This mad man just ran Tomb Raider on a 3D accelerator with no texture memory... and it worked. Blew my mind, that TMU is just blindly writing/reading to open traces, and it could care less! Makes sense but I would have never thought to try it

6:30 I'm more impressed by the fact that the card is still stable despite not having _any_ texture memory. I have a Voodoo3 1000 that I'm excited to finally test during my time off class and hopefully it isn't broken.

Great video! Your solder skills are really stunning. Keep on your great work.

Had a reference voodoo 1 as a kid. Epoxied heatsinks on the main CPUs because it would lock up and I noticed the chips were hot. After that blind mod, it ran perfectly. The visual difference was incredible. Hardware interpolation made a huge visual difference. Acceleration allowed old PCs to run quake and unreal 1 which were absolutely mind blowing compared to doom and wolfenstein.

Wow, this was fantastic! I'm a fan of old hardware, especially old Voodoo cards, and it was really empowering to see you repairing step by step and old Voodoo card. Made my day better! :)

successfully desoldering and re-soldering a large surface mount IC with more legs than a millipede - that's some serious retro computing restoration

Nice to see one of the most coveted cards from my youth up and running! Can't remember how long I wanted to get one, and finally got it. It was a gaming bliss.

What brilliant work, such a pleasure to what your repair work - it's a real inspiration.

You could take the RAM sockets from (for example) an old PCI graphics card that has an upgradable RAM option…or just get some RAM sockets. Then create a Voodoo “test” board that has replaceable RAM that can be inserted or removed from the sockets…just an idea…

Damn I toss so many broken PC hardware that might got fixed with knowledge you provide😥 I'm very interested in repairing stuff like this and definitely will train my solder skills.

I've soldered chips with this pin pitch and count. I respect the nice work you did. It's not difficult if you have the experience, however for most people it's scary difficult. Flux flux flux is all I can say.

I use to run an Intel740 and Voodoo hooked together. That combination blew the first run of Nvidia 32's out of the water. All of the 3dfx games around that time were crude by today's standards but back then they were great. Monster Truck, Warzone2100, Need for speed 3 and Unreal were really fun to play. It was just a shame that the Voodoo's graphics memory couldn't be used for general applications.

What a suitable intro for the "Voodoo Master"! Great work!

love your videos! I've leared so much from them thank you so much!

Your channel is by far the most favorite one for me into hardware repairs! Alles gute und vielen dank! I will subscribe on an instant!

Cool! I'm wanting to try this for myself for some time now on two very crippled V2 cards I own. Bought a few Bruce (TMU), Chuck (FBI) chips and some RAM for them on UTsource at the start of this "human malware" we're experiencing. I've already tried replacing the RAM, RAMDAC, VGA output switch IC and watch the debug logs while starting up a glide demo. RAMDAC seems to initialize, RAM is being detected but glide apps simply freeze up and have to ALT+TAB and kill them. There's no output in the monitor. With some apps one card sometimes output a brief frame and then blackness or that frame stucks. The debug logs are somewhat cryptic, but a modified old linux voodoo2 kernel module can be recompiled with a lot more customly written debug output. Maybe. I'm not very good at visual C++ SDK that Windows uses and this can be already very time consuming. Even measured the oscillator clock on a scope, checked voltages. All fine. (The V2 seems to idle at a standby speed of 50MHz, jumping to the target clock speed (~90MHz) after initializing and running an app. The only thing left is to play around with the TMUs and the FBI and hope they are not fake. After watching your video I'll try reflowing the pins first, then go on with replacing them. I've already successfully resurrected another card missing the green color output by a simple RAMDAC and switch IC replacement. That working card has a fine working "brother" too to run in SLI with, a thing I was missing as a kid. :) One of the two working cards was 8Megs originally, but became 12megs with a little soldering.

Really enjoying these videos! Thank you :)

This is just amazing work :) Great video, as always! Cheers!

Excellent work, i enjoyed this vídeo so much, the intro is fantastic 👍

Love the Voodoo 1. Just something about the way the card looks is very pleasing. And its great for early 3d gaming as well.

6:31 LOLOL XD Nice :D i love this tecnical in to the hardware :D

Epic repair. Fantastic video, and subject matter.

Excellent work! I still have a bunch of Voodoo's that I kept from back when they were current hardware. All still work fine. Fun times.

Discovered this late... Enjoyed the repair!

just my kind of youtube channel! Keep up the good work!

"Fucking Voodoo Magic Man!!!" Well done!!!

Well done really enjoyed this video!

Awesome work!

Well done! Congrats! 🙂👍👍👍👍

I had a diamond monster II 3d 12 Mb if I remember right it was a full length or pretty close. That card blew my mind to little bits absolutely incredible.

Nice job! Very nice soldering.

Love the videos!

Tomb Raider 2020: Here king, have some polygons.

Excellent video, I enjoyed it and I really liked. I own a voodoo 2 in a vegetative state, but I don't have spare parts to exchange

Excellent video and great work!

To desoldering ICs that does not have pads underneath it is a great help to use low melting point solder like bismuth alloy (for example Chip Quick).

Great Job !!!!

Great work.

6:00 early version Diamond Monster 3D from 1996, this and Orchid Righteous 3D was first on the market, nice

Great project!

good work on saving good old 3d accelerator

Awsome tips on soldering

Nice work!

Very well done! Great work \o/

2 years old but I have an idea. Take one of the working Voodoo cards, remove the memory, and replace the memory with a socket. You can use it as a tester for video RAM.

First this is astonishing work so patient, for testing you may use S3 Trio64V2/DX is useing exacly this same memory only you need version with sockets

Thanks! for video!

Please keep up the good work

Nice job !

Would have been really cool if you also only put 1 or 2 of the memory modules back on to see what happens.

