg
 
Yea, that scan sums it up. ALSO, if memory serves, the S3 Virge was a type of 3d accelerator on its own, I remember that because I used to run descent 2 with it, always got horrible frame rates because of it. It is possible that the S3 Virge is conflicting with the Voodoo 1. Do you have a generic PCI or ISA vid card to diagnose?
 
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