OpenBSD Journal

Voodoo based Accelerated OpenGL on OpenBSD

Contributed by sean on from the do that voodoo you do so well dept.

Grimmer writes in:
Glide/OpenGL drivers for OpenBSD using 3Dfx's Voodoo based cards

From http://users.openbsd.fi/iku/opensource/openbsd-glide/

"It all started when Toni Spets and I were chatting on IRC about 3D acceleration on OpenBSD. Toni said that Voodoo cards should be a piece of cake to get working in OpenBSD. He tried it but and couldn't get it to work. Time passed, about half a year at least when we started chatting again about it. But this we made a more serious attempt together and got it to work! Toni did really good effort, I pointed him in the right direction with OpenBSD."

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward (85.178.127.68) on

    That sounds nice and confusing. What is "Vodoo based". NVidia bought this company so do you mean the old "Vodoo"-Based Cards (I'm unsure if there many people who can test it even it's cool and a great start!) or realy also "modern" models in some way?!

    Is it planed to may take advantage of ATIs decission to release Docs?
    So is it a 1st step into this direction?

    It would be nice if somebody may explains the "tactic" if there's some plan to do further researchs to get 3D working (are those mpeg4 and mpeg2 accelerator things related to "3D" if it deals with grafic cards?!).


    This a great thing and for sure a worth a beer and a big *thumbs up* :)
    Thanks for your work and the time you spend! :)

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (165.228.157.146) on

      > That sounds nice and confusing. What is "Vodoo based". NVidia bought this company so do you mean the old "Vodoo"-Based Cards (I'm unsure if there many people who can test it even it's cool and a great start!) or realy also "modern" models in some way?!

      Don't be an ass, Voodoo is a defunct video chipset family widely implemented by third parties. If you don't what you're talking about, you don't need the driver. So don't comment.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (84.60.37.213) on

      > That sounds nice and confusing. What is "Vodoo based". NVidia bought this company so do you mean the old "Vodoo"-Based Cards (I'm unsure if there many people who can test it even it's cool and a great start!) or realy also "modern" models in some way?!

      Voodoo, Glide ... cmon.

    3. By Anonymous Coward (129.174.114.95) on

      > This a great thing and for sure a worth a beer and a big *thumbs up* :)
      > Thanks for your work and the time you spend! :)

      I'm curious how much acceleration you got. I know voodoo stuff is old, etc, but with a chunky processor alone (e.g. no acceleration) how many frames do you get? Are you going 4 frames to 45 or 30 to 45?

      I know there's always "more work to do", but is the underlying OpenBSD setup happy to work with vid card acceleration or is getting "accel = on" just the first step of a looong road?

      Excellent work either way!

  2. By Zack (24.255.9.58) on http://artisancomputer.com

    What're you guys going to use this for? I mean, porting a 3D library that was modern 10 years ago is pretty neat, but other than that, are there any plans for this?

    I'd love a 3D stats for pf, but other than that...

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (74.13.58.27) on

      > What're you guys going to use this for? I mean, porting a 3D library that was modern 10 years ago is pretty neat, but other than that, are there any plans for this?
      >
      > I'd love a 3D stats for pf, but other than that...

      Some people own this hardware still, perhaps they want to use them?

      Comments

      1. By Nathan Houghton (69.69.146.244) nathan@brainwerk.org on

        > > What're you guys going to use this for? I mean, porting a 3D library that was modern 10 years ago is pretty neat, but other than that, are there any plans for this?
        > >
        > > I'd love a 3D stats for pf, but other than that...
        >
        > Some people own this hardware still, perhaps they want to use them?

        I still own a voodoo 3... i'll have to find it i guess :)

    2. By iku (213.139.161.110) iku@openbsd.fi on

      > What're you guys going to use this for? I mean, porting a 3D library that was modern 10 years ago is pretty neat, but other than that, are there any plans for this?
      >
      > I'd love a 3D stats for pf, but other than that...

      Read the page.

  3. By Leonardo Rodrigues (189.10.126.156) on

    Ok, now that Quake 1 screenshot really got me. Congrats to the guys who made it possible =)

  4. By Paladdin (213.97.233.52) on

    It's sooo good! I'm the proud owner of two Voodoo 2 cards and I cannot wait to try this driver. With Quake!

    I love retrohardware :)

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (198.240.130.75) on

      > It's sooo good! I'm the proud owner of two Voodoo 2 cards and I cannot wait to try this driver. With Quake!
      >
      > I love retrohardware :)

      Yeah, I remember when ebay was spanking new you could still find pretty good deals because most people weren't thinking to check for typos in listings yet (either buyers or sellers), so I got a Quantum 3D Obsidian X-24 card for about $90 (circa early '99). They're almost invisible even to google these days and Q3D long ago moved away from consumer hardware, but basically they took two Voodoo2-12MB cards and married them on one PCI pcb for a one-card SLI setup. Ran quake2 a treat, let me tell you! Physically they were this full-length-PCI jet black chunk of silicon that just screamed "I am a bad ass!" when you held it. Good times, good times... :)

  5. By Anonymous Coward (144.124.16.28) on

    The 90s are on the phone; they want their hardware back.

