I found the first review I ever wrote for CGW. So I had to write about it again. And then some…
:D
I, too, loved the wayback machine. I even have/had a Sherman & Mr. Peabody T-Sirt. And after reading the article, I also realize that I had the odd-duck Matrox Mystique video card. 3-D acceleration for that was a bit of a bitch with card-specific patches being provided by some publishers/developers to take full advantage of the Mystique.
I had the Mystique, too. It was a DirectX1-compliant card. Its best “feature”: screen-door transparency, instead of true transparency. I recall the Matrox designers basically giving us the “psuedo-transparency is good enough for home users” line.
Then the Voodoo came out, and ate cards like the Mystique whole, bones and all. (S3 kept trying to make those ViRGEs, though; hey, they were cheap to produce, I guess).
Thank you, 3dfx.
–scharmers
Yeah, some poorly chosen names for cards in those days…
Virge - on the verge of actually being a 3D card
Matrox Mystake
16MB of EDO RAM was $600… Wow. I forgot all about “EDO” RAM. High performance stuff, eh?
I still remember when the Rendition guys came by CGW to show us the Verite. We were amazed.
Funny what people bitch about in games nowadays.
Hah, I had a Virge card once, with a whoppin’ 4MB of Rambus Memory! Talk about one craptacular 3D de-celerator, though. But then Voodoo Graphics came along, and it was Holy Shit I Gotta Get Me One Of Those! GL Quake just looked so fuckin’ smoooooooooooth.
What about the Rendition Verite or whatever the hell it was? THAT was one weird name… I had one of those boards (from Sierra, no less), and it worked well for a while, but was forgotten when I got my first 3Dfx board from Canopus…ah those were the days…
I remember paying extra to get the Canopus Voodoo card with 6megs of memmory. They had list of quotes from devs about how the extra memmory would help in upcoming games. Even one by a 3D Realms guy saying saying something about how Prey would definatly take advantage of that extra 2 megs. Yea I’m a sucker…
The Rendition Verite 2100 was definalty one of the first great price/ performance cards. The Diamond Stealth II was my first 3D card(I don’t count the Virge DX I had).
And the graphics card makers are still saying that today!
:D
I remember crashing the Rendition suite at the 1995 game developer’s conference. They were showing simulated NASCAR runs, which looked great for the day. But they were unable to continue the pace of development, which is why they eventually fell by the wayside and was eventually acquired by Micron Technologies.
I was a big fan, because they actually had a programmable (okay, microprogrammable) graphics core, years before there was a DirectX 8…
I’ve still got my Canopus Pure3D 6MB card sitting in a drawer here, just in case Prey needs it. 
Whatever happened to Canopus? They made great cards – I had a Pure3D, two Pure3D IIs (Voodoo2’s in SLI mode), and a TNT card (forget what it was called) by Canopus. THe TNT and V2s made for a killer gaming machine with my Celeron300 OC’d to 450. But when I upgraded, I couldn’t find a Canopus card anywhere. Anyone know what happened to them?
Aleck
They left the consumer 3D video card business shortly after releasing the Canopus Spectra 2500 which is probably what you had and was by all accounts an amazing card.
I was disappointed to read this – then I wandered over to Canopus’ website (htt://www.canopuscorp.com). Screwing around on their Japanese site, the words “GeForce FX” jumped out at me.
Babelfish Yielded the somewhat confusing:
Are they still in business, just not here in the States? And does this mean I could, conceivably, get a Canopus card again?
Yeah, I know, it would cost a bundle: but how much of a bundle? Anyone know?
Aleck
EDIT: and yes, it is the Spectra 2500 – which is still chugging along in my backup gaming machine (does fine with CS…)
Are they still in business, just not here in the States? And does this mean I could, conceivably, get a Canopus card again?
[/quote]
Yes, they no longer sell graphics cards to consumers in the US, just in Japan. In the US, they’ve mainly focused on video editing solutions.
Are they still in business, just not here in the States? And does this mean I could, conceivably, get a Canopus card again?
[/quote]
Yes, they no longer sell graphics cards to consumers in the US, just in Japan. In the US, they’ve mainly focused on video editing solutions.[/quote]
Okay, this leads me to the inevitable: anyone either in Japan/going to Japan who wants to price out some Canopus cards for me? Anyone know an importer where I could buy one?
Yeah, I know it’s kinda scary, but my Canopus cards are the only ones I’ve never had any problems with – ever. I have fond memories of the cards…
Aleck
I knew I had to have a Voodoo 1 after reading that fall '96 CGW video card round-up. Connected it to a Hercules Dynamite 128 (ET6000 chip) and a P166 and I was in PC heaven for blazing GlQuake performance. Ahhh, the memories of those simpler times. :P
Yeah, simpler times when you had to have a 2D card, a seperate 3D card, drivers for both, as well as specialized OpenGL patches for each game. Oh yeah, and they were all running in DOS back then too, so Command Line heaven.
Oh yeah, those simpler times. :)
And the cover showed a game I turned down for Interplay earlier that year, USS Ticonderoga by Intelligent Games, Ltd. in England. I didn’t think it could sell even 30k copies, even though I personally love that kind of game. I took some flak for passing on it, until the sales figures for it came out.
Wow, that really WAS a blast from the past.
Yeah, and that issue had a strategy guide for Masters of Magic.
sigh
Yeah, simpler times when you had to have a 2D card, a seperate 3D card, drivers for both, as well as specialized OpenGL patches for each game. Oh yeah, and they were all running in DOS back then too, so Command Line heaven.
Oh yeah, those simpler times. :)[/quote]
Later came Voodoo2 SLI, where you had the pass-through cable AND a cable connecting the master and slave V2 cards. The 3D solution took two freaking PCI slots, unless you had one of those Quantum3D Obsidian X24 cards, complete with PCI bridge chip.
:D
Heh… . the “Sierra Scream’in 3d”. My 1st 3d card, bought so that I could get Tomb Raider in 3d - - and the box had an endorsement from John Carmack on it, presumably made before 3dfx showed him the light. Wasn’t there a “V-quake” before 3dfx for Verite cards? I still have that card in the old P133 that my kids use for Reader Rabbit.
Metabyte made Voodoo 2’s for a while- - I still have my 2 that I used in SLI mode with the TNT2 Ultra in a PII-400.
There was, indeed. To this day, I think the image quality of vquake was better than the 3dfx GLquake. But that’s only my opinion.
:)