I exhausted my teenage savings to buy the Voodoo 1 due to the Linux support. Granted, I was running Red Hat at the time so the installation consisted of installing what, two RPMs? Played a lot of Q3 and Unreal on that card.

My first as well, getting drivers working on *nix I. The mid 90’s.. was always a fun challenge.

Also had the issue with modem, paging through the manual figured out the initialisation string

AT&FX1

Same here. I remember some kernel module or video driver named tdfx, and then, struggling to make X11 work with this DRI (Direct rendering infrastructure or something like that) setting on. It was very rewarding to see it enabled on glxinfo's output after days compiling half of your system and trying to figure out what was wrong, specially when the access to the internet was limited, and then being able to launch GLtron with hardware acceleration. Also remember playing Quake 3 and America's Army games around that time.

Fun times, now everything is straightforward on Linux but I somehow miss that era when you actually had to do everything by yourself.

A 3dfx Voodoo Banshee was the first graphics card I ever bought. I bought it to play the EverQuest beta, which also would have been around 1999. I remember logging into that game for the first time and it felt like a life-changing experience. And it kind of was.

I remember really liking the 3dfx splash screen[1] for some reason. Maybe because it was the only thing that actually ran smoothly on that card. But still, I was a loyal 3dfx user - probably because of their marketing which someone else mentioned in the comments - and was sad when it went out of business a couple years later.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LanTZ_AnAso

The bar is a lot lower- it was practically implied that you were already an enthusiast if it was in your awareness at that time I think.

I agree, but can't tell if it's the nostalgia speaking. Like, I just went and tried to figure exactly what model of PowerMac my Voodoo card was plugged into, and just got a dangerous rush of nostalgia for model names like "PowerPC 8600" - which is an objectively very boring name but I think it meant something profound to me at one point in my life.

+1

I cannot even figure out what the "modern" part is. Like, "netlist aware tracing" ... sounds like state of the art from the 80s at best.

I tend to feel the same way, although I'm actively trying to move past it. I'm OK at writing, but thanks to a combination of educational background and natural aptitude, I'm darned near illiterate at higher math. That puts me behind the 8-ball as an engineer, even though I've been reasonably successful at both hardware and software work. I tend to miss tricks that are obvious to my peers, but when I do manage to come up with something useful, I'm able to communicate with my peers and connect with my customers. While I don't need or want LLM assistance with writing, I can't deny that recent models have been a godsend for getting me out of trouble in the math department.

Now, here's somebody who's clearly strong on the quantitative side of engineering, but presumably bad at communicating the results in English. I consider both skill sets to be of equal importance, so what right do I have to call them out for using AI to "cheat" at English when I rely on it myself to cover my own lack of math-fu? Is it just that I can conceal my use of leading-edge tools for research and reasoning, while they can't hide their own verbal handicap?

That doesn't sound fair. I would like to adopt a more progressive outlook with regard to this sort of thing, and would encourage others to do the same. This particular article isn't mindless slop and it shouldn't be rejected as such.

Besides all that, before long it won't be possible to call AI writing out anyway. We can get over it now or later. Either way, we'll have to get over it.

I find your (and my!) reaction to LLM generated text fascinating. It has a distinct smell, and I honestly can't really put words to why I find it repellent, I just know that I do.

Are you sure this is AI? Normally when I read AI written stuff I zone out because it can go entire paragraphs without saying anything. The sentences here seem short and to the point.

Their previous posts published before ChatGPT seem similar enough. Although, they have way more em dashes and this one has none, almost like they were removed on purpose... lol

I don't know what is real anymore.

Thank you! These things do pack in a ridiculous amount of functionality for what they do. Probably why they look so good but also why it took 30 years for a hardware re-implementation.

I keep my Voodoo3 2000 with the idea to frame it, but I still haven't found a good way to do it.

Yes but the Nvidia NV-1 preceding the Vooodoo was much more impressive. Using NURBS you could display perfectly round objects. Also it had forward texture mapping which significantly improves cache utilization and would be beneficial even today.

It was just way harder to program for. Triangles are much simpler to understand than bezier curves after all. And after Microsoft declared that DirectX only supports triangles the NV-1 was immediately dead.

Tribes 1 looked so good thanks to Glide…

>The Voodoo cards had no right to look as good as they did for their time.

Nor did their marketing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35027437

I had a Voodoo3, can't remember the model number anymore, but my friend who had a TNT2 would often comment about how much worse the 3dfx's 16bit color looked vs the TNT2's 32bit. I could never tell a difference.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that functionality is implemented in another component. The register bank only records the category of each register and implements the memory-mapped register functionality.

This list of registers and their categories are then imported in separate components which sit between incoming writes and the register bank. The advantage is that everything which describes the properties of the registers is in a single file. You don't have to look in three different places to find out how a register behaves.

I loved it, though from that era I liked Fatal Racing the most.

Apparently Voodoo cards defaulted to 1.3 gamma instead of the standard 2.2. I wonder why that is, since it theory using a non-standard gamma would just reduce your color range with no real benefit.

This is definitely fixable in the design though by looking at the DAC gamma register. I'll do so once I get to the scan-out implementation on the DE-10 Nano.

FPGA simulations are a naive attempt to guess at Metastability problems by finding a "steady state" latency after a certain amount of simulation time. Clock domain crossing mitigation only gets folks so far, and state propagation issues often get worse with larger and faster chips.

Note, there are oversized hobby Voodoo cards that max out the original ASIC count and memory limits. There are also emulators like 86box that simulate the hardware just fine for old games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4295RCp0GQ

>Or does this only run in simulation anyway?

If they are a LLM user, than it is 100% an April fools joke. =3

This fits and runs in a DE-10 Nano without too much difficulty, uses around 70% of the fabric. I've been working on timing closure and just got it to 50 MHz.

Note that I also implemented cache components not present in the original Voodoo in order to be more flexible in terms of the memory that can be used. So it could be quite a bit smaller, maybe 50% of the fabric if you got rid of that.

The Voodoo was fast but also expensive, and you needed an additional VGA card. I think it was around USD 300 back then, that's more than USD 600 today and you'll still need another card.

The author mentioned the DE-10 Nano on another comment, which is the original board used by the MiSTer project, based on the Cyclone V.