Guess what this is....

[[EOCF] Tim]

Davros, I owe you one mate, that has to be it. Will have a look later today!

 

[Davros]

Oh the days of graphics drivers being under 100k
keep us informed of your progress...

 

[Rootax]

Aaaah, I can't resist, I love / loved PowerVR so much (don't look at me like that...)

 

[[EOCF] Tim]

Good and bad news, the driver did recognize the card and went to install but came up with a Midas Windows 95 Installation Disk not found error. It couldn't find PVRHAL32.DLL, PVRTHK16.DLL, PVRWIN32.dll and quite a few more.

It seems this driver is to enable D3D for the card. Three files, one help file, PVRILOAD.exe, which loads on Win7! Enables PowerVR D3D HAL tray icon, setup etc. Third files is VideoLogicMIDAS.INF which is the actual driver, it's got entries for Directx3 games such as Hellbender, Monster Truck Madness, Hyper Blade, Agilewarrior.

Help file below :

This utility enables the graphics of some games to work optimally with PowerVR technology.

Some games display a halo of solid color around objects, such as in the example below:

If you are experiencing this problem, follow the steps below.


If your game is listed in the dialog box

1. Click the game's description to turn the 2D/3D Compositing setting on.
2. Click Exit.
3. Restart the game.


If your game is not listed in the dialog box

1. Click Add. The add new game dialog box is displayed.
2. In the Application column, type in the name of the executable file for the game, in the form app_name.exe

If you are not sure of this filename, the best way to find it is through the Find facility (click the Start button and point to Find). The filename usually has the extension .EXE or .COM. For example, if your game were called Chess, you would search for Chess.EXE on your hard drive. If this did not work, you would search for Chess.COM

3. In the Description column, type in a brief description of the game, in capitals or lower-case including symbols and digits, up to a maximum of 35 characters.
4. Click OK. The PowerVR D3D Setup dialog box is displayed.
5. Click Exit.
6. Restart the game.


If you want to modify an existing game's entry

1. Highlight the game's application name, and click Edit. The edit game dialog box is displayed.
2. In the Description column, type in a brief description of the game, in capitals or lower-case including symbols and digits, up to a maximum of 35 characters.
3. Click the 2D/3D Compositing box to turn the utility on.
4. Click OK. The PowerVR D3D Setup dialog box is displayed.
5. Click Exit.
6. Restart the game.

 

[Mendel]

MMmm... Monster Truck Madness. I think it was the first Direct3d game I ever played... before that I didn´t even know what hardware acceleration meant... nor did I know that my S3 Virge had such a thing as hardware acceleration for 3d. I experienced bilinear filtering for the first time with S3 Virge and Monster Truck Madness. I think it actually rendered a frame every second if I recall correctly.

Anyways that got me interested enough to buy a magazine that had article about hardware acceleration so I found out about 3dfx and PowerVR and stuff... and so I bought Voodoo Rush ... facepalm... Well, it was a quite a bit better but it would never run every early glide game. Nor did Voodoo 2 that I got after that... I never got to play hardware accelerated Fatal Racing for instance, which bugs me to this day.

 

[[EOCF] Tim]

I've got a long forgotten patch for Fatal Racing for the Game Glint (Creative Blaster VLB). That's something I still need to pursue.

 

[Davros]

I loved fatal racing - still got it
Maybe rhys can help you with midas 3 drivers,

ps: those files seem to be standard pvr files maybe standard pcx1 drivers would world

found this : (from standard pvr)
[Version]
Signature="$CHICAGO$"

[DestinationDirs]
DefaultDestDir=10
Midas_WindowsFiles=10
Midas_SystemFiles=11

[DefaultInstall]
DelFiles=Midas_WindowsFiles,Midas_SystemFiles
DelReg=Midas_DelReg
UpdateInis=Midas_DelInis
Restart
Reboot

[DefaultUninstall]

[Midas_SystemFiles]
pvriload.exe
pvrhelp.hlp
pvrhal32.dll
pvrwin32.dll
pvrthk16.dll
pvrthunk.dll
vsgl.vxd
pvrsm3d.dll
pvrsm3d.hlp
pvrhal32.dll
pvrinit.exe

 

[[EOCF] Tim]

Interesting that's what I thought as well, will check again when I'm there next.

 

[Simon F]

He has quite a nice pile of old cards, which I'm sure that the history of is very interesting, but sadly SimonF has a tendancy to be very busy

"Pile" is certanly the appropriate word. I need to tidy them up. (And is "busy" a euphamism for "disorganised"? ;-) )

Wow, this is great, I just got my Midas 3 Compaq board out. Really wanted to do some testing on this one after having been in storage for ages. Frantically looking just about anywhere for a driver, but can't find any. Stumbled on this topic by chance. Simon, Rys, can you help me out here? Board is the one picture below.

LOL: I didn't think the board supported a fish-eye projection. Seriously though, I rather doubt I have midas 3 driver.

Does the Avalanche3D work, drivers and all? Damn, I'd love to have one too.

IIRC, there were quite a few changes between the separate ISP/TSP combo and the integrated PCX1 and PCX2s. I think one of the changes was the addition of a "TLB" to allow the chips to read (at least some of) the 3D model data directly from PC main memory rather than the on-board RAM. That, for a start, would make the drivers completely incompatible.

 

[RudeCurve]

Cool thread.

 

[Simon F]

nor did I know that my S3 Virge had such a thing as hardware acceleration for 3d. I experienced bilinear filtering for the first time with S3 Virge and Monster Truck Madness. I think it actually rendered a frame every second if I recall correctly.

I have a feeling that everything might have been driven by a register interface and so the setup time in software, maintance and hand-holding probably made it inefficient for anything besides enormous triangles.

 

[Davros]

well the virge was know as a graphics decelerator (although it was quite feature complete)

from wiki
"While revolutionary in delivering an affordable 3D accelerator with good quality 2D performance, the ViRGE earned the unofficial title as the world's first "graphics decelerator" due to its abysmal 3D performance. While the ViRGE could render basic 3D scenes faster than host-CPU based software rendering, turning on features such as bilinear filtering and Z-depth fogging caused the card to slow down to the point where software-rendering would outrun the ViRGE. To this extent, the practical feature set of the ViRGE range was extremely limited."

 

[[EOCF] Tim]

Carsten, as for your question about the Avalanche3D board, I have the answer right here, don't think he would mind me sharing his words.

I don't remember for sure, but I don't think we had any full blown driver for Axe, just some utilities for bring up procedures.

There is no built in boot screen or anything like that, the best you could possibly to achieve with that is bios show it as a PCI device on the bus. Can't remember the device/vendor ID you should look for. If it shows, then you should be able to access the on board memory. But, since it is very little visible you can achieve with that I'd just keep my motherboard safe and not put it in

So there you have it.

Also, digging through my emails to back up my statement above :

To my knowledge the Axe board you have is the only piece outside the company, the earlier pictures of boards (interner) I think have been taken by people at some places where we have had the board with us. We have maybe two or three such boards at the office.

Going to build an acrylic wall display for them.

 

[Blazkowicz]

the S3 Virge would ran two demos that came on the CD, descent II and terminal velocity, those would run great with bilinear filtering at 640x480. good image quality. too bad I never could run anything else, and I guess those games were made with a 486 DX/2 66 in mind.

 

[Lightman]

the S3 Virge would ran two demos that came on the CD, descent II and terminal velocity, those would run great with bilinear filtering at 640x480. good image quality. too bad I never could run anything else, and I guess those games were made with a 486 DX/2 66 in mind.

I went through Virge DX 4MB to Virge GX/2 4MB SGRAM and it was much quicker than predecessor. Still too slow for nearly anything available back then and with bugged drivers
After than I had my first true 3D accelerator - RIVA128 - didn't want to go Voodoo way because I needed OpenGL acceleration for LightWave3D in Windows!

 

[Davros]

Can't really say much more than that, but I'll try and get permission from the powers that be to talk about it a bit more, since it's a cloaked bit of PowerVR history.

A month late but that seems to be a theme here
Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday Dear Quote
Happy Birthday to You.

Please join with me in wishing the above quote a very happy 2nd birthday

 

[Stiletto]

For those Midas owners who stumble upon this thread, you can also find the drivers from DriverGuide here. (AFAIK they've yet to be tested again in the modern era...)
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=530
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=531

 

[Putas]

Drivers versions 3.x indeed works with Midas 3, but are very immature. I found only several playable d3d games. The rest often crashes after drawing first frame. Many transparency issues, functionality is pretty down to drawing textured Goraud shaded polygons. No true color output. Even most of SGL games fails because of missing functions. Was there newer driver for Midas 3 then the 3.1?

 

[Putas]

Have to correct myself, Midas 3 does not play well together with Virge. With Verite as primary adapter it does lot better and enables 32 bit output. It runs most of 1997 d3d games, even though often with blending artifacts. It can only crossfade by alpha. Specular highlights and reflection mapping are only working under SGL, fog is also very problematic. It has ~90% of PCX1 speed, despite having 10% clock advantage. Considering that Midas 3 also has the separate geometry buffer to it's advantage, the PCX1 seems to be quite improved, and not just integrated Midas 3.