Ok it's late and hopefully someone else here can help you moreso than I can.

But you have all the wrong drivers, you're using Voodoo2 drivers surely?  Get the last original 3dfx Voodoo3 Win9x WHQL release: 1.07.00

Also you won't get 32bpp rendering, impossible.

What type of dos games are you running and are you using a boot disk or running under Win9x?

A P3 @500.  I have absolutly no Idea what 32 bbp  rendering is.  And don't care, I think.  I would replace the card with a millinum 2 I have sitting in a box, but I also watch a DVD every now and then.  I have a feeling the Mill2 won't deal with the DVD very well.  So if I can't find the WHQL r 1.07.00, I want to look for a driver that says v3 as the prefix for the file name?  I would think in this case an older driver would be better then a newer one?
T.(BTW, you guys are fast!!!  Thanks.  I was suprised to get a response, must less a quick and helpful one).

The Windows-Driver mentioned above you can find here: http://www.falconfly.de/voodoo3.htm

But the Windows-Drivers don't affect DOS-Programs. Also i have a program that gives me the error message "vesa 2 not found" altough the the Voodoo3 supports Vesa1 - 3 . This is a bug in the program, not in Voodoo3 Bios (where the Vesa Bios Extension runs). I had the same Problem with the same Program on my old ATI graphic-card (it's Bios supports Vesa2) and SDD (a program the adds Vesa3 Support to the ATI). Without SDD the program runs. With SDD not. I think that some old DOS-Programs are not compatible with Vesa3. I found no way to disable Vesa3 support on the Voodoo3 yet.

Sorry,
Andreas

As has been said the drivers have nothing to do with the card's ability to run DOS games.  DOS games use VGA and VESA modes and these are handled by the card's BIOS.

The monitor should be able to handle the 60 or 72Hz the DOS games generally require so that leaves either a fault with the Voodoo3 or else the possibility that the games are either buggy or else are making demands (colour depth or resolution) that the Voodoo3's VESA BIOS can't meet.

The Voodoo3 is VESA 3.0 compatible.  This should be backwards compatible with VESA 2 and VESA 1.2.  But some games' implementation of VESA is flawed.  You could try one or more of the utilities from http://home.student.utwente.nl/r.muller/unirefresh/ to see if that will help.

Otherwise I'd guess that the Voodoo3 is faulty in some way. 

In that case, then it might be a problem with the CPU, at least for some. There are known to most of the users the errors: integer divide by zero, and some other strange things that happend, and make you to get back to the command prompt. For the CPU, it is known that for some old games (like Lotus) that it will not run on anything faster than 350 Mhz.
However, most of the problems when starting a DOS game are not related to the Video card itself, but by configuration problems. A list, ordered by the most likely to be the cause:

1. Sound card (most of the games will just freeze if they don't find the card you tell them you have). Also, choosing a wrong IRQ can again be the problem, as the one you know in WIndows might not be the one you could have in DOS mode. For most of the modern soundcard, choosing wrong between Sound Blaster Pro, Sound Blaster 16 and Sound Blaster compatible is the cause for nearly 20% of the problems.

2. Memory. Windows will never offer you as much as some DOS games would require (500K is too much, Windows can normally make nearly 480K free), others make some conflicts and simply can't run in Windows, and a very little part of them can't be run in anything else but DOS mode, without himem.sys and other stuff running.

3. CPU. Most of the games will either run too fast on a 1Ghz processor, or they would not run at all (Lotus) after a certain Mhz barrier. Unfortunately you can't do anything in that case, but use another computer, or a computer emulation program, that would simulate the lower CPU.

Having said that, it is obviously why DOS games can be such a problem to start. And a very important thing:
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80% of the DOS Games will fail to start in Windows NT, 2000, XP!!!!
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Quote:


Maybe too late, but, anyway... I bet you're using Windows XP. W2K/XP kernel does not allow to access hardware VBE 2.0/3.0 directly. It allows to detect VESA BIOS extensions, but when you try to access, say, a linear framebuffer (VBE 2.0), you get an error. You can load a TSR program that forces the card to fall back to VBE 1.2 backward compatibility, which avoids these errors, but obviously you will lose VBE 2.0 and 3.0 enhancements. If you don't need Sound Blaster support, the best option is using any DOS 6.x/FreeDOS boot floppy disk, with some of the utilities Procerus has mentioned (UniRefresh, MosLo, and VBEPlus if you need low-res VESA modes). However, if Sound Blaster compatibility is a must and you don't have the good oldie ISA card, try emulation via VDMSound, DOSBox, Virtual PC, ScummVM, Glidos, etc. Each game may require a completely different setup. Remember CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT days? Think that it was far more complicated than Windows' Plug&Play? Then add SB16 emulation, VESA issues, DPMI support, Conventional/XMS/EMS memory problems, and tons of emulators, patches and utilities (unsupported and provided as-is). DOS hell is back!

It's called NOLFB:

http://advsys.net/ken/nolfb.zip