Important Information about Voodoo3® for Macintosh
The Voodoo3® drivers contained in this installer are delivered "as-is" and are not offered with any support. They are primarily intended to serve as reference implementations of Glide2.x and Glide3.x for Voodoo3® on the Macintosh, and are not intented to replace commercial products or their associated drivers.
System Requirements
The following is required to install and use the Voodoo3® drivers for Macintosh:
• A PowerPC™ based computer with a minimum of 32 megabytes of memory (RAM)
• Voodoo3® 2000 PCI or Voodoo3® 3000 PCI graphics accelerator
• Mac OS System 8.1 or later
VERY IMPORTANT NOTE FOR BETA 8 RELEASE
The files in this driver update may not be mixed with the files from any previous versions of the driver releases. It is recommended that you delete all of the older files on your system before installing these drivers. It is also very important that you update the ROM image with this release as some important changes were made that could affect hardware stability.
Installing the Voodoo3® in your Macintosh
Before installing the drivers, the Voodoo3 board should be installed into any available PCI slot in your Macintosh system. Please consult the documentation that came with your system for instructions on how to install PCI expansion cards in your system. It is not necessary for a monitor to be connected to the Voodoo3® card for the driver installation phase.
Installing the Voodoo3® drivers
To install the Voodoo3® drivers, drag the four files in the "into Extensions Folder" into your Extensions folder. This may be done easily by dragging the files over your System Folder icon. MacOS will notify you that the files need to be placed into the Extensions folder automatically. Click on OK and MacOS will copy the files for you.
Updating the ROM image
Before the Voodoo3 will be usable, you must run the FlashROMVoodoo3 Application found in the ROM folder of the drivers archive. When you run this application, a console will open that will display a list of all Voodoo3® based boards found in your system, along with which slot they are installed in. Choose the number of the board you wish to update, or choose 0 to abort the update utility.
After choosing the board, the update utility will examine the ROM on the board and tell you that the ROM either contains a PC BIOS image, or contains an OpenFirmware image. If will then ask you if you are sure you want to update the BIOS on that board.
If you enter 'y', then you will be prompted for the filename of the ROM image to use. This will be something like "V3P143-MM-DD-YYYY.rom" for the Voodoo3® 2000, or "V3P166-MM-DD-YYYY.rom" for the Voodoo3® 3000.
Once you enter the ROM, the update utility will examine it and determine whether it is a PC BIOS image or an OpenFirmware image and prompt you again to make sure that this is the ROM image you wish to use.
After choosing 'y', the utility will save the existing ROM image to disk as either PC-SAVE.ROM or MAC-SAVE.ROM depending on the current ROM image on the board, and will begin the process of updating the flash ROM on the Voodoo3 board.
IMPORTANT: If this is the first time you are flashing the ROM, please save a copy of the PC-SAVE.ROM file in a safe place in case you ever need to use the Voodoo3® in a PC. If you don't save a copy, it will be overwritten the next time you update the ROM. As a safety measure, the new FlashROMVoodoo3 utility will not allow you to specify names of "PC-SAVE.ROM" or "MAC-SAVE.ROM" for the source BIOS name.
After the ROM has been updated, you must restart your computer for the Voodoo3 to be recognized by thesystem. If you do not yet have a monitor connected, then you may shut down, connect a monitor and then turn your system back on.
Removing the Voodoo3® drivers
If you wish to remove the Voodoo3® drivers, simply drag the following files from your Extensions folder into the trash:
3dfx GlideLib2.x
3dfx GlideLib3.x
3dfx Graphics Accelerator
3dfx Hardware Resource Manager
3dfx OpenGL Renderer
You will not be able to delete all of them permanently (by emptying the trash) until you reboot your system.
Bug Fixes/New Features
Please see the "ReleaseNotes.txt" file in the "Release Notes" file for further information on any new features or bug fixes included in this release.
Preliminary OpenGL support is now included, but is still a work in progress. Many OpenGL based applications will probably not work quite right (yet).
Known Issues
Not all games are fully compatible with these drivers. Some older game titles have relied upon undocumented functions that were present in Voodoo1 or Voodoo2 versions of Glide. Other games depend on having functional passthrough control which is not present on UMA based hardware such as Voodoo3.
These drivers do not support any form of QuickTime acceleration and are not recommended for movie playback.
RAVE is not currently supported
With the beta1 release, MythII appeared to work but had problems with a missing mouse cursor when exiting from full screen 3D display modes. With the beta2 drivers, the bug that was allowing 2D mode changes to happen while Glide still has control of the screen has been fixed (this fixes Quake2, for example). This will cause MythII to not properly return from 3D mode at all since it isn't ever telling Glide to close down the display on Voodoo3. Unfortunately this will require a patch from Bungie to be fixed.
There seems to be some form of incompatibility between the 2D acceleration code and some systems that have been upgraded with G3 processors. One common cause for failure is overclocking the motherboard beyond it's original specification. Slowing down the motherboard clock speed seems to help here, although some systems (notably 7600's with certain PowerLogix accelerators) are still having stability problems even at the standard motherboard clock speeds.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the brightness look weird in Quake3 with these drivers?
It turns out that Quake3 uses a very steep gamma ramp to simulate overbright lighting when running in fullscreen modes. Because gamma settings were not support with previous driver releases, it makes the game look brighter than you may be used to. This is normal.
Why do the colors in windowed 3D applications look "bad"? Is there any way to fix this?
In order to make the Voodoo3 able to display anything in a window when the desktop is in Thousands color mode, we have to do a pretty horrible hack that winds up chopping off the bottommost bits of the red and green channels (leaving you with 455 RGB instead of 565). If possible, run windowed 3D applications in Millions mode. However, same games use windowed mode under some circumstances, which means you may see this problem in games that appear to be in full screen mode.
Wait a minute, I thought the Voodoo3 didn't do 32-bit rendering? How does millions mode work?
The Voodoo3 always renders in RGB 565 no matter what. However, the 2D blitter can perform a color conversion blit from 565 (16-bit) to the desktop's 32-bit display mode. Thus, when the back buffer is "flipped" to the front buffer, we do that conversion. This effectively gives you 565 color in a window.
