Recently, blogger Omores showed an amazing example of "combination of ancient and modern times":He successfully made a 1998 Creative 3dfx Voodoo2 12MB graphics card work normally on his Windows 11 system equipped with an AMD Ryzen 9 9900X processor.
It's no small feat, taking a 1998 3D accelerator card, via an experimental 64-bit driver from 2006 that relies on services written for a 1996 operating system, and ending up running on a 2011 operating system (Windows 11) whose core comes from a 2024 processor.
Omores asks a simple but bold question at the beginning of the video: Can a classic Voodoo2 graphics card work on modern hardware and Windows 11? He admitted that this sounds "almost impossible" due to the need for 64-bit drivers in Microsoft's latest systems.
Omores chose Voodoo2 instead of the original Voodoo because Voodoo2 did not have the limitation of the original Voodoo chip that the speed could not exceed 1.0 GHz.
He speculates that with the right drivers and PCI-to-PCIe connectivity, the iconic 3dfx should be able to coexist harmoniously with AMD's latest platform.
Omores first introduced the key to physical connection, a StarTech PCI-E to PCI adapter box, which allows the 1998 3D accelerator card to be connected to the modern AM5 motherboard system.
It was first tested on a system with Windows 98 installed, using a reference driver to confirm that the connection on the hardware side was normal, and then confirmed hardware compatibility in programs such as "Quake 2" and 3D Mark 2001 SE.
Subsequently, he switched to Microsoft's last 32-bit operating system, Windows 10 32-bit, and used community-developed 32-bit drivers without any problems.
Omores next used the experimental 3dfx Glide x64 project driver released in 2006 by Ryan Nun (AKA Colorless), which was based on research on the original Win NT (1996) driver, and with a fix patch for XP systems, the driver successfully ran on Win 10 64-bit.
With experience with 64-bit drivers, Omores believes Windows 11 should work the same way after driver signature enforcement is removed.
In the end, after several twists and turns, Omores successfully solved the problem. He concluded:"We now have a 1998 3D accelerator card running successfully on Windows 11 23H2 using a driver that relies on a 1996 Windows NT service."
However, when Omores tried to go a step further and run dual Voodoo2 SLI on the same system, it eventually crashed due to flaws in the second Voodoo2 itself.