I recently had a computer die on me.  I replaced it with and older one I got cheap( yard sale, absolutly no frills like drivers or documentation).  It has a 3dfx Voodoo3 AGP card(16megs) in it. Im running Win98 SE with all the current updates and patches.  I only use this computer for writing and old DOS games.  My games won't work.  I just get a bunch of lines at the top of the monitor.  
The numbers on the card are AT49BV512
I DL'd drivers vt-3.10.06; vg-w9x-q3; v2-w9x-3.02.02
The v2-w9x is the one that worked the best (it gave me 32bit true color, which the others wouldn't).
So my question is, will this card even work in a VESA 101 or 104 mode( if it's still called that) and if so where can I get a DOS driver that I can put in my config.sys and autoexec.bat?
T.

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?

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Also you won't get 32bpp rendering, impossible
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He'd be able to run 32bit in software mode.  

v2-w9x  drivers, as beta said, are for the voodoo2 (v2=voodoo2), so strange how it works @ all......maybe s/w as mentioned above?
What speed cpu do u have with the pc?

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).

wrote on 26.10.03 at 03:44:49:

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?

SP.MBT is what I'm mainly looking to get working.  I'm in a tournament and if I'm down to long they will bounce me out.  I also run harpoon 3 a lot.  I don't expect to have much trouble with harpoon, and can live without it if I have to.  I cannot live without MBT.  If I can't get this to work, I will have to look around for a P1 between 166 and 300 and just run it as a stand alone.  I'd rather not since it is a pain in the you know where to shuffle zip disks back and forth.  I do strictly PBEM, so I don't want to shift a lot of 2 meg files around via physical medium.  This machine only has a 12 gig hard drive, but I have a spare now and where I'm gonna end up at is running the slave as a DOS only HD in a dual boot system.  But first I have to get it to work. :'(
T.

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

When I was last running DOS games it wasn't on any kind of Voodoo board, what DOS games I have run since do work but earlier games may need a VESA tool/driver like scitech display doctor.  Later DOS games that run using DOS4GW Protected Mode Runtime, don't usually have any problems at all, in fact these should run from Win9x.  Try a VESA tool and use a boot disk, if you haven't already other than that I can't suggest much more.  It's a case of keep trying.  An older version of DOS would be a good idea as well.

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.  :(

A thing to remember (at least for old Dos Glide games), is that there is a file "glide2x.ovl" which is used by DOS apps to make use of glide2x. If that file is missing, or is not inside the Windows folder, then no game using Dos glide can start. Also, this "interface" is less likely to be as compatible as a glide2x or glide3x.dll you normally know (these glide2x.ovl are not so easy to be used on all the cards, as you can with some V5 glide files on a V3)...

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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If the CPU/system is too fast you can use a slowdown utility like Mo'Slo -
http://www.hpaa.com/moslo/

wrote on 26.10.03 at 10:16:33:

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.

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!

I am already familar with configuring Dos  as you can read in the "This & That" "Sorry but..." thread. But the program to fallback to vesa 1.2 interests me. How is it called and where can i get it?

Regards,
Andreas

It's called NOLFB:

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

I have problems with WinXP Sound Blaster emulation. It works strange for me - slow, distorted sound, not depending with the IRQ used. I am using ECS K7S5A, L7S7A2 motherboards. IRQ 5, 7 are free. I have SB Live (and onboard CMI 8738, SIS 7012). I was able to run only SB Live DOS emulation (not very stable - it hangs after some minutes when the program/game is using SB 16 mode - hiqh DMA, but works ok with SB Pro mode) and Win98 vxd driver - it works perfectly for me (except for the games, already incompatible with Windows at all). But in WinXP I am unable to use any SB emulation... I tried also VDM Sound - it works only with very simple application, I am unable to start any game, except Tie Fighters Install /but not the game/. Sound 2000 Pro (or simular name - commercial project) also didn't work on my systems. Is anybody here, who can use WinXP SB emulation without problem?

That's why I have Windows 98 and a sound blaster 128 PCI
I have sound in all DOS games (including Tie Fighter - great game), from windows or from pure DOS (seems it's needed for Privateer II : the darkening, which I have bought few days ago 8)  )