LGPL'd Voodoo ROMs from Bochs

[ruben_balea]

Bochs now has its own LGPL'd VGABIOS with Voodoo Banshee specific code called VGABIOS-lgpl-latest-banshee (https://bochs.sourceforge.io/doc/docboo ... notes.html)

So I copied "VGABIOS-lgpl-latest-banshee" to "2k11sd.rom", "3k12sd.rom", "pci_sg.rom" and "blasterpci.rom", then modified those files as needed:

2k11sd.rom: Updated Vendor ID, Device ID, Subsystem ID and Subsystem Vendor Id for 3DFX Voodoo 3 2000 PCI
3k12sd.rom: Updated Vendor ID, Device ID, Subsystem ID and Subsystem Vendor Id for 3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 PCI, changed file size to 64KB
pci_sg.rom: no changes needed.
blasterpci.rom: Updated Vendor ID, Device ID, Subsystem ID and Subsystem Vendor Id for Creative Labs 3D Blaster Banshee PCI

I used the PCI ID's found at https://pci-ids.ucw.cz/read/PC/121a

In Windows 9x the four cards seem to work correctly and both Windows and the drivers detect the correct card model. I have not tested the operation under DOS because basically I never had any game with 3dfx support...
I have no idea how those games detect the presence of the card, if they look in the VIDEO BIOS for "3Dfx", "Voodoo" or "Banshee" then they won't detect it.
If they cannot be used as 3D accelerators under MS-DOS they still function as (S)VGA cards.
And until now there was no video card with LGPL/GPL BIOS, although I don't know these issues in depth, I imagine that if the original has an LGPL license there would be no problem in distributing these derivatives together with PCem to make it more useful with support out of the box for the Voodoo cards

Extract all files and folder from the RAR archive inside your PCem roms folder, if you have the OEM BIOS for any of those cards do not overwrite your own files, or make a backup before if you really want to test the Bochs Voodoo BIOS.
The next time you start PCem you will already have those video cards available as long as you use a motherboard with PCI support, I guess at least some 486 and all Pentium boards will have PCI slots.

VGABIOS-lgpl-latest-banshee-PCem.rar

(14.58 KiB) Downloaded 205 times

Edit: For some reason I originally wrote "DRIVERS" instead of "ROMs" obviously this has nothing to do with the drivers, the drivers created by 3dfx also work with these ROMs from the Bochs emulator, there is no other alternative or specific driver for these ROMs, sorry if I have caused confusion

[handlingcfg]

it seems to work little faster,
i run 3dmark 2000, with 533mhz celeron+3000pci
normal rom gets
2292
this rom gets
2532

i dont know if 3dmark results accurate enough

[Dacicus]

Those modified ROMs don't seem to work properly under Linux as the guest OS, but it's still an interesting idea for experimenting with things under Windows. Thanks!