While sorting through some old documents, I came across my old Voodoo5 card and some interesting VOGONS threads. I figured they should be somewhere on here, even if I don’t have a retro PC anymore!

The Voodoo5 5500 was quite an interesting beast. Released back in 2000, it featured two VSA-100 graphics processors working together on a single card. Why have one graphics chip when you can have two? Sounds perfectly reasonable to me!

The card has 64 MB of memory, split into 32 MB for each processor. It isn’t quite the same as having one big pool of 64 MB for textures, since much of that data needs to be duplicated between the two chips. Still, it was an impressive arrangement for its time.

One of the big selling points was full-scene anti-aliasing, which helped smooth out the horrible jagged edges in older 3D games. There’s also the whole 3dfx Glide side of things, with plenty of games from the late 1990s that were designed to make good use of Voodoo hardware.

Unfortunately, getting old graphics cards working nicely isn’t always as simple as putting one in a computer and turning it on. Drivers, operating systems, motherboard compatibility and the particular games you’re trying to run can all make things interesting. Windows 98 and old PC hardware… what could possibly go wrong?

I’ve included a couple of useful VOGONS threads below, one covering Windows Glide games and another looking at testing a Voodoo5 5500 AGP card. They’re worth keeping around for anyone putting together a retro gaming PC.

Maybe I’ll end up building another old PC eventually. It would certainly be nice to give some of these graphics cards another workout. In the meantime, at least the documentation isn’t gathering dust!

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