Voodoo 3, max. 16 colors

[Shadowfax]

Since quite a while, I have been running my GF3 AGP together with my Voodoo 3 PCI card, for the secondary monitor. No problem at all, as long as I set the PCI as primary in the bios.
When I started using windows XP, there was no problem at all either. I use the GF3 for games, and had the Voodoo set to 1024x768x32-bits @ 85 Hz with default drivers, which was no problem at all.

When I came back from a weekend off, all of the sudden things weren't working normally. The computer hadn't been switched on without my knowledge.
I have installed 3 different drivers or so, without any luck. I tried another PCI slot, and going back to default WinXP drivers, but still I get max. 16 colors.

Hopefully any of you has any idea what the problem could be, 'cause I'm a bit out of ideas at the moment...


Thanks in advance!

[Todd a]

did you try a system restore? It is an easy way to make sure nothing got changed. Otherwise you can try re-installing the drivers. VoodooFiles has a ton of good 3rd party drivers for all 3DFX cards for Windows XP. They work pretty good.

The other thing you might check is that the correct monitor drivers are installed. It might have tried to change the monitor for some reason.

[GOSHARKS]

wasnt the v3 limited to 16bit colors? or was that in games only...

[Todd a]

Unly in 3D mode. It could handle 32bit for desktop and internal buffers for 3D, but the output frame buffers could only handle 16bit color. You could set it to render this way at a slight performance drop and they called it 24bit color or something like that. It really made for just a more accurately displayed 16bit color. Still the desktop could display the full 32 bit colors in 2D mode. My Voodoo3 2000 AGP had a much better 2D image quality than my GeForce2 GTS and in 24bit mode did look better than the GeForce2 GTS in 16bit mode, but the Geforce could do full 32bit color.

[Shadowfax]

No, haven't tried a system restore simply because I disabled that... I have tried two or three drivers from VoodooFiles, all giving the same results... I'll see if I can get some monitor drivers, although it recognizes it as the same old plug & play monitor like it did before, already removed and reinstalled that too...

[Todd a]

Try manually setting the monitor to SVGA with whatever max resolution the monitor supports. When it just says Plug and play, that does not mean much.

The other option you might try is to install the drivers that came with the card, then install the 3rd party drivers over that. I seem to recall having to do that. It has been about a year sinse I touched a Voodoo3 (gave my old one to my EX and the neighbors have one too).

[SexyMF]

Use powerstrip to generate a monitor driver based on reading the data from your monitor.

I find a lot of times it's the monitor rather than graphics drivers which are not playing nice.