71–80 of 82 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What 2D game you play doesn't have textures, alpha blending or transparency in any way? Seems like pong might be one of the few that fits your criteria.
Zork. I'm not a gamer.
When I was working on early 3D video games in the 1990s, all these companies would give you prototype 3D cards to make sure what you made was compatible. This was pre-direct X. On Battlezone, many of us had different video cards to maintain compatibility. I had a G200. It wasn't the fastest card, but I always thought it looked great. Later we got to demo early builds on pre-release TNT2 cards and it caused a panic fo…
The pre 3DFX era was kinda interesting. The first hardware accellerated game I saw was VQuake on the Rendition Verite 1000 or whatever the branding was. It blew me away. When the Voodoo1 came out I was shocked by the framerate, but thought it looked ugly compared to the Rendition version. Technically the Verite had worse texture filtering, but I was used to the aliasing and thought the Voodoo looked overly smoothed.
Back when 2d acceleration mattered Matrox was king. And you could always trust it'd drive even the most picky CRT at whatever refresh rate.
You also could get the capture card with the Matrox Millenium and turn a Win95 pc into a legit video editing station, all be it hilariously limited vs today. I worked with a non profit briefly that did stop motion animation production with this setup.
I was the first with a TNT2 at the big LAN party group in my area. The Voodoo2 SLI setups were still faster, but with the TNT2 you could do 16 bit color with a tweaked color map for id engine games, and it looked absolutely killer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zork. I'm not a gamer.
What 2D applications you use that don't make use of textures, alpha blending or transparency? ;) Good luck doing CAD without them!
When I was working on early 3D video games in the 1990s, all these companies would give you prototype 3D cards to make sure what you made was compatible. This was pre-direct X. On Battlezone, many of us had different video cards to maintain compatibility. I had a G200. It wasn't the fastest card, but I always thought it looked great. Later we got to demo early builds on pre-release TNT2 cards and it caused a panic fo…
Funny to see Matrox discussed mostly as a piece of PC graphics history, I actually work with Matrox cards almost every day. In the broadcast world they're still very common. X.mio/DSX cards are widely used for professional SDI I/O, video servers and channel-in-a-box systems, and Matrox also has dedicated M264 hardware accelerators for H.264/AVC encoding and decoding. The current flagship X.mio5 family is basically hi…
Yeah, I have a few lines to that toward the end without going into the other product lines. I focus on computing history, and not on AV.
Funny to see Matrox discussed mostly as a piece of PC graphics history, I actually work with Matrox cards almost every day. In the broadcast world they're still very common. X.mio/DSX cards are widely used for professional SDI I/O, video servers and channel-in-a-box systems, and Matrox also has dedicated M264 hardware accelerators for H.264/AVC encoding and decoding. The current flagship X.mio5 family is basically hi…
Yeah, I have a few lines to that toward the end without going into the other product lines. I focus on computing history, and not on AV.
Funny to see Matrox discussed mostly as a piece of PC graphics history, I actually work with Matrox cards almost every day. In the broadcast world they're still very common. X.mio/DSX cards are widely used for professional SDI I/O, video servers and channel-in-a-box systems, and Matrox also has dedicated M264 hardware accelerators for H.264/AVC encoding and decoding. The current flagship X.mio5 family is basically hi…
That's crazy. Apparently they still have at least 500 employees and make $500 million a year in revenue. Last time I encountered a Matrox was the G400 I had in my PC in 1999. It's no wonder they're talked about in the past tense when they exited the consumer hardware space over 20 years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Before I was a Linux type I was a Windows expert, and when I went freelance in 1996, I built myself a fairly serious NT 4 rig: Pentium II 450, 192MB of RAM (I think), and dual Matrox Millennium cards so I could drive dual 14-15 inch CRT (glass) screens as a single big display. Just to get the timeline right -- the PII 450 wasn't released until 98, so I'm assuming this is about when you mean. I always thought it wou…
Oh my! Well, from faint 30-years-on recollection, it was the end of '96 so I guess I needed to save up for it. Thanks for the correction! Ordinary relatively cheap consumer Matrox cards could be paired up. I couldn't afford a fancy dual-output card, but I could afford 2 second-hand Matrox Millennium cards, and that did the job fine. At that time, Matrox was about the only brand of (parallel PCI) graphics card where t…
I was just trying to remember what was available -- that was an incredible machine for its time, I'm not surprised you ran into issues getting it configured.
Back then it felt a lot more like certain configs were just never going to work even if they were "compatible". Today it seems like with sufficient effort you can make just about anything work.
Lesser known feature was that the Matrox MGA/G200 chips were capable of delivering "sync on green" via regular VGA cable. This was a specialized format were VSync/HSync weren't transmitted over dedicated pins, but encoded into the green signal. This was required by some (then) older workstation monitors. In the early 2000s, I managed to get a 20" SGI workstation monitor for 20€ at ebay (at times where 20" monitors we…
Sync on green could be done with the ATI Mach 64 as well. I picked up a 20" SGI monitor (if memory serves, it was made by Hitachi) on the "free" table around 1999 on my university campus. I got it working, but the one I had was pretty limited - it did a specific resolution at 60 Hz (I may have the details wrong - it was a long time ago). I never ended up using it, as I had a newer 17" DEC Trinitron from an old Alpha…
Lesser known feature was that the Matrox MGA/G200 chips were capable of delivering "sync on green" via regular VGA cable. This was a specialized format were VSync/HSync weren't transmitted over dedicated pins, but encoded into the green signal. This was required by some (then) older workstation monitors. In the early 2000s, I managed to get a 20" SGI workstation monitor for 20€ at ebay (at times where 20" monitors we…
Back then some friends and I got hold of some lovely 20" Sun monitors that were sync-on-green only but none of our cards supported it. No matter! A transistor, a couple of diodes, and half a dozen or so resistors soldered into a DE15 plug shell made the "sync plunger" that cured all your woes. I probably still have a couple lying around. I could still just about draw the circuit from memory, not much good in these HD…