www.redhill.net.au

MaxBurn

Storage Is My Life
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That site is a great read for memory lane stuff, but alass it's down for me too.
 

Handruin

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Tea's sticking bananas in the fans again...caused the server to overheat. She thought they'd help her peel them. Silly ape.
 

Howell

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Alas, it takes an enormous amount of time to maintain it properly in this ever-changing industry, and in the last couple of years we have had too many other things soaking up time, so the Red Hill Guide has been allowed to sit untouched. In the main, it is about the fascinating history of hard drives and CPUs and motherboards, so there is no real harm in that. History doesn't change much.
 

tazwegion

Learning Storage Performance
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I adore that site, and still refer people there... though admittedly I'd also like to see the history/evolution of the Graphics Card covered as well, y'know S3, 3Dfx, nVidia & ATI to name but a few ;)

*cough* hint *cough* :roll:
 

Tea

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OK Taswegion, seeing as Tannin is too lazy, I better have a go at it. I had best warn you that I am too young to remember any of this, so I'm just repeating the bedtime stories Tannin used to tell me when I was little. As to whether there is any truth to them or not, I'll leave you to judge for yourself.

<DETAILED HISTORY>

ISA
First there were very basic 16 colour cards. That was pretty boring.

Then nicer cards came along. The two most common brands were Trident and Cirrus Logic. Tridents were usually a little bit cheaper (a couple of dollars maybe) but, oddly enough, more consistent. Cirrus Logic went through too many different chipsets, where Trident tended to stick with one base design for longer but tweak it up as they went along. Trident always had better drivers. Except when they f*ed it up and had worse drivers. But mostly they were easier to install and more feature-rich.

The high end to midrange belonged to Tseng. Or possibly Matrox. I can't remember if Matrox was around already, it probably was. The Tseng cards were a tiny bit tricky to get right, but went like bicycle lizards on a hot day.

And there were various other chipset manufacturers, dozens of them .... Oak, Avance Logic, ATI, Realtek .... lots more.

VESA
The VESA era introduced heaps better performance. Cirrus Logic and Trident were still the major players, and the Tridents were still the better of the two. (Be careful here, it's a religious issue. Think Ford vs Holden.) S3s were fast and fragile; Tseng was still the next step up but rather expensive, and if you wanted to destroy the budget completely, Western Digital's long running line of truly excellent cards reached its peak at this time: they were superb, but much too dear for most people. Many of the other players were still around also.

PCI
More of the same. Cirrus Logic faded away, S3 rose and rose, Trident held its ground, then began to fall into the ever-cheaper entry-level market segment. Number 9 was the absolute peak (US$2000 a pop for an Imagine 128, and their best S3-based card was maybe US$400), Tseng had its final bit of glory with the ET6000, and some no-one-ever-heard-of-it company called 3DFX brought out this weird and useless thing for gamers called a Voodoo. This was the beginning of the end. Nobody knows why some people wanted to waste a perfetly good computer by playing games on it, but there you go. With humans, sometimes you just have to shrug your shoulders and accept that they are like that.

AGP
S3 ruled the volume market, Trident were just barely hanging on, nearly everybody else had given the game away or, like Matrox, retreated to a profitable niche. The moronic games playing weenies took over the entire world and it was a completely new environment, dominated by two companies: the Good Guys were 3DFX, the Bad Guys were another start-up company with a stupid name with funny capitals in the wrong places, which I'll ignore. (That's Nvidia.) (Ignore the capitals I mean, not the company.)

3DFX made Good Products: the well-regarded Voodoo II and the wonderful Voodoo III. (We will ignore the horrible 3DFX Banshee here, as I'm telling the story and I'll ignore as much evidence as I have to.) Nvidia made Bad Products, the best-remembered of them was the TNT-2. Voodoo cards worked, TNT cards didn't worked. (Most of the time.) (S3 cards and even old Tridents worked too, but we are not supposed to mention them anymore in case someone thinks we used them to make computers or something. It's sort of like having holes in your underwear: everybody does it but you are not supposed to talk about it.)

By this time, there were only two real honest-to-goodness video card driver software people left on the planet. All the others were thickheads with more thumbs than a hatful of bottoms. (Sorry, I seem to be having some trouble with my metaphors tonight.) One of the two good programers, an old retired guy who only worked part-time, was at Matrox. The other one worked for 3DFX making Voodoo drivers.

Then one day the Voodoo guy went off to take up a new career as a novelist or something involving long periods of time spent sitting under a palm tree drinking something cold and fizzy and not writing video drivers, and most especially not helping the other people at the 3DFX factory make nice new video cards. Luckily the old retired guy at Matrox was still coming in two afternoons a week and you could get nice stuff like G-450s.

