3D Revelator reloaded

Posted on by acme

Over the last view weeks I’ve read a view reviews about Nvidia’s new 3D shutter glasses – the Nvidia 3D Vision. I also wrote a short Blog article about it, and about the differences to the old ELSA 3D Revelator shutter glasses. I’ve pointed out, why their new (still to be published?) stereo driver very likely won’t be compatible to the old 3D Revelator.

I haven’t looked for quite a while for anything regarding 3D shutter glasses, so one can say I’m pretty much out of this business.

As an owner of a few 3D Revelator shutter glasses from 1999 and an old CRT that can handle very high frequencies (142kHz, Iiyama Vision Master 514, 22″ – HM204DT ), e.g. 1280×1024@120Hz.
I was always waiting for something (irrational?) to happen that makes start using this old glasses again.

Now it just happened 🙂

I’ve reactivated my old Intel Pentium D 805 – 2,66GHz dual core Windows box. The graphics adapter was an Nviadia GeForce TI 4200, but while running all my tests I’ve also tried a GeForce 5200 with 128MB, but ended up with an 6800GT/256MB, which – due to the old drivers I had to use, wasn’t without flaws either.

Like I wrote in my last Blog entry, I’ve started using Nvidia’s driver version 78.01 – the the appropriate Stereo driver. You can download it from Nvidia’s website. And started to first to try the very old classics, like Midtown Madness and Midtown Madness 2 from Microsoft. I first had to patch these two games, because the actually weren’t developed to run on Windows XP. (I’ve got the patches from here and here). Midtown Madness 2 refused its installation (after starting setup.exe) with the message

“Setup was unable to find (or could not read) the language specific setup resource dll, unable to continue. Please reboot and try again.”

I’ve followed carefully these instruction to circumvent this bug, but at the end it turned out, that I simply mustn’t start setup.exe, but just start midtown2.exe directly, just without any installation.

The both games are from 1999, respectively from 2000 and the hardware requirements are pretty low. The performance of the game was just excellent, the 3D effect awesome but the graphic is poor of course.

Midtown madness was the first game came to my mind, then the first version of Call of Duty (2003) and of course Far Cry (2004).
I’ve installed all, and played them also.

Because of the very poor performance of Call of Duty and pretty ugly graphical bugs in Far Cry I’ve decided to try another driver. And I’ve really tried – although everybody knows it, an current Windows XP driver (181.20) with the last available Stereo application (91.31). Well – this didn’t work, and I didn’t even saw a menu for the stereo settings. But going back to Nvidia’s driver version 91.31 and reinstalling the appropriate stereo drivers again, was more successful, well – sort of.
Call of Duty was performing extremely well now with the new 91.31 driver in stereo mode, but FarCry (although already patched to version 1.4) gave me completely system freezes, sometimes only the sound was left playing. Midtown Madness was as good as with the 78.01 driver. So after all I went back onto 78.01 again – and am still there now.

I couldn’t believe, that there really isn’t any current stereo driver out there, that would run with my 3D Revelator. So I’ve started my investigations on that.
My first approach was just to look for shutter glasses at Amazon. I’ve got basically three hits.

Although the Razor 3D DLP shutter glasses looks exactly the same like the 10 years old ELSA 3D Revelator, and also some picutures of shutter glasses on eDimensional site shows the same glasses, I felt inspired by the following two (1,2) posts to try the driver from iZ3D.
I’ve installed again the latest 181.20 driver and downloaded iZ3D latest (1.10 Beta) driver. It didn’t work. In the following post it’s pointed out why, but it’s still not clear to my if this would work for the 3D Revelator driver.

And while on razor3d’s site in the ‘requirement’ section no graphics adapter is mentioned at all, is eDimensional claiming their glasses are working with:

  • nVidia
  • ATI Radeon (all cards)
  • Kyro, Matrox, Intel and more.

Where as iZ3D sells only their 3D driver for $49 and also claim to be actually the Stereo driver for ATI Radeon, but support Nvidia cards, too.

What I’m really missing is an up-to-date overview of available glasses and drivers. I saw such lists, but they are all outdated. Most of them are from 2005 and older. Do we see here a scene dying?

While searching the Internet for 3D drivers and shutter glasses, I had the impression to deal with something very uncommon and the sites looked to me some kind of cheap or old fashioned. The prizes were between $59 and $99.
Just imagine, I bought a set of ten ELSA 3D Revelators for about $15 three years ago.

I just hope Nvidia will bring a fresh breeze into this sector with its new 3D Vision shutter glasses, what of course would mean to buy new and expensive hardware.

While I was looking for a list of third party stereoscopic 3D glasses I’ve found this sentence at Nvidia’ site:

* Please check nvidia.co.uk for list of supported displays and third party stereoscopic 3D glasses.

Following their advice I did so, and got no relevant search result back, but their new product, the GeForce 3D Vision glasses.

On the next page I’ve collected a few games, that might work well with the shutter glasses and Nvidia Gfx cards up to 7xxx.

Pages: 1 2 3

20 thoughts on “3D Revelator reloaded”

  1. Hi! I have a pair of wired 3D Relevator also. My current 3D card is GF9600GSO. Is there any way to get those both work together? I saw the iZ3D driver are still updating. Any hope from it?

    Nice article! Learned a lot! Thanks!

  4. Have you tried Vista? I mean, I was able to play in 3D with paper red/cyan glasses and saw option for shutter glasses over there, but it was disabled (probably due to not actually having one)

    As far as I know Vista should be right thing to do, so … can you test it out for us?

    I am considering purchase of ELSA glasses and am curious about will it work

    Tnx 😉

  5. @Momcilo
    this certainly won’t work for shutter glasses. Anaglyph is different. You don’t have to trigger the signal for the shutter glasses there.
    Vista or not, it won’t work for cards based anything greater than G80. And a e.g. 8800GTX (G80) is only working with a trick.

    Sorry

  6. I make some experiments with ELSA glasses (wired) on GF6200. Glasses ar trigered with VGA pin 12 DDC Serial Data Line, but on WXP is this signal unstable and glasses ar randomli flickering. It is posible reconstruct this signal by signal from pin 14 Vertical Sync, but for this I use a simple AVR processor AtMega8. It is working bun onli on VGA connector and for DVI oh HDMI is it unusable.
    DDC _+——-+________+——–+________
    VSYNC _+-+_____+-+______+-+______+-+______
    I hopo it helps another people and I am so SORRY for my bat english.

  7. @Tomas
    Very ipressive! Never would have thought to solve this with a micro controller. I’m seriously thinking about to buy one, since they aren’t very expensive.

    But I’ve got three thinks to add/mention/ask

    1) Does your solution work with a current driver such as 195.62 or something and GeForce >7950?

    2) All of my eight (very old) ELSA Revelators 3D glasses didn’t work anymore. Is seems they all have one or more loose contacts somewhere, because when I start to push them in various directions, they start to work for a fraction of a second. Does anybody had similar symptoms? Any cure available?

    3) Because of 1) and 2) I’ve bought red/cyan glasses, and use the current driver with a GTX260 for recent games and movies. It’s not really fun, but the Nvidia 3D Vision solution is simply too expensive for me, since it would also mean to buy a new TFT.

    Thanks again for your helpful contribution.

    Regards,
    Andreas

  8. @acmelab68

    Hi,

    can u pls confirm that a nvidia Geforce 5200 is working with elsa 3d glasses?
    I spent weeks to try to make the glasses working with such card, but without any results (as u can see from my desperate posts here: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=12910)
    If u really successed in using the 5200 videocard, can u pls be so kind to tell me which drivers u used?

    Thanks a lot in advance.

  9. @rafscipio

    Try 78.01 or even earlier. 91.31 is the last available with shutter glasses support for cards up to GF7950, but I didn’t manage to make them work for me.

    Regards,
    Andreas

  10. Hi, I have bee doing this (3D) for 10 years now. Quad-buffer frame sequential stereo with Nvidia Quadro cards, and thought I’d weigh in with what I know to work and what I am trying to get working.

    1.) I started with Nvidia driver with version 56.64, and have successfully “done stereo” in both DirectX and OpenGL through 162.50 of the Nvidia drivers.

    One thing you HAVE to do is match the Nvidia driver with the appropriate consumer stereo driver EXACTLY!

    Nvidia sometimes states this is not so, but for the system to work reliably, the versions must match (e.g. 165.50 driver 162.50 consumer stereo). check guru3d site for more info.

    This works up to and including version 162.50 with win2k or XP. I have been using XP since 2002 or so, but 2k should work too if necessary (theoretically)

    Basically we never went to Vista, so haven’t had the disappointment of that HAH! (I said “Hasta la Vista!” from day one, as it appeared the Windows ME version of Windows XP.)

    Anyway, Here is the rub with Vista/Windows7 and the latest cards (laptop and desktop (I am speaking Quadro cards, though GeForce supposedly should work as well), anyway the problem I have had is that the monitors we have are not 120hz, therefore the 3D vision drivers do not work with them “out of the box”.

