3 ms·

IRIX 3dfx Voodoo driver and glide2x IRIX port

109 points by zdw 7mo ago

HerbManic 7mo ago
Very nice. I guess the final boss would be to port Quake 1 with glide to support this.
- somat 7mo ago
  A nice joke but... this is an sgi, they pretty much invented accelerated graphics. Original glquake used minigl which was GL cut down and neutered to fit within the glide api, these guys invented and their systems could run the full GL. There actually was a very nice accelerated port of Quake on the demo disks included with the system.
  - anthk 7mo ago
    It's already done as Quake it's libre source and if the GLIDE headers for SGI match the ones of the 3DFX ones from the Linux implementation it would be just a matter of path setting and a few ifdefs.
    - aa-jv 7mo ago
      As someone with a room full of SGI equipment which already runs Quake (and Doom, and Mektar and Tranquility), I can only say: this port to Voodoo on Irix needs to be done. ;)
      - anthk 7mo ago
        Just pick any VooDoo supported source port (old enough, from gcc 3.4 days) it might compile as is with very few changes. EDIT: all of them use MiniGL, damn....
        fredoralive 7mo ago
        There isn’t a Glide version of Quake. John Carmack didn’t want to do endless vendor specific API variants of Quake after an early Rendition Verite port burned him, so just released Glquake and said vendors should support standard APIs. 3DFX had a mantra of “no CAD” so didn’t support OpenGl, as they saw it as a primarily aimed at running CAD software etc. So therefore they had to come up with the somewhat hacky MiniGL to implement enough of OpenGL to get Quake to actually run.
        aa-jv 7mo ago
        /u/sdz-mods - the person doing the 3DFX port to Irix - reported just now that they got MesaFX up and running and that'll serve as the basis of a "MiniGL" to get the port done. ;) So, there is hope!
        anthk 7mo ago
        That's because CAD graphics for games where a very different beast. NV Quadro cards would maintain far more objects being rendered but with slower FPS' as a CAD rendering wouldn't requiere real time FX with constant changes everywhere. If you have a look at GLIDE games the effects somehow look 'prettier' and the lights more 'alive'.
      - sdz-mods 7mo ago
        Soon :) Just got MesaFX working with the Voodoo card. Planning to use that as a miniGL replacement.
        aa-jv 7mo ago
        Awesome. Can't wait to see your progress. What other neat hardware support might you add in the future?
        sdz-mods 7mo ago
        Well, Voodoo2 is next for sure. As soon as I have a machine in which it actually fits.
somat 7mo ago
Now I am curious, how does the voodoo 1 compare with the native o2 gfx? The o2 used a unified memory scheme so it's graphics were never as fast as it's big brother the octane's impact graphics but because of the unified memory it was a texture power house in comparison, close to a GB of texture memory in 1996 is mind blowing, in comparison the ocatane's impact graphics had 4 mb of texture memory and if you payed out the big bucks for a max impact with double the memory(which was the size of a large motherboard)... you still only got 4mb because the extra memory was basicly sli. and a graphics board that had the reputation of desoldering it's own memory off.
- ChrisGreenHeur 7mo ago
  Quake 2 runs a bit iffy on an O2, but runs fine on PC with a Voodoo 1
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    I wonder if it's optimized for it. Quick! Someone send Fabien an O2 before he finishes his Quake book!
kmavm 7mo ago
I was an intern at SGI in the summer of 1998, when we shipped the latest minor version of IRIX, 6.5. I worked on a test suite for IRIX's pthreads implementation, and got to ship a teeny, tiny bit of real code that fixed a real-time hold-off in pthread_mutex_t. (IRIX is a hard RTOS, you see.) As things happened, the dot-dot releases of that minor version would be the last releases of IRIX to roll off the software assembly lines before SGI put it in maintenance mode for these last darn-near-30-years. In 2000, I was the 20th-or-so full-time engineer at VMware, where I worked for 9 years. Then was at Facebook from 2009 to 2016, where I worked on the search backend (now replaced), HHVM (which still runs the Big Blue Application, a shrinking portion of the Meta Empire), and started FAIR in 2015 (which finally seems to have turned around the "open" sign with Yann's departure). In 2016 I started at Slack as Chief Architect, where I mostly did not write a ton of code. I worked on a job queue scheduler which I would not be surprised to find has been replaced. And after that I was mostly encouraging/advising people doing Real Work. All of which is to say, it is quite possible that the last code I've worked on professionally that is out there running on customer machines ... is that libpthread mutex bug fix from when I was barely old enough to drink.
- aa-jv 7mo ago
  I was a young systems programmer in this decade, which were some of the most virulent of my life, and I had a lot of projects on Irix, particularly in Mountain View, necessitating my weekly flight from Burbank to San Jose for 3 days on site, porting and hacking and generally having a great ol' Irix time .. and oh, how I loved my trips into the SGI parts of town, the Birds of a Feather meetings discussing Irix vs. Linux (and SunOS and *BSD, oh no!), the flight simulator facility on the SGI campus where I would regularly get trounced by Air cadets in a matter of seconds .. the beautiful buildings that looked like they belonged under my desk or atop the Indy I had at home .. the confident air of the SGI engineers at lunch in the Oracle campus, the crazy ports of naughty things to naughty hardware (Netscape Navigator on Nintendo 64, oh my, how naughty you were, SGI!) If only SGI had not made that Microsoft deal, had a bit more respect for their hardware engineers, and instead actually built a laptop to compete with Apples famed tiBook. Its one of my favourite alternative-universe daydreams .. what if the tiBook was an SGI tiBook, running Irix out of the gate .. would we have quite the Big Fruity Company dilemma we suffer today? What would an SGI iPhone have looked like? Off to play some Tranquility and calm myself down a bit.
cellularmitosis 7mo ago
Klipsch was famous for making speakers using acoustic horns, which was somewhat esoteric. When they finally made a speaker which used a conventional woofer, they named it “the heresy”. A 3dfx card running in an O2 surely deserves a similar moniker :)

