Les,
I have been down the road you're traveling on (decent 3D from a Rage
Pro), and the conclusion that I reached was the Rage Pro is too old
to handle all of the fun 3D stuff you're hoping for. Perhaps I failed
to configure it properly, but you'll probably need (want) a more
recent video card for Croquet et al.
What is the output of 'glxinfo | grep -i direct'?
Chris