Voodoo 3-3500 drivers and information

30/9/2000-19/10/2002

Summary

I owned a Voodoo3-3500 and was very disappointed that NVidia did not support the Voodoo cards when they took over 3dfx in December 2001. There were beta drivers available and good people at x3dfx have done their best to improve them by tweaking the .INI files to support them on new operating systems. Without source code to the drivers, Visual Reality and a driver development team to make big improvements these cards will become legacy, what a pity.

I will upload these drivers when I have sufficient web space. My Freeserve Anytime member extended web space can only have at most 2Mb per file. Freeserve say that this limitation cannot be removed. This is the only problem that I have found so far with Freeserve. I might be able to get better webspace service from TISCALI.
I hope that this document helps the x3dfx community.

Requirements

Voodoo3-3500 (Don't know if NTSC is supported in the new drivers, I have the PAL version).

The minimum hardware specification for MPEG1 video capture is a P2-350 (or equivalent) and a 20Gb 5400RPM UDMA66 hard disk or higher.
The recommended hardware specification for uncompressed video capture is a P3-800 (or equivalent) and a 40Gb 7200RPM UDMA 66 hard disk or higher.

At the time of writing only WDM capture drivers are available on Windows 2000\XP. This only supports the resolution 320*240 in YUV at 25FPS. The capture driver only works in Visual Reality, it doesn't work in programs like VirtualDub or FlyCap.

On Windows 95\98\ME the capture driver is VFW (Video For Windows) and it works perfectly at various resolutions in YUV and RGB colour modes.

MPEG capture

The latest beta drivers cannot capture MPEG2, only MPEG1. The improvements, stability and performance of these beta drivers outweigh MPEG2 capture. MPEG1 capture has always been done by software on this video card. If MPEG2 capture is required, WinVCR can be used or AVI can be captured and Flask or TMPGEnc 2.5 can convert those files to MPEG2.

The latest PAL beta drivers can capture the VCD standard 352*288 at 25 frames per second in MPEG1 on Windows 95\98\ME only.
The latest PAL beta drivers can only capture 384*288 at 25 frames per second in MPEG1 on Windows 2000\XP.
This has not been tested on NTSC versions of the card.

For MPEG1 video capture use the supplied Visual Reality or WinVCR.

AVI capture

In Windows 95\98\ME the most efficient video colour format for this video card is YUV 4:2:2. Capture resolutions of 384*288 is possible, though 352*288 is preferred for fast conversion to MPEG1 VCD standard using TMPGEnc. Compression codecs can be used though most use the RGB colour format and not YUV.

RGB codecs include: Uncompressed RGB, Cinepak Codec by Radius, DivX, Ligos Indeo, Microsoft Video 1 and NewSoft H.263.
YUV codecs include: Uncompressed, DivX and HuffYUV.

For AVI video capture use VirtualDub or FlyCap.

Download

Windows 95\98\ME

v33500tv-w9x-nonus-rc1.exe
vr-3.10.05.exe
Euro tools

I am missing v33500tv-w9x-us-rc1.exe, the last release candidate 95\98\ME NTSC drivers.
If you have this file then please contact me!

Windows 2000

v33500tv-w2k-rc1.exe
VR-3.10.06.exe

Windows XP

Voodoo3500DriversForWindowsXp.zip. Download from http://www.voodoofiles.com/4980.
Visual Reality Launcher (Only required for Windows XP). Download here.
Windows XP users must use the Windows 2000 version of Visual Reality.

To overcome the problem where Windows XP overwrites kstvtune.ax with a newer incompatible version, you can do the following:
1. Use the Visual Reality Launcher batch file,
2. Boot in DOS mode and replace kstvtune.ax version 5.1.2600.0 with version 5.0.2134.1 in windows\system32\dllcache and windows\system32

If the disk is formatted as NTFS then the file system cannot be seen by a DOS boot disk. In this case you should reboot windows, press F8, then logon as an administrator in a command prompt to do this.
Windows File Protection is running all the time in Windows 2000\XP and so this file update is only possible outside Windows.

If you use the Visual Reality Launcher it must be unzipped in a c:\utils directory or edit 3dfxtv.bat to copy the file to and from the correct directories on your hard disk.
Some people say that overwriting kstvtune.ax in the command prompt works, but I have found that this can be overwritten by other video capture drivers (e.g. webcams and scanners). It is also DIFFICULT and NOT RECOMMENDED to disable Windows File Protection, so I always use my Visual Reality Launcher.

Credits

The best drivers are the Windows 95\98\ME ones but I do not have enough web space to upload them. I will add them if anyone requests them. They are hard to find now, but they can capture the PAL VCD standard on PAL Voodoo3-3500 cards.

x3dfx
x3dfx message board
Voodoo Files
CAirey's Home Page
VirtualDub Home Page
Serge V. Andyk Home Page (FlyCap)

NVidia


"The next range of NVidia cards should be called Voodoo".

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