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Comment by goosedragons | Hacker News Reader

Kinda related but less happy end. IIRC there was no difference between Voodoo graphics cards for PC and Mac and they could be used interchangeably. When Nvidia entered the scene they decided they wanted more money and made Mac specific BIOSs and ATI followed suit.

I know quite a few people that have paid more for "Mac" USB hard drives where the only difference is the format out of the box and maybe some junk software they never used.

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My understanding is that the PC is actually the odd one out there. Many pre-UEFI devices (PowerPC Macs, Sun SPARC boxen, etc) ran Open Firmware, which used device-independent bytecode in their boot ROMs. You could swap the graphics card out of a Mac and put it in a Sun machine, and things would work. PCs, on the other hand, put x86 machine code directly in the boot ROM.

DEC Alpha systems solved this problem by using an x86 emulator during system boot to run the initialization code, thus allowing for standard PC cards to be used on a non x86 processor.

(Reference to this in some early RedHat documentation, which is about as authoritative of a source I could find in 2-3 mins of Googling: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/red...)

> IIRC there was no difference between Voodoo graphics cards for PC and Mac

I'm not sure about that. The video BIOS is x86 code; that certainly wouldn't have run on a (PowerPC) Mac system.

Correct, but they could be cross-flashed: https://web.archive.org/web/20060511060609/http://homepage.m...

I have also cross-flashed a PCI Radeon 9200 but it needed a larger flash chip to hold the larger ROM image.

Earlier Voodoo cards didn't need to worry about video BIOS because it wasn't the primary video card. It used this wacky passthrough system where you still used your normal graphics hardware for ordinary 2D stuff, and then it switched over to the 3D card when you ran 3D software, which had to take over the entire screen. Nvidia and ATI cards handled normal graphics functions, not just 3D, so they needed to be able to come up at boot time. Later 3dfx cards added 2D and also needed Mac-specific firmware.

Were those earlier cards ever used on Macintosh systems? I don't remember that ever being a thing.

I don’t think they ever shipped with a Mac, but they were available. I had a Voodoo in a Mac clone. It was a strange setup. You plugged the monitor into the Voodoo, then ran a second video cable from the computer’s built in video out to a second port on the Voodoo. In normal operation, it would pass the video signal through, and when using 3D acceleration, it would take over the video signal.

Wild. I never ran into one of those - the only Mac peripheral I knew of which did that was the PC Compatibility Card.

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