So, a while ago whilst looking around the interwebs I found references to some nvidia drivers that say neptune in the readme.

Nice that archive.org picked them up, huh.

These drivers were originally leaked in March 2000 by persons unknown, and everything i read about them say they're pretty buggy.
(well, 'pretty buggy' here meaning 'unusable if you're interested in playing games of that time'!)

If anyone has a box with an nvidia card from the time, it would be nice if you could actually test these drivers on neptune! (the 'pretty buggy' reports are all people who were using Win 2000 RTM)

So we're looking at a GeForce 2 or 4 series card? I'll get right on that, as soon as I get access to my collection.
I would assume that a mobile platform would work as well?

These drivers / This driver is an official confirmation of a fact that earlier builds of Neptune than 5111 were compiled cause the version of this driver says it is from 12/01/1999 while 5111 was compiled at 12/11/1999

EDIT: A weird thing I noticed - The INF file says that "Dest" directories are Windows\System32 and Windows\System32\Drivers, AFAIK, there should be WINNT instead of Windows [*wonders* - Maybe the text setup our Neptune copy is packaged with is not original cause it installs to WINNT directory and it should go to Windows directory, maybe this was just a mistype on NVidia's side, maybe we still don't have the full original]

EDIT 2: Also, it seems that these drivers were the 3rd revision of NVidia drivers for Neptune (If we count it like 5.0,5.0.1 and this one, 5.0.2)

EDIT 3: When looking at the compile dates of leaked 2000 builds, I saw a kinda big date jump between RCs and also between the last RC and RTM, from looking at these files I discovered another things, seems it tooks so long to go from 2183 to 2195 because Neptune was developed at the same time, another thing i saw was an unleaked build's version string "5.0.2169.502" (I guess 502 is just the driver version and NVidia was developing drivers for ~Pre-RTM at approx. the same time as these Neptune ones, also in properties of the "NV4.DLL" file, it is still listed as a "NVidia Compatible Windows 2000 Display driver, Version 5.02")

Interesting... Obviously nVidia had access to some Neptune build(s).

Shame that I can't test them on an geforce2 MX-400 video card.

I had an MX-200, but I got rid of it... :/

Just a quick update: Neptune build 5111.1 in fact ships with these exact same files (except the readme.txt)...