Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

Post by a96 » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 11:19 AM UTC

zdw wrote: post #5

When I was building a linux PC in the late 90's, I bought a Matrox Millenium with the memory expansion to 8MB which could do 1600x1200 with 24 bit color. That was an awesome card for the time, and an incredibly stable analog signal, which Matrox was known for - other cards at the time would get fuzzy, shimmer, or have ringing / ghosting. At the time, for good support you needed to *buy* an X11 server for accelerated…

I think I had a Mystique which may have been a PCI model as well. I remember the signal quality being very visible switching a display from that box into some other one which had some S3 or something. The image looked noticeably blurry or fuzzy with the exact same display and cables on the worse card.

Post by ErroneousBosh » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

a96 wrote: post #80

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My memory says Sun used composite sync in the 13W3. I do remember making some cable mods as well to use monitors across Sun, Sgi, and a few other machines. Some used H+V, some C, some SOG. Maybe thankfully I no longer remember which ones were which after all.

It might have been SGI, instead of Sun. I know I had a big pile of Sun kit that came from Glasgow Uni, and some SGIs.

Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals