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Have you ever had a problem you couldn’t figure out for a while and you looked all over creation and you still couldn’t find anyone else who had posted the solution to the problem and no one you knew knew the answer to the problem, so you mucked with it long enough to figure out what was going on and you figured out how to fix it and then it came in really really handy many times after that and you look like a fucking genius since you figured it out? Well I just had one of these sorts of things happen recently and I want to spew it forth so that it doesn’t bite anyone else in the ass. Basically, I had a problem wherein I installed the DirectX SDK and I fired up some of the Direct3D examples. No go. I have a Voodoo3 3500 (the Voodoo3 part is the important bit) with 128MB of system RAM. Some of the examples told me I didn’t have enough video memory. Others told me they couldn’t create a Direct3D device. I had the latest drivers, I had DirectX 8 installed. No go. I posted my problems to GarageGames and though the people there wanted to help, they couldn’t. Odd, since many of them claimed to have the same setup as me. I tinkered with BIOS settings, reinstalled DirectX and my drivers multiple times, even reformatted and reinstalled Win98SE. Nothing. Then, on a hunch I visited Voodoo Files. I noticed that there were relatively new drivers out from someone for the Voodoo3/4/5, so I downloaded them. When I install them they have the official 3dfx screen and everything. When I reboot, I can suddenly fire up all the Direct3D samples (except for a few, which tell me that their particular feature isn’t supported by my card). I can even still run my TV tuner bit. A little bit of research reveals that the latest official 3dfx drivers (which are old at this point, as 3dfx is dead) do not support DirectX 8, which is the root of this problem. Ironically, if I had fired up the DirectX 7 SDK I wouldn’t have had this problem. So, if you have this problem with your Voodoo3 card, fire up these drivers. The only thing I wonder is: are these “hacks” of older drivers, or are they reverse engineered? Or is this someone out there who used to work for 3dfx who is still updating drivers with a copy of the driver source he hung on to? The official 3dfx installer is the most curious part. Also, now the Red Faction demo works.