Mach64 & Rendition Drivers Now Work With X.Org Server 1.20

[M@GOid]

The most common piece of hardware that died on my hands were motherboards and graphic cards, so unfortunately I don't have really old computers with me.

My oldest motherboard/CPU are a Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 and a FX-8350. In fact, I don't have anything with DDR2 or earlier memory (maybe the first Pi?).

Since I started buying better PSUs my motherboards are lasting longer, so maybe now I can have things working for more than 4/5 years.

[DanL]

An Olivetti M240 with a 8086@10MHz, 640K RAM and a Western Digital VGA card with 256K of video memory from 1988.

Wasn't that a low-end machine for '88? IIRC, my family's first x86 computer around that same time was a 16MHz 386SX which was more of a budget model.

[DanL]

(ATI ES1000) Terrible thing to have in a server in this day and age. 16MB RAM I think it is?

It's only meant to be a very cheap, VESA-compatible GPU used for diagnostic purposes on a headless server. It can give you a 1280x1024 console without any special driver. In other words.. good enough.

[devius]

Wasn't that a low-end machine for '88? IIRC, my family's first x86 computer around that same time was a 16MHz 386SX which was more of a budget model.

Yeah, it probably wasn't setting the world of computing on fire, but it's still sweet. I bought this PC together with two others 2 years ago for 25€. The price in 1989 was about $1100 USD, from what I could find, although a 386 would cost 3 times as much, so not sure how "budget" your 386 really was. Here's a price listing from January 1989. Look for the AT&T 6300 WGS which is a rebranded Olivetti M240.

BTW, that PC came with a EGA card, but I upgraded it to VGA mainly because I can't find an EGA monitor for sale locally.

[coder]

Wasn't that a low-end machine for '88? IIRC, my family's first x86 computer around that same time was a 16MHz 386SX which was more of a budget model.

It's funny how long 8088's continued to sell, even though the 80386 launched in 1985. We got our 8088 around 1987 or so. According to Wikipedia, the 80386 SX only launched in June of 1988.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...he_80386_range

True - the SX was a budget version, in much the same way as the 8088 was a budget version of the original 8086.

Annoyingly, we didn't upgrade to a 386 DX until a few years after the 486 launched. That's where I first ran Linux, pre-1.0..

[coder]

Back to the article, the Mach64 driver makes sense considering the installed base (particularly of compatible chipsets integrated into servers, as previously mentioned).

Verite is odd, though. Sales volume must've been probably 2 orders of magnitude less, but Wikipedia claims it also found its way onto motherboards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendition_(company)#Downfall

It's interesting to ponder the extent to which its RISC core could adapt to modern APIs, but it sounds like this wasn't even a particularly compelling option, at the time:

Because the GPU was not "hardwired" as ASICs are, the chip could potentially adapt to newer or differing standards than it was initially designed for. Performance limitations, however, inevitably dictated that the chip was not able to grow significantly. OpenGL support, for example, was very limited on V1000.

[coder]

Afaik this software wrapper that emulates that card's Glide API for retrogaming works pretty well. http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide
Did you try them?

I was going to say: the obvious solution is clearly to build a compatibility layer atop more modern APIs.

[ruthan]

No model of the S3 Virge series had OpenGL support.

I said basic.. at least GLquake was running, i played it personally.

Nothing on YT, but there is at least some proof:

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/gl-quake-and-s3-virge-technology.43732/

[coder]

I said basic.. at least GLquake was running, i played it personally.

Yeah, don't you guys remember the era of OpenGL "miniport" drivers? They were basically just the subset of OpenGL needed to run GLQuake, IIRC.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action/F4RbyUCgPE0/6TNAtXPmtAUJ

[ruthan]

Did some research, Virge DX and newer supported OpenGL how for some games..

http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/S3#S3D_accelerated_games

I dont know why GlQuake is not listed.