109 points by zdw 7mo ago

HerbManic 7mo ago

Very nice. I guess the final boss would be to port Quake 1 with glide to support this.

somat 7mo ago
A nice joke but... this is an sgi, they pretty much invented accelerated graphics. Original glquake used minigl which was GL cut down and neutered to fit within the glide api, these guys invented and their systems could run the full GL. There actually was a very nice accelerated port of Quake on the demo disks included with the system.
- anthk 7mo ago
  It's already done as Quake it's libre source and if the GLIDE headers for SGI match the ones of the 3DFX ones from the Linux implementation it would be just a matter of path setting and a few ifdefs.
  - aa-jv 7mo ago
    As someone with a room full of SGI equipment which already runs Quake (and Doom, and Mektar and Tranquility), I can only say: this port to Voodoo on Irix needs to be done. ;)
    - anthk 7mo ago
      Just pick any VooDoo supported source port (old enough, from gcc 3.4 days) it might compile as is with very few changes. EDIT: all of them use MiniGL, damn....
      - fredoralive 7mo ago
        There isn’t a Glide version of Quake. John Carmack didn’t want to do endless vendor specific API variants of Quake after an early Rendition Verite port burned him, so just released Glquake and said vendors should support standard APIs. 3DFX had a mantra of “no CAD” so didn’t support OpenGl, as they saw it as a primarily aimed at running CAD software etc. So therefore they had to come up with the somewhat hacky MiniGL to implement enough of OpenGL to get Quake to actually run.
        aa-jv 7mo ago
        /u/sdz-mods - the person doing the 3DFX port to Irix - reported just now that they got MesaFX up and running and that'll serve as the basis of a "MiniGL" to get the port done. ;) So, there is hope!
        anthk 7mo ago
        That's because CAD graphics for games where a very different beast. NV Quadro cards would maintain far more objects being rendered but with slower FPS' as a CAD rendering wouldn't requiere real time FX with constant changes everywhere. If you have a look at GLIDE games the effects somehow look 'prettier' and the lights more 'alive'.
    - sdz-mods 7mo ago
      Soon :) Just got MesaFX working with the Voodoo card. Planning to use that as a miniGL replacement.
      - aa-jv 7mo ago
        Awesome. Can't wait to see your progress. What other neat hardware support might you add in the future?
        sdz-mods 7mo ago
        Well, Voodoo2 is next for sure. As soon as I have a machine in which it actually fits.

