Sylvain Munaut Brings 3dfx's 1998 Gaming Powerhouse, the Voodoo2, to the Raspberry Pi 5

Vintage computing enthusiast Sylvain Munaut has made a best-effort attempt at bringing the 3dfx Voodoo2 graphics accelerator back from the grave — as an accessory for the popular Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer.

"[This is] my journey of running [a] 3dfx Voodoo2 3D accelerator from 1998 on [a] Raspberry Pi 5 ARM64 single-board computer that was released 25 years later. First thing to go over is: why would you even want to do that? And although I'm a firm believer that 'because I can' is a perfectly valid excuse, in this case there is a bit more to it."

Founded in 1994, 3dfx Interactive was an early player in the field of hardware 3D accelerators for consumer PCs — initially with dedicated devices that overrode the video output of integrated graphics or 2D accelerators when 3D acceleration was required, then later with devices that combined 2D and 3D graphics capabilities in one. The Voodoo2 came out in February 1998 as the company's second-generation device, still reliant on a separate graphics device for 2D work, and delivered a big performance gain over the company's original chipset.

Typically, a 3dfx Voodoo2 would be installed in the PCI slot of an era-appropriate desktop PC — an Intel Pentium MMX, Pentium II, AMD K6, K6-2, or K6-III, for instance. In Munaut's case, though, the target is something a little newer: a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer, which is both considerably smaller than the Voodoo2 and lacks a PCI slot in which to install it.

"Back in the late 1990s I was a teenager, and I owned 3dfx cards," Munaut explains of the thinking behind the project. "And I still remember that I wanted to learn how to program those cards. I placed a last-minute bid [on Ebay] and I didn't think it would win but it did. A week or so later the parcel showed up and I was now faced with the problem of testing it."

Lacking any devices with a 5V-capable PCI slot, Munaut decided to take a different approach: converting the card to a more modern PCI Express connection, then wiring that into the PCIe lane available on the Raspberry Pi 5. "Because," Munaut jokes, "why go for simple when you can make your life ten times harder?"

There were a number of bumps on the road to getting the card up and running — not least of which is that 3dfx went bankrupt in 2002, shedding staff and technology to industry giant NVIDIA. The next is that the 3dfx Voodoo2 was designed for use with x86 "IBM compatible" PCs, not Arm-based devices like the Raspberry Pi — and no suitable drivers exist. As a result, Munaut had to port a kernel driver then add a compatibility layer for the original MS-DOS and Windows software using DOSBox-X.

Initially, the result was extremely unstable — a problem Munaut tracked down to a simple cause. "Turns out a Voodoo2 can eat quite some power," he explains. "Even more than 3A apparently and if you try to feed it from a 1.5A random supply, that can cause problems. I was looking for zebras when I should have checked for horses first — always check the basics!"

The project is documented in full in Munaut's video, available on YouTube and embedded above, with the kernel driver source code available on GitHub under the GNU General Public License 2 or later.