How to get Glide to work in ALL XP builds

[obsolete 0]

Well, almost. I have found a workaround that enables Glide-equivalent performance under Windows XP using OpenGL, including RC1 and above. At the moment, I will supply specific instructions, but I soon will provide drivers on my site. The secret to this is a beautiful little product from Metabyte, known as WickedGL. These replacment OpenGL drivers enable performance either equal to, or in the case of any Quake 3-engine games (and many others), performance WELL ABOVE the standard level of Glide and OpenGL. All you 3dfx owners out there who cannot play Tribes 2 due to consistently low framerates, breathe easy - these drivers can double the performance of the game. In the case of Unreal Tournament, if yopu have ever used OpenGL support as your 3D renderer, the 1/2 frame per second performance would be enough to scare anybody off. However, with the addition of WickedGL, the performance is equal to that of Glide. So in theory, Glide still doesn't work, but there are very few games out there that supports Glide and not OpenGL. Anyway, I'll stop harping on, and give you 3dfx-owners the lowdown on how to get this working.

 

1. Many 3dfx owners would have noticed that not only has Glide ceased to work, but also OpenGL. A quick-fix for this is to take the two 3dfx driver files from any pre-2485 Whistler or XP CD, located in the /i386/drivers.cab file. I cannot remember the names of these files off the top of my head, but they are fairly obvious, both containing '3dfx' in the filename. Don't bother with the .ini file, we dont need it. Now, in order to enable Open-GL, we must use these files in place of the drivers of your choice (My reccomendation is the Omega 1.02 Voodoo 3/4/5 drivers, available from Voodoo e|Extreme.) You MUST install these drivers first, then simply replace the two files in the /windows/systeh32 directory with the two files taken from the drivers.cab file. And voila, OpenGL support! Test this with any OpenGL game (at the present time, I have not been able to get Half-Life Blue Shift to work, however it does not appear to work under Windows ME either. If any of you have had any sucess with this game in other than D3D, let me know). If you haven't tried using OpenGL in Unreal Tournament, try it now - you'll be amazed at the difference WickedGL will make.

 

2. Now that we have OpenGL support (albeit a poor 3dfx-implementation of it), we can install WickedGL. The demo version, 3.01 at the time of writing, is available at http://www.wicked3d.com/technology/wickedgl.htm. These demo drivers are fully functional, however give a brief demo message at the 3dfx spash screen, and place a temporary watermark at the top right hand corner of the screen, however this dissapears after a minute or two. Once you have downloaded and installed WickedGL, be sure to read the readme file, wich has many specific instructions to get maximum performance for each specific game. (NOTE: If Tribes 2 gives a very prettey coloured but annoying screen during gameplay, be sure to set textures to 16 bit, not paletised as the readme says.) Once you have done all this, test all your games - I garuntee you will not be dissapointed. Who needs Glide, when you can get better performance, and Windows XP support from WickedGL?

 

Anyway, good luck to all you 3dfx-fans (and haters alike) - I'll let you all know when I have posted the proper drivers on my site, and I'll post any further instructions on how to get many games working if any of you have any difficulties.

 

www.gdivx.com/~winxp

Be sure to check out www.gdivx.com for the latest and greatest in all that is DivX ;-)

[SHS 0]

Hello obsolete

There only 10 to 15% chance of it working that not very good odd in my eyes, The problem is I fix one thing 10 more problem come up, If I could have acrhive 75 to 80% in favor "Working that is" of the user but I couldn't get there so there no point in any custom drv for WinXP.

Have you wonder why MS went the voodoo source code well that a BIG loss of sale and nVidia want all Voodoo folk to buy nVidia card "Look I see $$$" then why is nVidia trying so hard to killing off the 3dfx drivers for WinXP?.

[obsolete 0]

10 to 15% chance? Where did you get that from? I have a Voodoo 3 2000, using the exact drivers as described previously, and my system happily plays any game I throw at it, including Tribes 2 at 1024x768, and that's on a Celeron 533! Have you ever played UT in D3D on a Voodoo? It it hideous, and the gamma is the most rooted I have seen of any game. Modest I may be, but these are the best drivers that provide an alternative to Glide, with a noticable GAIN in performance for many games. My site should be up in about a week, so if anyone is too lazy to find the drivers from earlier XP builds, they'll be available soon at: http://www.gdivx.com/~winxp

[SHS 0]

You only test one system I on other hand test 6 diff system

300MHz & up both Intel & AMD.

[CM 1]

Is there no chance to get glide working

[Cyber 0]

It's a tragedy, really... I, having bought a voodoo5 5500 hoping for the best, was left with a notice several days later explaining that "3dfx has shut down for good." Rats... if only Nvidia were thoughtful enough to continue making drivers for the voodoos, having bought the assets and all, they should be responsible about it.

And it seems that no voodoo driver fixes for windows xp work... Oh well, I'm getting ready for a replacement, which would be a Geforce3... Who can't get excited over this Vertex Shader feature?

[SHS 0]

Cyber what wrong with 2000?.

[Anon-65e40e4a71 0]

Does anyone have those files out of the .cab ?

 

Thanks

[Gemfire James 0]

uhh, that's because 2000 is a business OS, if people want to run an NT that is going to give them the multimedia and compatibility of Windows 9x, as well as a hell of a lot stablized and hell of a lot faster than win2k, then they are going to use XP, and I agree with them, 2000 is gone from my work area once XP is finished.

[w2kgamer 0]

So why not just use the bete 3dfx drivers from

http://www.electic.com/download/download.cgi?v=996076517

 

????????

[fatattack 0]

don't worry about glide anymore

 

all drivers are right back in there in RC2

 

:-))

[SHS 0]

Gemfire James WinXP is also base off the same NT Kernel as WinNT4 and Win2000 so your point is point less Win2k is more stablized across lot more games and faster than WinXP is and dosen't eat up 35MB more of memory like WinXP dose so what if WinXP can boot faster big deal go get a cup coffee.

w2kgamer there no good and there no chance to get glide working your point is to point less and not only that there are only hand full of OpenGL game that work you do know there other games beside Quake?.

[Nogib 0]

fatattack, while it is true that the drivers are back in RC2, they SUCK! I've only tried Max Payne with them so far, but those drivers couldn't display a single texture properly. They were all blocky, corrupted, or not there at all. I loaded up the Win2K 1.04.00 drivers and have been having no trouble since.

 

Avoid the built-in drivers!

[fatattack 0]

Sorry Nogib, I'm an Nvidia user myself so I hadn't tested them.

 

It was a purely informational post.