Hands-On Review:

Village Tronic Price: $99 list [Eval Unit Provided by The Software Hut]

December 14, 1998 (rev.1, Originally posted 11/23/98

Pros: Perfect Voodoo1 graphics, modularity with MacPablo for large screen TV output, well-built, lots of demo software, inexpensive, easy to install.

Cons: None.

Rating: Outstanding, 5 out of 5 Exclamation Points: ! ! ! ! !

Brought to you by Macs Only! Copyright 1998 by Bill Fox

Village Tronic has done it! They have provided an inexpensive 3D graphics accelerator card, MacMagic, for the Mac that uses 3Dfx Interactive's Voodoo graphics chip set. MacMagic is an accelerator card that works in line with the computer's onboard video or graphics card to produce fast and terrific 3D action. MacMagic comes with 8 MB of RAM and runs all the great 3Dfx-implemented 3D games, e.g. Unreal, Quake, Myth the Fallen Lords and F/A-18 Korea. While the PC world has largely moved on to Voodoo2 (and there is even Voodoo3 in the wind), a Voodoo2 card for the Mac is produced by only one manufacturer at present and at a price of $300. Unless running a superfast G3 CPU, one won't notice the difference between Voodoo1 and Voodoo2. In either case, all 3Dfx games run acceptably well on Voodoo1 with a 180 MHz 603e CPU on up. Joe Muoio of The Software Hut provided an evaluation unit so let's take a look at MacMagic!

What you get

MacMagic comes packed in a bubble pack in a high quality and attractive box typical of VillageTronic's other products (shown at right). A manual, registration card, cable, floppy disk and CD are also included.

The 20-page printed manual covers installation of the MacMagic card and the cable which passes the video signal from the computer's video monitor port to the card and on to the monitor. It also covers installation of the software drivers and how to use the MacMagic Tweaker application to optimize the performance of MacMagic in one's particular computer. Installation and configuration of the MacPablo, the optional S-VHS video output module which fits on MacMagic, is also described. There's a glossary, technical data list, legal notices and contact addresses for Village Tronic. The manual is complete and clearly written. Printed inside the box on its bottom is a series of five graphics illustrating the installation steps. I don't think anyone will have a problem. However, there is no written warranty, an issue that I noted in previous reviews of Village Tronic products. I should note that I have used three products extensively for nearly a year with no problems. Furthermore, questions e-mailed to Village Tronic Support were answered satisfactorily within 72 hours and usually 48.

The MacMagic cable has a VGA port connector (smaller one) on one end and an Apple video port connector (larger one) on the other.

The included registration card, entitled Service and Guarantee Card, is in German and must be mailed to Village Tronic in Sarstedt, Germany. Just write in your name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, the card's serial number and write in the product, MacMagic.

On the floppy disk is an installer that automatically installs the software when double-clicked.

The CD, entitled "The Village Post," is the 1998 v2.01 of Village Tronic's CD magazine. The CD includes lots of information on Village Tronic's products plus QuickTime 3.0, RAVE Bench. Knoll Lens Flare Pro demo and plenty of game demos like Civilization II, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Commotion and F/A-18 Korea.

MacMagic's Specifications

The card shown at right is clean and appears well-built. It is painted a cool black on both sides to go with the voodoo mystique. There are three ports visible on the silver flange at the left end of the card, a Mac video port on top, a VGA PC video port and an S-video port on the bottom. There are two 3Dfx Interactive Voodoo chips and 8 MB of RAM, 4 for the frame buffer and 4 for texture buffer. For the real technogeeks, MacMagic supplies "... 45 Mpixels/second sustained fill rate for bilinear or advanced filtered textures and over a Mtriangles/second for filtered LOD MIP-mapped, Z-buffered, alpha-blended, fogged, textured 25-pixel triangles." Got that?

About 20 percent from the left end of the card there is a single row of pins at the top and a double row of pins at the bottom, just before the gold flange that goes into the PCI slot on the computer's motherboard. These connectors hold the MacPablo module (shown at left and must be purchased separately) which is just pressed onto MacMagic to enable the S-video out port at the bottom of the silver flange. MacPablo allows one to show games on a television set that accepts S-video, including a large screen projector TV, or the computer. One can also attach a video recorder to record the output from MacMagic.

