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by vgoh1 2638 days ago
I collect vintage electronics, mostly computers and gaming consoles. The Voodoo cards are considered quite collectable because of their GLIDE API. There is a decent stack of games that will ONLY run on Voodoo cards, or will only support Voodoo natively, which matters to a lot of collectors. Back then, a good eye could sometimes identify a card just by looking at the game. For one, for a brief period, games were only made to run on specific cards, so you could narrow it down just by what game is playing. Also, the artifacts would give them each a different look. Some were grainy, washed out, etc. The Voodoo 1 cards would stand out by the artifact that I can only describe as what looked like faint artificial scan lines.

They are really special cards, and two of my vintage computers were built around a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2, meaning, I started with the cards, and knew I had to build a PC to run them optimally.

2 comments

The Voodoo cards had that odd glossy, liquid look that made the surfaces of objects seem deeply physical. The ADCs (EDIT: RAMDACs, of course) that they were using did an odd sort of "poor man's antialiasing" and running any games from that era on modern equipment is a shocking exercise in explicitly defined pixels.
They are already collector's items? :-/ For quite some time i wanted to buy one to play around with Glide (on a real machine) but i postponed it since it also requires building a full desktop and i do not have space at my current place :-P.

Perhaps i should try and find a couple of those before they disappear.