  6. By iku (213.139.161.110) iku@openbsd.fi on

    Hi,

    obviously none of the commentors didn't even read the page before posting, please do, it's all explained there, if not and it's worthy to add please send email.

    In short OpenGL works so it's not about the obsolete Glide API. Voodoo 1, 2 and 3 work. Voodoo2 works currently best, 3 has some quirks and 1 is not tested that much.

  7. By glthornberry (glthornberry) gerald@thornberry.net on

    Nice going! I just built a system last weekend with OpenBSD 4.2 and a Voodoo 3 card, and I was lamenting the "fact" that I couldn't take full advantage of its potential in this Operating System. The card has been laying around a few years and saw a LOT of Quake frames in its day (Windows and Linux). The machine is still on the workbench, so I'll give this a try. Thanks a lot!

  8. By Sacha Ligthert (213.46.69.133) sacha@ligthert.net on

    Thanks+congrats on this work! Cool project :D

  9. By TylerEss (69.42.243.110) on

    Wow! I was wondering what to do with some spare Voodoo2s I have laying around... now I know.

    This is an awesome demo, and I think it illustrates a lot of the arguments both pro- and con- 3d accel on OpenBSD: A) It works, so there goes the "it's impossible!" canard. B) "Set securelevel = -1 and become root" illustrates the importance of a fancy kernel driver sitting between userland and the 3d chipset to prevent its abuse.

    Now, to find time to play with it...

    Comments

    1. By iku (213.139.161.110) iku@openbsd.fi on

      > Wow! I was wondering what to do with some spare Voodoo2s I have laying around... now I know.

      Yep, really easy to find (for free) even if you don't have one :-)

      > This is an awesome demo, and I think it illustrates a lot of the arguments both pro- and con- 3d accel on OpenBSD: A) It works, so there goes the "it's impossible!" canard.

      Indeed.

      > B) "Set securelevel = -1 and become root" illustrates the importance of a fancy kernel driver sitting between userland and the 3d chipset to prevent its abuse.

      Yep it really sucks. All we would need is simple ioctl driver (only ~1k lines I think!) in this case. DRM is something else :-P

      Someone wants to do the kernel driver? Specs are there, Linux driver too but it's useless with the GPL around it ;-)

      I recall FreeBSD used the Linux driver so it cannot be used either and I haven't investigated much but I think NetBSD doesn't have on at all.

  10. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

    The reason I first started using OpenBSD was to do with a Powermac G4 I had bought on eBay which had a dodgy video card, ATI 128 RAGE if I remember correctly. The person who sold me it chucked in a Voodoo card. I tried a couple of linux distros and NetBSD and had no success getting it to display properly, and then I tried OpenBSD and it seemed to use it without issue. In the end I ended up replacing that card with another ATI 128 RAGE card from a different machine, but I still kept running OpenBSD.

    Don't have either of them any more, forgot what I did with the card.

    Comments

    1. By dingo (68.30.155.130) af.dingo@gmail.com on

      > The reason I first started using OpenBSD was to do with a Powermac G4 I had bought on eBay which had a dodgy video card, ATI 128 RAGE

      the AGP port on these machines are mysteriously funny...

      and the compatible ones are very expensive.

      But yea, using ppc's is what switched me to BSD from linux many years ago as well. It's nice to have keyboard mappings, X windows, packages, mice, etc. work without dozens of hacks, tricks, or failures.

  11. By Strog (64.207.240.34) on

    I don't see any mention of the Voodoo Banshee cards being supported. I have one in my box of goodies that I'd be willing to donate to the cause. I played a lot of unreal/quake on that card until I got my Voodoo 3. :^)

    Comments

    1. By iku (213.139.161.110) iku@openbsd.fi on

      > I don't see any mention of the Voodoo Banshee cards being supported. I have one in my box of goodies that I'd be willing to donate to the cause. I played a lot of unreal/quake on that card until I got my Voodoo 3. :^)

      We haven't tested it but it should work with the "h3" FLAVOR of glide3-port. AFAIK it's a crippled (missing some chips) Voodoo2 that could do 2D also. So please, give it a try and report back :-)

      Here are the codenames:

      sst1: Voodoo Graphics
      sst96: Voodoo Rush (FLAVOR does not build out-of-the-box)
      cvg: Voodoo 2
      h3: Voodoo Banshee/Voodoo 3
      h5: The VSA-100 chip set used in the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5
      line of products. (unsupported)

  12. By Terrell Prude' Jr. (151.188.247.104) tprude@cmosnetworks.com (this is a spamtrap address) on http://www.cmosnetworks.com/

    This is good work, if for no other reason that you can and you enjoy it. Try getting nVidious to support this card.

    Any plans for Voodoo5 support? I've got a 3dFX 5500 PCI card which is currently on a Slackware Linux box. Still a good card.

    --TP

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