Remember my brother asking me, "Is it a good thing to buy one of those........ Zombie II cards?"

I used to have a Voodoo 64mg graphics card back in 1998, and a creative soundblaster sound card. Great machine.

I am having exactly the same problem with my Diamond 3dfX. Hope to revive it with this technique, thanks very much !

Excellent video!

You should put heatsinks on gpu chip and ram chips defo ! Good job on soldering 🙏

that was really a Voodoo magic!!

Respect. Good guy! 3Dfx rulez!

well done!

The Intergraph VooDoo was my start with OpenGL, then I went with the The Pro Intergraph Wildcat Cards..

At 11:17 when you show the texture buffer memory chips pin 5 from the left edge of the screen appears not to be soldered correctly. This style of package can be particularly difficult to hand solder correctly. Speaking from experience.

I'll ask my father he worked at 3DFX and managed to bring home a rare voodoo 5

WAOOO Excelente.

I have Voodoos 1, 2, and 3, and still probably cherish (yeesh) them more than almost any other video cards I've had. My 2, though, has always had these red blotchy artifacts when playing multitextured games (q1 looks great, q2 has some artifacting). They always played just fine otherwise, but it has bugged me and I haven't used it in a retro machine because of the artifacts. Now I wonder if it could be something as simple as sloppy solder. That would be crazy. I kind of want to dig it out and take a look! I just assumed it was bad RAM, but I'm thinking it's the TMU itself. I should have warrantied it right away, but I hated to be without it :)

Hi, congratulations for repair! But i have seen at minute 11:18 on U2 memory a pin not soldered in the middle of ic. When you have time please check. Possible to be a cold soldering that will fail in the future.

I don't know if u know but u should still be able to find the ic's available so those could theoretically be brought back

So Great!.i like Voodoo1

No heatsink? YA! Use the girlfriends feet...those things could even cool a Nuclear Reactor in winter times..

if you solder a spacer in for the rams you can just pop them out if they go bad and replace them easy

hey man, fantastic video? quick question, do you still have that bracket 3d model for the v1? i'm thinking of fixing a card with memory issues and no bracket sadly haha.

Lovely rework that takes skill

I have a 110MHz (memory) Voodoo2 card with damaged legs on a corner of the frame buffer chip. Sadly, eBay shipping damage. Actually I have two such cards but one is damaged and the other is perfect. I'd love to try and fix the damaged one some day because the good one runs great overclocked to 110MHz and I've wanted for years now to have a 110MHz Voodoo2 SLI setup. I would need a donor FBI chip, which I don't currently have without sacrificing a working card. I've also never done surface-mount soldering at this level so I think practice would be needed first! For now my pair of Diamond Voodoo2's runs quite well at 100MHz.

I have 2 two Voodoo 2 and booth are artifacting one is slightly better it can run couple of Quake 2 benchmark. Always nice to see Voodoo raised from dead or any other card especially old cards .

nice work broo

Nice Clip

6:31 lol, I was thinking the same

They really should have had cooling on these cards. Too many died due to the heat issues.

Bravo bravo 👏

Nice intro! How does the 3D printed bracket card fit into a normal case (since it's a little bit thicker than metal) ?

Maybe you could solder memory sockets to one of your voodoo cards, that way at least you could rapidly test memory.

if you use a logic analyzer you could test it in-situ; look for stuck bits, etc. Just clip onto the ic and run the device watching its data in/out, etc.

My dad says that in the RMA departments of 3DFX they had all sorts of Chip testing things. Wherever that went is where you will find those chip testers.

Nice

i got one of them 3dfx chips inthe motherbord i used to build my windws 2000 pc

Wow. That was magic.

Funny. I repaired a Voodoo showing all white textures last year. I noticed that when I would slide my fingers across the upper RAM IC legs, colored textures would appear. It turned out that a zero Ohms resistor in the RAS line of the upper RAM ICs was totally open. No visual defects on the resistor could be seen. I wonder how that could happen, especially with the tiny currents in the RAS line.

👍

I laughed like crazy, when he started game without texture VRAM. I will be sure to store this useful information right next to my collection of hair, fingernail clippings, and chicken bones. Chickiebonez! Yahma-yahma, yahma-yahma, YAHMA!

There are pads for more DRAM on the back. You could have an 8MB card.

Dual voodoo man! SLI them up!

Hi there great video ! btw can you please tell me how you got started into this field of work and how you advanced regards

you can solder some sockets for the ram on the card :) on many S3 9xx pci cards i saw this sockets

I'm not a hardware guy, it seems strange that you can remove the texture memory chips and it doesn't crash, it just keeps running without any textures instead

Have you tried a o- scope there are cheap ones that work well either diy or assembled for under 50 dollars. Great video keep it up!

I came. ROFL. On a serious note, definitely apply some basic heatsinks on everything. Make it last forever.

maybe it wasn't even the TMU, but rather just the contacts? maybe if you put the original one back it'll work.

6:08 - What's differance between those capacitors between memory area? There are four capacitors. C104 C105 C102 and C107. I have card, where I have them soldered in different spots. I mean, like those yellow ones are instead of round ones. Do they have same attributes and can be switched? What is better one? They are on S3 Rage IIC AGP. I have two same looking cards. Both cards are working and have same PCB, just have different types of capacitors. I don't know, what kind of card should I keep... with yellow one small capactiros, or with larger cylindric ones.

Hi my friend! Very nice video! You can use the RAM's of cheapo S3 Virge PCI RAM's to replace bad IC RAM's of Voodoo1. Replacing caps it is also a good measure to extend Voodoo live. Lara Croft continues a really hot girl :)

That first board was a pentium 2 board

This is a bit after the fact but AFAIK no-clean flux is NOT conductive

0:28 Oh, I see, a cross fire...