    Prior to the Nvidia 78.01, or (perhaps 61.76-61.77, I don’t recall) Registry hacks were required to get stereo to work.

    Basically, that is what I am looking for now, the registry “hacks” that let you use sub 120Hz shutter glasses with the monitors.

    From what I have found, the clone mode stereo works (haven’t tried it, but appears to work), and what Nvidia is doing in some cases is “y connector-ing) the dual video outputs and through a proprietary interface generating the LRLRLRLRLRLRLRLRL signal for stereo shutter glasses.

  11. @professorjwn
    “I am speaking Quadro cards, though GeForce supposedly should work as well”
    GeForce7950 is the last known to work. I’m not familiar with the Quatro series, but is the last know card, that supposed to work with the glasses?

    Btw. Thanks a lot for sharing this

    Regards,
    Andreas

  12. @acmelabs:
    I’ve had 91.31 working flawlessly with my Elsa Revelator (wired), a GeForce 6600GT and a good old CRT (160Hz @ 800×600 ftw!) on Windows XP. I’ve tried them with a friend’s GF7900GT too, once and they froze the PC with Oblivion after some minute of playing (in 3D ^^).

    Now that I have a Radeon HD4870 I’m really interested to see, what is going to happen with the newly released drivers (10.3), since they are said to support stereo 3D. I just wonder, if they support the good old Elsa Revelator glasses (or eDimensional stuff and such). I’ll be very happy if they did…

  13. @Decryphe
    That would be too nice too be true (3D@Radeon). Btw. do you know whether the eDimensional Glasses work with an 3D Revelator IR-Transmitter diod? All my Revelators doesn’t work anymore.
    I was about to test the mentioned 162.50 Stereo driver on XP, but no glasses around, I can test it with.

    Regards,
    Andreas

  14. @all
    Doesn’t anybody knows of a solution for a broken ELSA 3D Revelator (IR-Version)?
    Driver and Monitor are OK, because if a press the glasses with my fingers in the opposite direction of my nose they start working for a few seconds.
    There must be a way to fix/repair them somehow. It must be contact issue or such. They all stopped working after a while , one after the other, died like flies. All eight.
    What I can certainly exclude:

    • Batteries (the are brand new VARTA 2032)
    • VGA Cable (because, If I press the glasses, they start to work for a short time)
      -Driver (because: see above)
    • Monitor (it’s an CRT 140KHz, all TFTs are turned off -> No foreign interfering IR source)

    Any ideas?

    Regards,
    Andreas

  16. @all
    It’s not a matter of driver, EDID, pins, DDC signal or stuff. It turned out, that my glasses just died a natural death.
    A friend of mine, who is a magician regarding fixing hardware, revived a view of them by pulling and plugging the inner shutter glasses out and back in again. It’s only a matter of contact. I’m going to write a blog entry (maybye with one or two drawings) which describes how it was done.

    Thanks to all anyway.

    Regards,
    Andreas

    PS: I’m using the Acer H5360 DLP @120Hz with Windows 7 and XP. If you did the same mistake and didn’t use the original Acer VGA cable, which was sold just right away with the beamer itself, then you maybe also suffered from a not deteced beamer. This way you can’t select the 120HZ mode, and the 3Dvision wizard refuses to work. After hours I realized my fault, but a Acer_H5360.inf file anywhere (Acers homepage?) on the Internet would have done the same, but there wasn’t any. Thats why here is the

    – Acer_H5360.inf

    for the Acer H5360 Beamer working with Windows 7 and XP. (Produced with Moninfo). Just go to your monitors drivers section, and install it manually.

  17. I would love to know if the 3D Revelators work with the new ATI drivers 10.3 released today. If anyone could check please let me know. Then I will have to start digging in the garage.

  18. i folowed numerous instructions how to run the elsa wired glases,,,it runs great on older cards and win xp with stereo drivers,,, NOT BETA! i was able to run it on my 8800 gts but with numerous problems and bugs,,folowed instructions on mtbs3d and the result was almost nothing,blue screen,crash etc. then i had an idea,i have old p3 with fx 5200 with stereo drivers, i turn on the glases on old computer and set the resolution and refresh rate to match the other computers resolution and refresh rate. the new computer has iz3d drivers set to shuter beta.i tried cod 4 and passed the iz3d test on start. the stereo works,,, maybe somebody can try this, maybe it wil be better. ps … p3 is about 10 eur,,,,hehehe 🙂

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