Several Old DDX Drivers Got Updated For X.Org Server 1.19, Even Voodoo Graphics

[Veerappan]

I had a voodoo rush, then voodoo 2, then voodoo 3 then voodoo 5 before jumping on the nvidia bandwagon.
Those things were incredible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVwx20WE9UU

I've still got a few voodoo 3s in my spare parts stash. They still worked fine with Windows 7, and I'm planning on either one of those or a PCI Radeon hd 5400 as the display card for the DEC Alpha project machine I'm trying to find the time to get Gentoo up and running on

[Gusar]

Man I remember the original Voodoo card, I bought it new in December 1996. It was positively groundbreaking at the time, I remember being blown away by how amazing it was. Lots of fond memories playing GLquake with that card, and later an SLI pair of Voodoo 2's.

For me it was Need for Speed II Special Edition. I still run the game sometimes, including the 3dfx logo spinning (check hussam's link) when the game starts. Man, those were the times... just think: bilinear filtered ultra low-res textures! gouraud shading! colored lighting! specular highlights! That's what's got us excited back then. None of that fancy shader stuff we have nowadays...

[Guest]

This was one of my favorite games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In53On18YEk (note the 3dfx splash logo at the beginning of the video)

[torsionbar28]

I'm planning on either one of those or a PCI Radeon hd 5400 as the display card for the DEC Alpha project machine I'm trying to find the time to get Gentoo up and running on

Yikes, don't bother. I'll explain why. I used to be the worlds biggest Alpha nut, seriously, (I worked for DEC and Compaq in the 90's and 00's) and had a number of them at home. I gave up my last two 667 Mhz XP1000's a couple years ago. Yeah they were *beastly* machines in their day. I got my first one in 1997, it was a 500 Mhz 21164A based workstation. 64 bit 500 Mhz when the very best from intel was the 32 bit 200 Mhz Pentium Pro. No contest!!

I ran Gentoo on the XP1000's in their last few years, so I have some experience with this exact combination. I never could get the Radeon HD 5400 to work. I bought a bunch of different versions of the cards from ebay, and none of them would POST. The best card that I could get working was a Radeon 9100. USB 2.0 PCI cards will work, Firewire cards will work, some SCSI cards will work, ISA card Sound Blaster will work. Make sure you have SCSI drives, there are major performance issues with using IDE drives on any Alpha system and it's a hardware (chipset) flaw, nothing you can fix. Every Alpha with IDE interface only supports PIO mode, they don't support DMA mode, so talking to IDE disks is painfully slow. SCSI at 40 or 80 MB/s is the only way to go.

A couple problems you'll run into with Gentoo on Alpha:

1. There are like three people on earth left still running Gentoo on Alpha, so you'll get very limited help in the Gentoo forums for anything Alpha-specific.

2. While these machines were way fast back in the day, the XP1000 with 667 Mhz 21264 chip has roughly the same processing power as a previous-generation iPad. Yeah, it really is slower than an iPad. Because it's so slow by modern standards, it will take ages to compile anything. Literally *days* of compiling are required to build something large like Firefox. This is Gentoo, so you will be compiling literally everything. It will take a month or more of compiling to build a fully featured system. And then you'll find that updates get released faster than you can compile them. Your machine will be compiling 24/7 and there will be no time for you to actually use it! Also if you're expecting any kind of decent floating point performance, you *need* the proprietary Compaq Portable Math Libraries (CPML) for EV6, otherwise you're stuck with GNU libm which is horribly slow on Alpha. They were distributed in RPM format for RHEL 3 and 4. Good luck finding those after the whole HP merger and HPE split.

3. It will put out tons of heat. I live in a small home, and I realized the two XP1000's were helping keep it warm in winter, but were causing me a huge electric bill in summer. Nifty old machine, but not worth paying the electric bill to run and cool them these days.

[nuetzel]

Old days... --- but GREAT!

[Veerappan]

Yikes, don't bother. I'll explain why. I used to be the worlds biggest Alpha nut, seriously, (I worked for DEC and Compaq in the 90's and 00's) and had a number of them at home. I gave up my last two 667 Mhz XP1000's a couple years ago. Yeah they were *beastly* machines in their day. I got my first one in 1997, it was a 500 Mhz 21164A based workstation. 64 bit 500 Mhz when the very best from intel was the 32 bit 200 Mhz Pentium Pro. No contest!!

I ran Gentoo on the XP1000's in their last few years, so I have some experience with this exact combination. I never could get the Radeon HD 5400 to work. I bought a bunch of different versions of the cards from ebay, and none of them would POST. The best card that I could get working was a Radeon 9100. USB 2.0 PCI cards will work, Firewire cards will work, some SCSI cards will work, ISA card Sound Blaster will work. Make sure you have SCSI drives, there are major performance issues with using IDE drives on any Alpha system and it's a hardware (chipset) flaw, nothing you can fix. Every Alpha with IDE interface only supports PIO mode, they don't support DMA mode, so talking to IDE disks is painfully slow. SCSI at 40 or 80 MB/s is the only way to go.

A couple problems you'll run into with Gentoo on Alpha:

1. There are like three people on earth left still running Gentoo on Alpha, so you'll get very limited help in the Gentoo forums for anything Alpha-specific.

2. While these machines were way fast back in the day, the XP1000 with 667 Mhz 21264 chip has roughly the same processing power as a previous-generation iPad. Yeah, it really is slower than an iPad. Because it's so slow by modern standards, it will take ages to compile anything. Literally *days* of compiling are required to build something large like Firefox. This is Gentoo, so you will be compiling literally everything. It will take a month or more of compiling to build a fully featured system. And then you'll find that updates get released faster than you can compile them. Your machine will be compiling 24/7 and there will be no time for you to actually use it! Also if you're expecting any kind of decent floating point performance, you *need* the proprietary Compaq Portable Math Libraries (CPML) for EV6, otherwise you're stuck with GNU libm which is horribly slow on Alpha. They were distributed in RPM format for RHEL 3 and 4. Good luck finding those after the whole HP merger and HPE split.

3. It will put out tons of heat. I live in a small home, and I realized the two XP1000's were helping keep it warm in winter, but were causing me a huge electric bill in summer. Nifty old machine, but not worth paying the electric bill to run and cool them these days.

Matt is that you?

1) I realize that there's a very limited community left for these machines, and that help is next to non-existent... It's more of one of those: "I've never managed to get it up and running to my satisfaction, and before I send it to the scrap heap, i want to be able to say I got it working" things. I've had plenty of experience building software by hand and running other (non-gentoo) source based distributions... We'll see where that gets me.

2) Yeah, I'm aware that my cell phone has multiple times the processing power of the PWS (21164, 500Mhz) I've got. If I can get the base system up and running, I'm going to be attempting to see if i can get a cross-compile toolchain up and running on a beefier box in the house to speed compile times using something like distcc. I've got some PCI gigabit cards laying around, so I was planning on using a small IDE driver for the /boot partition, but network mounting everything else. I suspect that I might actually get better performance and access latency over the 133MB/s that PCI can deliver than using PIO or the LVD SCSI cards I've got laying around.

3) I've been planning on attempting to get a PCI Graphics Card (either voodoo or radeon), my old ISA Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold, a PCI gigabit ethernet card, and a PCI USB2 card installed and using that as the base. I am well aware of the DMA bug in the IDE chipset that has caused previous runs of getting Gentoo running on my machine to eat its own filesystem (hence part of the desire to network mount most of the storage).

Regarding the CPML, I do have an EV6 copy of that laying around.

And well, I live in the upper mid-west. Any power used to heat the house is money I don't have to spend to run the furnace.