somat 7mo ago

Now I am curious, how does the voodoo 1 compare with the native o2 gfx? The o2 used a unified memory scheme so it's graphics were never as fast as it's big brother the octane's impact graphics but because of the unified memory it was a texture power house in comparison, close to a GB of texture memory in 1996 is mind blowing, in comparison the ocatane's impact graphics had 4 mb of texture memory and if you payed out the big bucks for a max impact with double the memory(which was the size of a large motherboard)... you still only got 4mb because the extra memory was basicly sli. and a graphics board that had the reputation of desoldering it's own memory off.

ChrisGreenHeur 7mo ago
Quake 2 runs a bit iffy on an O2, but runs fine on PC with a Voodoo 1
- bombcar 7mo ago
  I wonder if it's optimized for it. Quick! Someone send Fabien an O2 before he finishes his Quake book!

kmavm 7mo ago

I was an intern at SGI in the summer of 1998, when we shipped the latest minor version of IRIX, 6.5. I worked on a test suite for IRIX's pthreads implementation, and got to ship a teeny, tiny bit of real code that fixed a real-time hold-off in pthread_mutex_t. (IRIX is a hard RTOS, you see.) As things happened, the dot-dot releases of that minor version would be the last releases of IRIX to roll off the software assembly lines before SGI put it in maintenance mode for these last darn-near-30-years. In 2000, I was the 20th-or-so full-time engineer at VMware, where I worked for 9 years. Then was at Facebook from 2009 to 2016, where I worked on the search backend (now replaced), HHVM (which still runs the Big Blue Application, a shrinking portion of the Meta Empire), and started FAIR in 2015 (which finally seems to have turned around the "open" sign with Yann's departure). In 2016 I started at Slack as Chief Architect, where I mostly did not write a ton of code. I worked on a job queue scheduler which I would not be surprised to find has been replaced. And after that I was mostly encouraging/advising people doing Real Work. All of which is to say, it is quite possible that the last code I've worked on professionally that is out there running on customer machines ... is that libpthread mutex bug fix from when I was barely old enough to drink.

aa-jv 7mo ago
I was a young systems programmer in this decade, which were some of the most virulent of my life, and I had a lot of projects on Irix, particularly in Mountain View, necessitating my weekly flight from Burbank to San Jose for 3 days on site, porting and hacking and generally having a great ol' Irix time .. and oh, how I loved my trips into the SGI parts of town, the Birds of a Feather meetings discussing Irix vs. Linux (and SunOS and *BSD, oh no!), the flight simulator facility on the SGI campus where I would regularly get trounced by Air cadets in a matter of seconds .. the beautiful buildings that looked like they belonged under my desk or atop the Indy I had at home .. the confident air of the SGI engineers at lunch in the Oracle campus, the crazy ports of naughty things to naughty hardware (Netscape Navigator on Nintendo 64, oh my, how naughty you were, SGI!) If only SGI had not made that Microsoft deal, had a bit more respect for their hardware engineers, and instead actually built a laptop to compete with Apples famed tiBook. Its one of my favourite alternative-universe daydreams .. what if the tiBook was an SGI tiBook, running Irix out of the gate .. would we have quite the Big Fruity Company dilemma we suffer today? What would an SGI iPhone have looked like? Off to play some Tranquility and calm myself down a bit.

cellularmitosis 7mo ago

Klipsch was famous for making speakers using acoustic horns, which was somewhat esoteric. When they finally made a speaker which used a conventional woofer, they named it “the heresy”. A 3dfx card running in an O2 surely deserves a similar moniker :)