81–90 of 241 posts
We both bought cards. I was convinced.
I really wish I'd gotten back into game programming then (I was doing mostly systems stuff, boring things like storage and operating systems). It would have been a lot of fun.
I was the lead and pretty much only programmer for the Canopus Pure3D. Ours had 12 RAM chips for 6 MB of memory. 2 MB extra Woo hoo! We also featured a Chrontel chip for composite and S-Video output. I wrote our DirectX driver (performance enhancements) and other sundry software for the Pure3D (pictured) and Pure3D II. Pretty cool to think back on those days.
It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the to…
I think Intel could have stepped up their no. of cores with low thermal CPUs a lot sooner. The last radical step up from Intel was 2013 with Haswell CPUs and then after that 2018 with a more lower TDP 4 core CPU which we see now on the Macbook Pro 13".
Playing Unreal and coming out of the spaceship at 800x600 on my voodoo2 and 400mhz Pentium II (I was spoiled and got the !2MB version!!!) was still one of the greatest gaming moments of my life
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On many computers it did not run faster just differently. Regular quake and glquake were two totally different programs.
Afaik there is no CPU where software Quake would run faster at same resolution as GLQuake on 3dfx.
Being 14 years old and getting to experience and see it evolve first-hand with a Commodore (at home), the Apple II (at school) and 286, 386, 486 and Pentium era with a Diamond Multimedia 3dfx Voodoo card was amazing. People who missed it either being busy with other things in life or weren't born yet, believe me, as a technologist being there from the beginning of the home computer market till about 2000 was amazing.…
It is because you experienced these things during your formative years that they have such a unique luster, and that nothing seems to quite compare. People who are in their formative years today will look back upon the current times with similar enthusiasm; just like your elders a few decades ago found that your Playboy magazines and 3D video game cards were pointless debauchery. So it has been for the billions of hu…
The reasoning that immediately comes to mind is two-fold.
The first is the obvious point I made, where from the very start I place books as the supreme medium, and are far before my time. The written word can be information dense, puts your mind and imagination to work and if in a book, never needs recharged. :) It's just underrated, underappreciated. Books are "inferior technology", which to me is the ideal abstraction layer for our species. I think we'll continue to see back to basics as a movement as corrosive societal effects from "social media" plays out. We need real community, the kind humans evolved for, not that marketing nonsense chewing people's brains up and spitting them out only left with capacity for short-term attention spans. Most people don't need help with that. Facebook is the new smoking. Things don't always get better with every generation for billions of years, nor do most witness great change. You're assuming that because the last 300 years have been relatively action-packed. Mostly thanks to Europe's astonishing leap forward around 1600AD in and out into the world. Things are objectively worse today from the 20th century, everyone knows it or can definitely feel it. The deck is stacked against a young person with opportunities slowly dwindling. That trend may continue if we don't solve capitalism collapsing on itself in the western world, discover new antibiotics, among numerous other very serious challenges that aren't being effectively addressed. Our big, impressive move lately (speaking for the US) is simply cutting taxes when already at historically low rates. Brilliance.
The second thought I had is that the home PC space undeniably hit it's stride from ~1980-2000. That's just when that market had its golden age. Combine it with the arcade experience of the day, and you had a sensory experience that really isn't even widely available today anymore. You can't really explain it to someone who didn't see it. It's not just generational placebo. It's like the circus. They hardly exist now, but they were worth the trip and I regret many kids may never go to one. Someone who did miss the way it was before would likely insist I'm just a fool, but Netflix and Youtube is not a fair replacement for these things. They're just not.
You have to go hunting for an arcade today, and I'm not even sure if there are any truly modern ones around. A kid just won't get that sensory experience, which isn't just technological but the social element of all the kids being there too. That goes without mentioning the loss of comic books stores that kids rode their bike to(!), toy stores, candy stores, Saturday morning cartoons and all the waiting, anticipation and excitement attached. Just nostalgia? Or is it real. The examples sound real.
Back to addressing your point, certainly the cotton gin, the steam engine, home electricity (which my grandma told me about when they were the first house in town to have it installed because her dad was so enthusiastic about it), among others, were more monumental on a macro level than seeing the home PC space explode from 1978 to 2000. Yet I have my doubts that an old timer was passionately reminiscing about "seeing the cotton gin come to be", and how amazing it was. It harkened great change to society, but I'm not sure people were living their lives in a way at that point to personally experience rapid iteration as people witnessed in the home PC market. Being a market specifically targeting them/us. It really is different today than it was then, it has normalized, there's less excitement for sure, and it's far more difficult to be impressed with advancements.
We're at the point now where we need to go back to step one, bring back creativity. That's why I circled back to books being the ultimate medium. What good is an 8K TV is there's nothing good to watch? Zero. I'm back to hunting for good books instead. Choose Your Own Adventure were better than what Hollywood is putting out today. Writers often do the best job at expressing thought-provoking creativity, which without that human spark of creativity injected into your technological medium, it would all be pointless.
From our human perspective at least, once they're unleashed, our AI overlords won't care.
My claim to fame is that the only Voodoo card I've ever owned was a Voodoo 5 6000. I picked it up in the early 2000s during a pre-closure clearout at my then-employer, a UK video games developer. The sheer size of the thing made me LOL, that and the number of fans and the additional power connector. Then I noticed it was a 3dfx - oh, hey! I could play that Glide-based motorbike game, that I remembered enjoying at a f…
at least you didnt throw away Voodoo5 9000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3iHV0NvLPI
Maybe it was the voodoo 2, but I seem to recall that 3dfx cards could render into a chroma-keyed window, not just full screens. In any case the main problem with them was they made your 2D desktop look like junk for the 99% of the time you were not playing Quake, due to the extra analog-digital-analog conversion.
My claim to fame is that the only Voodoo card I've ever owned was a Voodoo 5 6000. I picked it up in the early 2000s during a pre-closure clearout at my then-employer, a UK video games developer. The sheer size of the thing made me LOL, that and the number of fans and the additional power connector. Then I noticed it was a 3dfx - oh, hey! I could play that Glide-based motorbike game, that I remembered enjoying at a f…
at least you didnt throw away Voodoo5 9000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3iHV0NvLPI