Play 3DFX games on modern GPU?

[DarthTengil]

Hello.

I want to ones again be able to play my old games that I used when running Win 98 SE. Titels like the very first Unreal Tournament uses 3DFX. Fighter Pilot uses Direct X 6 and proberly also 3DFX. Have the almost compleate collection of the Need For Speed saga 3-6, (NFS 3 Hot Pursuit, NFS High Stakes and NFS Porsche). A funny but missleading and confusing thing is that on the cover on NFS Hot Pursuit 2 box cover art the orange Lamborghini with the helicopter behind look almost identical with the NFS 3 Hot Pursuit cover art of a orange Lamborghini with a polis car behind, thus when you looking closly on both you will see that the last one dont look the same on the front spoiler and front lights at all. When I could run NFS Hot Pursuit 2 on my XP and is made 2002 there just must be that the NFS 3 Hot Pursuit is older when that only support Win 98???

I have my old Voodoo 3 PCI GPU that supports 3DFX in one of my box and wonder if I can plug it into a modern motherboard PCI slot (not PCI-express and not VGA, but a simple old time PCI slot)? Or to turn the question in the opposit way: can I use a nowday PCI-e GPU to play a 3DFX game on? Does PCI-e GPUs support 3DFX at all or is it just the Windows OS that mess it up? Cant imagen I in any way is able to use my Win 7 with SLI to play those sort of games with 3DFX even if I install separatly OS on it. Know that one is able to make Win 7 to go down to Win 32 bit to use programs used on Win 98, but that is only for old Office and databank programs, but not to play old games on since this mode only use a extremly basic HID to make it work. Have no built-in graphic on my CPU, use the "old-time" and raw power 1366 socket (first generation i7 4-core CPU).

The most simple way is to build a small and basic new PC to use Win 98 on. But as I wrote before, does a new GPU support 3DFX, and can I use my old Voodoo 3 PCI GPU into a modern MB PCI slots?

 

[HEXiT]

it would still work but there are no drivers for modern o.s's you cnat install windows 3.1 because the hdd drives are to big and wont be seen by it and even then you would need a floppy drive.
running a virtual machine may be possible but i dont know of any that run 3.1 o.s. again there would be driver issues.
so yes in theory the hardware could work in a modern motherboard as the pci slots are backwards compatible. whether you could actually get it to work is another story.
your best bet is to forgo the hardware and run an emulator. your best off running them on a 32bit o.s as the games become much less of a pain to install and you can run dosbox relatively easily.(although its still a pain to setup for the new guy).

 

[DarthTengil]

Thanks for answer! What do you mean with Win 3.1? I´ll going to have Win 98 SE 32-bit as OS. Know I have to connect a Floppy drive becouse that system needs to use that in some cases, but the obscure fact is that when installing RAID on XP when installing the OS (even on my old PC I build 2003) you are forced to plug in a floppy disc to give the OS RAID drivers to carry on with the installation process, even thus XP dont need a floppy drive at all! The only time I used the floppy driver was just in the installation process... Know that Win 98 SE dont support large discs at all and will show them as unvissible, but dont remember the exact size. Have found that I still can buy HDDs that are 250GB, 320GB and 500GB in SATA interface. What is the limited size for Win 98? Also know that this OS dont support more than 3.20GB RAM. Please explain what you mean with Emulator and DOSbox!

Good to know the PCI slots are backward compatible to the old format, but nowdays it exist more than one PCI slots with different sizes and speeds (x1, x4 and so on), how should I know in which one of them to insert my old voodoo card in? Have still a uppdate for that GPU in my backups and know it was working better with that. Still a question I was searching for answers to if I can use a nowday PCI-express GPU and if that also would have support 3DFX? Know that newer OS dont support 3DFX, when I changed from Win 98 SE to XP I suddenly could´nt play my old games of the reason that XP (and later uppcomming OS) dont support 3DFX software. So, should a modern GPU support 3DFX or not?

 

[das_stig]

Plenty of old school hardware on ebay for you to build a gaming rig for the old stuff and should cost you next to nothing.

 

[DarthTengil]

Live in Sweden. Our comparement to e-bay is cuold Blocket.se but that is unforturly not to be trusted anymore with buying PC parts, many decievers :-( How is e-bay to be trusted? But it would eat up the savings to inport it over here. Is there any person that knows about a trusted old-school PC place to buy it from?

 

[DarthTengil]

Have still not get any answer of a nowday GPU have support???