Before too long there was only Nvidia left, and their cards worked fine, but only if you didn't want to load the drivers and use more than 16 colours. So Nvidia made the novelist an offer he couldn't refuse and he came along and fixed up the driver software for them, which turned Nvidia into Good Guys instead of Bad Guys.

So now there was only one, unless you count Matrox or S3. Oh, and another one called ATI. ATI had spent the last ten years making very good video chipsets with seriously weird drivers that either worked perfectly or else failed completely, depending on what foot you wore the red sock on. Seeing as this had been a farly successful strategy for them, they decided to spend the next ten years doing the same thing, and at least so far, have executed on the strategy perfectly. (I don't wear socks, which is why I always use Nvidia cards.)

</DETAILED HISTORY>
 

LiamC

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Tseng Labs. Ooh yeah, they were do bomb. Had few of them, VESA LB and PCI--and all were good.

Matrox. They burnt me with their G200/Open GL drivers--trumpeted on the box no less--that took them 15months to get working (sort of) and 18 or 20 to get working reliably--on Intel chipsets. Never did work reliably (that I found out) on Super7. TNT2 on the other hand, just did.
 

LiamC

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*sigh*

da, not do, and a few, not few

Still shitty with Matrox--let it go Bill, let it go...
 

Tannin

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I ran G200s on Super 7 for years. Hell, I've still got one last Super 7 system running Matrox. Only reason I'm not running the G-200s now is because all my video cards except one are G450s. (The other one - and the only one to ever give me trouble - is the ATI in my laptop. Since the latest driver upgrade (#4, I think) it's finally stopped crashing.)

As to which Matrox G-200 drivers, I don't remember. Probably not the ones you are talking about, Liam. You don't need a lot of fancy video driver software to run a spreadsheet.
 

LiamC

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I think the reason I am still shitty with Matrox is their (at the time) vaunted technical support--or in my case lack there of. I may have gotten a response or two, from several attempts, but I dont think they actually said anything meaningful, let alone helpful. It was always Real Soon Now.

I will concede that the G200 is still running in the in-laws XP 1600+/8KHA+ and the Matrox is still the best 2D that I have ever seen--amazingly crisp text and sharp colours.
 

MaxBurn

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The imagine 128 was $2000 originally? Damn I just gave a couple away last year. Would have framed it or something if I knew it was that special.
 

tazwegion

Learning Storage Performance
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Thank you for that run down Tea (orange haired simian) Darwin would be proud! :p

Seriously... now all that is required is to motivate your (some may say stubborn but overworked) 'house mate' to cut-and-paste your post over to the redhill historical site (edit capitals and details as necessary :p), include a few lovely snapshots (people love pictures :lol:) accommodate even more coding :roll:... and 'wha laa' job's done ;)

I was saddened to read of your dislike of the VooDoo Banshee because I have found it to be a most efficient card IMHO, especially compared to the S3 offering of the time and more recently (despite a 283 point hiding on the 3dMark2000 benchmark), managing to 'visually outperform' a Diamond Viper II 32Mb AGP on V-Rally2 (a really nice Retro driving sim')... with the Banshee NOT suffering the pixelation & missing graphics the Viper II did, though to be fair it was using the '99 released S3 drivers ;) for the record... I adore my Riva (nVidia) TnT2pro as well :p

There's a nice little write up over @ THG where they compare the Banshee, Voodoo2, S3 Savage3D & nVidia TnT ;)

Viva La Retro! :aok:
 

blakerwry

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I always had good luck with my TNT based cards... but they ran pretty hot for the time.

The voodooII I had worked well, but visually was terrible as 16bit dithering on 800x600 was ugly as sin compared to the 32bit goodness the TNT II offered at roughly the same framerates. Oh how I longed for the Voodoo3 or the banshee, but never could afford one.


I'm still happy with nVidia's products and ATi has decent drivers for their Radeon line since the release of the 9xxx series.
 

Tea

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Just ignore him, Taz. You are allowed to mention Tom's as often as you like. Hell, back around Voodoo times, Toms used to be a good place with a ton of useful info. (Though last time I looked it was just a vast morass of crap with useful stuff too well-buried to be worth looking for. I haven't been there for more than a quick flick in to something-in-particular out of Google for years.)
 

tazwegion

Learning Storage Performance
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ROTFL you two are ever the comedic genius today! :p :lol:

As for *cough* THG *cough* since I'm pre-occupied with Retro Technology anyway, their old reference material is still of some use to me ;)

Hmmm... hopefully I didn't offend the local bar-keeper :roll: :p
 

Bartender

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No, I'm less sensitive about those sort of things. As long as they don't cause any trouble, I'd even be glad to serve them a drink. I don't know what Buck is talking about, he's passed out most the time anyway. I doubt he could even muster up the energy to walk two blocks and find out if they have watered down drinks -- or if they'd even give him credit to purchase one.
 
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