How the 3dfx voodoo worked

Lots of interesting technical details. All it really did was draw nicely filtered textures but on a Pentium that was a hard task:

Comments

Post a Comment

Email me

Name

Email *

Message *

Popular posts from this blog

Panasonic TH-42PX75U Plasma TV review: input lag and upscaling tested using the piLagTesterPRO

Image
This 720p Plasma TV from 2008 is very unique and quite nice in many ways. It used to retail for around $1300. If you can find one it's a great choice for retro gaming.  Overview/Image quality This is a plasma TV, which generally means at least the following: nearly infinite viewing angles, and jaw dropping weight. That's true in this case as well. This 42" model weights 75lbs.  At native resolution (720p) this TV crops 20 pixels off the top/bottom and 30 off the sides. 480p/i crops 20 pixels off all sides. Both modes have aliasing, too, though it's not too bad. There's really no excuse for aliasing on a TV this big: you know the panel was designed specifically to be a tv. Why not hit 720p exactly? And as for 480p/i, they could have at least offered a zoomed out mode with black borders and 1:1 pixel mapping. But no such luck. There are zoom/stretch options to crop even more, but none that crop less. While the native resolution supposedly is 1366 x 768 it does accept...
Read more

Can you repair a scratched CD with plastx: empirical tests

Image
I have some PS1 games that I purchased used. Unsurprisingly, 20 years on the resale market hasn't been kind to them. I purchased a cheap disk polisher (monoprice disk repair kit, which is advertised to "clean 99% of all scratches"), but my experience wasn't that great for fixing the PS1 games. I did fix one PS2 DVD that wouldn't play, but mostly it didn't seem to help. So I decided to try other cleaning solutions than provided with the kit, and to run them much longer than the 3 minutes suggested. Here are my results with Plastx, an automotive plastic cleaner advertised primarily for headlights. I tried several PS1 CDs, and none became playable. But perhaps I just wasn't running the polisher long enough. So used a Windows program (nero DiscSpeed) to get a summary of the error rate to see if it was improving at all. PS1 CDs are after all just regular data CDs, so my PC should serve as proxy for the PS1, although I've found the DVD reader in my lapto...
Read more

piLagTester PRO order page

Image
The piLagTesterPRO measures your monitor's input lag and response time. It is a cheap, full featured add-on to the Raspberry Pi; I provide the sensor and required software, you provide the Pi (a $5 pi Zero is more than sufficient). Although it has a DIY aesthetic, it is quite functional and in fact offers quite a lot more features than the commercial alternatives (Leo Bodnar and the Time Sleuth), and has been tested with over 40 TVs, including 4k models .  Here's what it looks like in action: The pi draws a black background, and then roughly once a second displays a set of target rectangles (top/middle/bottom). You place the sensor over the desired target, and the piLagTester measures the monitor's response starting from the moment the frame of video data is sent over the Pi's HDMI port. This is plotted in the graph, which is sideways for space reasons. The lag tester measures two thresholds. In red it shows how long it takes for the monitor to start displaying t...
Read more