Upgrade Your Voodoo With More Memory
In 1996, the 3Dfx VooDoo VGA chipset transformed personal computer graphics for good. Since of the substantial expense of memory, most of the boards experienced only 4 MB of memory — which seemed a good deal again then. Even so, the chipset could actually take care of up to 8 MB. [Bits and Bolts] couldn’t stand that his board only had 4 MB, so he did what any very good hacker would do: he figured out how to add the lacking memory!
The mod has been performed in advance of working with the “piggyback” approach, where by you solder the new RAM chips on the outdated chips and bend out a couple pins out to right wire them to chip selects somewhere else on the board. [Bits and Bolts] didn’t want to attempt that, so instead, he designed a PCB that slips more than the chip employing a socket.
Of training course, this presumes the chips have ample clearance among them to match the sockets. In addition, the board is pretty unique to a specific VGA board for the reason that each board has different memory chip layouts. The sockets also had plastic guidance buildings that blocked the insertion, so a little surgical procedure eliminated them.
The board can insert far more memory to either the body buffer or the texture mapping memory. There are jumpers to established up, which you want to do.
Although we have seen piggybacking completed a number of situations — we have even accomplished it ourselves — we haven’t considered of applying a socket as a substitute of just soldering on prime of the memory. You continue to have to do the small soldering to graft the chip choose, but that’s substantially simpler than soldering each and every and every memory pin. Obviously, you want to lay the board out and spot the sockets precisely so every little thing suits alongside one another. It seems to be straightforward on the video, but at the conclusion, he displays some of the matters that didn’t go so well. But in the finish, it labored, and it worked perfectly.
It is not that tricky to establish a VGA, but the trick is overall performance, and that’s what the 3Dfx chips presented. Not that you just can’t do it in Excel, but it will likely be slower.
