Bug#185207: XFree86 problems with 3dfx Voodoo3 on a Performa6400
On Don, 2003-03-20 at 16:23, Mourad De Clerck wrote:
> Actually, the voodoo3 2000 he's talking about is a reflashed PC voodoo3
> PCI card. I have one of these.
>
> What happened is this: before 3dfx made Mac V4 and V5 cards, they
> offered a beta bios + beta MacOS9 drivers for their Voodoo3 series
> (afaict they never made a v3 mac card - other companies did some stuff
> with 3dfx V2 class hardware though). The bios is openfirmware of course.
So basically, it's not a BIOS at all. :)
> Now, I haven't bothered to try this out yet with my oldworld beige G3
> mac (I currently have a MAC Radeon PCI on that machine), but i don't see
> why it wouldn't work (aside from the tdfx driver never being tested on
> PPC hardware).
Bingo. Some people have gotten 3dfx cards working to some degree on
powerpc, but I don't remember if that was only a matter of configuration
or patching code, and even in the former case, development in the
meantime could have broken powerpc support again.
> (By the way: any idea if using this card as a second head with
> openfirmware bios on PC hardware would work? IIRC, it needs to be
> softbooted, so it probably relies on x86 bios.)
That's true in general, but IIRC 3dfx cards are of the rare kind which
may actually be initialized from scratch without help from the firmware
on the proper phase of the moon. YMMV.
--
Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper)/ Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc) developer
XFree86 and DRI project member / CS student, Free Software enthusiast
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