Installation and Setup

Installation is very simple. There are two pieces of hardware, the MacMagic card and the cable, to install plus software drivers and the application MacMagic Tweaker. The MacMagic card fits in an available PCI slot in a recent PowerMac or clone. It will not go into a NuBus PowerMac nor a 680x0 Mac nor the iMac.

To install the MacMagic card just (1) remove the computer case's cover and (2) remove a cover from one of the available PCI slot ends in the case and save the screw. A PCI slot is one of 3 to 6 white slots on the motherboard or riser card. It is the same length and has a divider that fits in the notch of the gold PCI connector flange on the MacMagic card. (3) Align the MacMagic card in the slot and press it rather firmly downward with no or as little rocking motion as possible to seat it all the way into the PCI slot. PCI slots, especially when first used, are very stiff and it takes greater than expected force to seat it all the way. It's difficult to see but none of the gold portion of the MacMagic's connector should be showing above the top of the white PCI slot. Replace the screw from the end cover to hold the MacMagic's silver end flange to the case. My PowerComputing PowerBase 180 has its PCI slots on a card that rises vertically from the motherboard instead of on the motherboard itself, so Mac Magic sits horizontally parallel to the motherboard rather than straight up at a right angle to the motherboard as in most computers. The photograph above at right shows the black MacMagic card installed in the top PCI slot of my PowerBase (upper left corner). The riser card containing three PCI slots is under the brace that runs front to back.

The video flow is from the computer via the black MacMagic cable to the MacMagic card and then from the MacMagic card to the monitor. One end of the black MacMagic cable is attached to one of the video ports on the MacMagic card depending on how the monitor is normally attached to the computer. If one has an Apple monitor, then connect the VGA end of the MacMagic cable to the VGA port on the MacMagic card and the Apple connector end to the Apple video port on the computer and then connect the monitor to the Apple video port on the MacMagic card. However, if one has a VGA multiscan monitor attached via an adapter to the Mac, leave the adapter on the Mac and connect the VGA end of the Mac Magic cable to it and the Apple connector end of the cable to the Apple video port on the MacMagic card. Then attach the multiscan monitor to the VGA port on the MacMagic card. The photo at left shows the black MacMagic cable and monitor cable (orange tape) hooked up to my PowerBase when looking down from above the back of the computer. The PowerBase is unorthodox in that the computer has both VGA and Apple video ports so that the cable could be attached either way.

That's it for the hardware.

For the software, just insert the floppy disk (cards produced later may include the software on the CD) and double-click on the MacMagic Installer. Four things are installed: two system extensions (3DfxGlideLib2.x v1.5.1 and Village RAVE), the application MacMagic Tweaker v1.0E and an Installation log file. The latter two are in a folder (MacMagic Installer Folder) on your hard drive. The instruction manual somewhat confusingly calls the RAVE extension "MacMagic RAVE" instead of "Village RAVE." This is because the RAVE extension will become generic to Village Tronic's cards. The RAVE extension is to permit the running of programs that use QuickTime RAVE software acceleration. The "Glide" extension enables the 3Dfx voodoo chip set. Village Tronic posted updated versions of Glide v1.5.4, Village_RAVE v1.2.4 and MacMagic Tweaker v1.1E in early December. The new Village_RAVE extension fixed an problem with the earlier extension that occasionally caused my screen to go blank and the computer to freeze. Village Tronic deserves a lot of credit for quickly fixing any initial problems.

MacMagic Tweaker shown in a screenshot above at right allows one to optimize the card. There are four controls. The upper left one controls the clock speed of the graphics chips and the settings range from 50 MHz (normal) up to 60 MHz (fastest), the higher the chips are clocked the faster the frame rate action in the application or game. The upper right one controls the Vsync or wait cycle. It ranges from 0 (fastest) to 2 and also has a default setting to use what the application recommends. The lower right one adjusts the monitors refresh rate from 60 to 120 Hz -- the higher the setting the smoother the action will appear but the lower the setting the faster it will run. The lower left one adjust the amount of texture RAM from 2 to 4 MB. Some applications freeze at the higher RAM according to the manual but so far I've had no problem using a full 4 MB.

That's it for the software.

