LGR - DOOM 3 VOODOO
Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And today we’re trying something a little bit absurd with Windows 98 and this 12 megabyte Voodoo 2 accelerator card from 1998: we're gonna be playing Doom 3 from 2004. This was absolutely not supported natively, at minimum it required a 64MB GPU and Windows 2000 or XP, but I remember seeing posts about this Voodoo 2 Windows 98 mod back in the day and always wanted to try it.
I’m gonna go ahead and show each step of the process to setting this up, but I’ll also provide typed instructions and links to the files used in the video description, so if you wanna just see the resulting gameplay feel free to skip ahead. As for the rest of you, well, let’s get the Lazy Green Giant set up to do this thing.
I usually have a Voodoo 3 in here but today I’ll be dropping in this lovely STB BlackMagic Voodoo 2 card, which was actually my first 3D accelerator back in the day. And since this only does 3D and doesn’t do any 2D processing, I’m gonna pair it with this 4MB ATi 3D Rage Pro card from 1997.
Just gonna stick ‘em into their respective PCI 2.0 slots right next to each other, since around back they need to be connected with this little SVGA cable in order for the graphics cards to work together. I’ll just be using the latest reference drivers for each card in Windows 98 Second Edition, nothing special in that regard.
As for Doom 3, the installer will immediately throw up a message about Windows 98 not being supported, but just click through and let it happen. And do note that you will need to use the original retail release of Doom 3. The BFG re-release won’t work at all and the Steam version relies on protection that isn’t compatible with Windows 98.
Also, it may ask about updating to DirectX version 9.0b, and if you don’t have it then install it, or even better install 9.0c like I did here. Once your system restarts you’ll need to update Doom 3 to version 1.31 and I’ve found I get the best results by updating to 1.1, then 1.3, then 1.31.
Each of these are included in the D3_patch folder in the archive I’ve put together for this video, no need to worry about hunting down any of these. Next navigate to the Doom3_v2_patch folder in the archive and open the executable there. First thing it presents is a list of Doom 3 PAK files to extract before running the patch, so you’ll need an extraction program like WinRar or 7-Zip to get into these.
Navigate to the Doom 3\base folder and open up PAK000, PAK002, and PAK004.pk4. Then just extract the required folders into the same “base” folder you found the PAK files. So by the end you should have folders in there titled Materials, GUIs, Particles, Textures, and Models.
Head back to the patch program and we can adjust the texture sizes, and while the default settings will work just fine on a Voodoo 2, I was curious to see how low it could go so I chose the minimum settings. And also make sure the two checkboxes at the bottom are checked, at least for the kind of setup in this video, and finally click “Run” and let it do its thing.
This can take quite some time, it may even look like it’s frozen for a while, but yeah it’ll eventually get there. What it’s doing is going through each of those files you extracted and converting them into much lower-fidelity versions that can be displayed on a Voodoo card, as well as plopping down some modified executables and config files so Doom 3 won’t refuse to run on such a low-spec system.
After ten or fifteen minutes, head back to the archive and the OPENGL32 folder, then copy over the DLL file to the main Doom 3 directory, right alongside the main executables for the game. And now it’s time to see if it worked! Open Doom3_V2.bat and if all went well you’ll see a 3dfx logo on startup.
Aw yeah. The intro videos didn’t work for me so you can just press escape to get past those, and finally we’re in the main menu. Still not ready to play the game itself though, just go into the options and crank things down as low as they’ll go, save, then quit the game.
We should now have a config file in the “base” folder, so go ahead and open that in a text editor and add the line seta r_singlelight “0” right below the final seta r line in that file, then save and make it read-only. You may be tempted to skip this step and see how it goes without it, but trust me, it’s worth it for the performance and aesthetic enhancements.
Once you get Doom 3 opened up again, start a new game and see if it works. If not and you get this empty window here, I’ve got a fix for that too. Back in the archive there’s a savegame folder. Just copy that entire thing into the same Doom 3 “base” folder we’ve been using, then go back into the game and you’ll have an autosave.
Load that and bam, it skips that glitch and gets you into the game. Finally, it’s Doom 3 time! Soldier: "Welcome to Mars. All new arrivals need to check in at reception." Hehe, ahh such as it is. But I mean, considering this is a 12 megabyte card running on an unsupported operating system, it’s not *that* bad...
Sure you don’t have like, *any* of the graphical features that made Doom 3 such an impressive technical achievement, but at the same time I think it’s oddly charming. Looks kinda like a prototype or something. It looks better than some modern early access games I’ve seen on Steam, which is actually kinda sad.
Oh and in case you forgot what it was *supposed* to look like, here’s the game running on Ultra on a PC that legitimately supports it. Receptionist: "Okay, there's a few things we need to take care of first." "This is your personal data assistant. You'll need this to access" "all secure areas.
If you get clearance for any security zones," "it'll download directly. It's important so don't lose it!" Swann: "Tell me, Dr. Betruger, why are so many workers spooked," "complaining, requesting transfers off Mars?" Betruger: "They simply can't handle life here.
They're exhausted and overworked." "If I had a larger, more competent staff and bigger budget" "even these few accidents could've been avoided..." Hehe, okay so the character models are straight up horrific and/or amazing depending on where you stand.
And the texture resolution and model complexity is drastically reduced all-around, but it’s still unmistakably Doom 3. You even still get the interactive user interfaces found on displays and panels throughout the game, the patch doesn’t seem to touch these at all.
Which is good because they’re rather necessary to the gameplay. Speaking of which, Doom 3 remains rather playable, if understandably choppy. And hey, don’t have to worry about about swapping flashlights anymore, bonus! Nyah! But yeah, even when the action heats up and things slow down, the controls remain rensponsive-ish and the FPS doesn’t tank as much as I anticipated.
Part of that undoubtedly has to do with the 1GHz Pentium III CPU in this system, but still. Even that is a generation behind and much slower than the 1.5GHz Pentium 4 that Doom 3 lists as its minimum supported processor. So all things considered, even though it can dip into single digit frame rates when you’re up against multiple enemies, I still think this is holding up surprisingly decently.
I mean I’m not gonna recommend actually playing the game this way, holy crap no, this is awful. But it’s an absurd, charming kind of awful that only comes from purposely breaking PC games to run on configurations that they were never, ever meant to. Oh and in case you’re wondering if it’ll work with an even older Voodoo 1 card, I wasn’t able to get that going at all with this 4 megabyte Diamond Monster 3D.
The patch technically supports it, but the game itself crapped out every time I loaded it, even with alternate WickedGL libraries installed. Oh well. That’s about it for this video, I just wanted to share this weirdness since I got a kick out of it. Ever since I saw the posts on gaming forums fourteen or so years ago I always wanted to try this out, but by 2004 I’d moved on from Voodoo graphics cards and gotten myself an ATi Radeon 9800 series board.
It didn’t run Doom 3 perfectly either, but hey, at least it was capable of taking care of business on its own. Dang, the 9800 Pro, now that’s a card I haven’t experienced in ages. Buuuut anyway, before I get myself distracted with questionable eBay searches I’m gonna go and say that’s it for today! I hope you enjoyed this little dive into some silliness.