Use

I tested MacMagic on a PowerComputing PowerBase 180 and an Apple PowerMac 9600. Here are the salient specifications:

PowerBase 180

• 180 MHz 603e CPU with 512K L2 motherboard cache
• System Bus at 40 MHz
• 56 MB RAM plus 44 MB Virtual Memory
• Standard on board ATi Rage II graphics chip with 2 MB VRAM
• 17" RIC multiscan monitor
• 8x IDE CD ROM Drive

PowerMac 9600

• PowerLogix PowerForce G3 250 MHz CPU running at 300 MHz with 1 MB backside L2 cache running at 200 MHz
• System Bus at 50 MHz
• 128 MB RAM
• ATi Xclaim VR with Rage Pro graphics chip and 8 MB SGRAM
• 19" Digital Research Technology multiscan monitor
• 12x SCSI CD ROM Drive

I ran the usual speed tests on the games Quake and Unreal. Myth was run for visual effect and compatibility. I also ran the QuickTime 3.0 RAVE game Nanosaur and the Walker Atrium spin test to see how well MacMagic passed through video from non-3Dfx applications.

First, I ran into one significant problem with the original Village RAVE extension that Village Tronic has subsequently fixed. When trying to run Unreal, Nanosaur and Walker on the PowerBase, the monitor went blank and the computer froze. Force quit wouldn't work and the computer had to be rebooted. Of course, Nanosaur won't run on the PowerBase because it needs 4 MB of VRAM but it normally yields a message saying so during launch and then quits without causing a problem. The same blank screen and freeze happened with Nanosaur and Walker on the 9600. I traced the problem to a conflict with the Village RAVE extension. When Village RAVE was disabled, everything on both computers worked perfectly. Village Tronic released v1.2.4 of Village_RAVE in early December and this fixed the problem.

Quake and Unreal ran beautifully. I used DEMO2 for Quake and Accelerate Your Mac's HQ file for Unreal. Here are the speed trial results:

Tweaker was generally set at 60 MHz clock speed with Vsync=0 and the monitor refresh rate at 85 Hz and 4 MB of Texture RAM. I got pauses for the PowerBase with Quake at 640x480 and the 9600 with Unreal at 60 MHz so it was reduced to 59 MHz. I tried 60 Hz for the monitor refresh rate but the action was a bit jerky and triangles were occasionally obvious.

Both Quake and Unreal ran fine with MacMagic on both computers at both resolution--all were very playable to me anyway. Quake is not sensitive to the CPU speed, running at virtually the same frame rate on both computers. Unreal is clearly very sensitive to CPU speed. Tweaker provided a substantial frame rate boost in Quake for both CPUs and for the 9600 at both resolutions.

Myth also worked fine with MacMagic on both computers. The visual effect of 3Dfx acceleration was substantial on both computers providing sharply detailed figures and landscape. There was no readily discernible difference in playing Myth on both computers.

Nanosaur won't run on the 2 MB VRAM PowerBase but it ran the same on the 9600 with and without MacMagic, i.e. beautifully, since Nanosaur is tailored to the ATi Rage chip running QuickTime 3.0 RAVE. So MacMagic passed through the ATi-generated video as it should, i.e. without getting in the way, when the Village_RAVE extension is disabled.

Walker spun around the atrium at a minimum of 3.33 frames/sec on the PowerBase and 16 frames/sec on the 9600 with or without MacMagic, again confirming a perfect pass through.

I've used MacMagic now for several days [for three weeks as of rev. 1] and I've found it to be perfectly neutral when not running 3Dfx applications and terrific on 3Dfx applications and demos.

Conclusions

MacMagic worked as advertised with no problems. MacMagic allows any PowerMac/clone with PCI slots to use 3Dfx accelerated applications, especially games, on a Mac. The speeds attained are acceptable even on a PowerBase 180 MHz 603e CPU for Quake and Unreal. The speeds are much better with Tweaker on the 9600/G3 than achieved in Macs Only!'s review of the MacPicasso 540 with 3D Overdrive, another 3Dfx-capable graphics accelerator from Village Tronic. MacMagic is simple to install and set up. It works seamlessly to accelerate 3Dfx-implemented applications. Its modularity in accepting the MacPablo to provide S-video output for large screen TV's sets it apart. Best of all it is only $99, an outstanding value.

Many thanks to Joe Muoio of The Software Hut who provided the evaluation unit used in this review. He tells me that his first shipment has sold out but that more are expected momentarily. MacMagic is a hot item!

. . [Macs Only!]