PowerVR Series 1: PCX 1, 2 old screenshots

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kyronet

Newcomer
I've finished putting together a "very small" history of PowerVR Series 1: PCX 1, 2 with about 4 screenshots which I took recently with my PCX2 (m3D) on my AMD XP 1600.
(just a few days after that my XP1600 burns up hahhahaha..., and then I upgraded to XP1700...and now 1800)

anyway, its at my Chipset->PCX1/2 (at the nav. bar)
http://kyro-net.paraknowya.net
 
:D ...Wow...I really like this, I'm getting older and it looks like I am continuing to "think back and remember" (after I pointed at some things in the Kyro4800SE thread).

I have to say that "the kick" I got in the early days with 3d, after I bought my matrox m3d for 80$, (used a matrox "mistake" only before that - remember that one? - good 2d - NO bilinear filtering), and fired up the bundled Ultimate Race.....o boy...those memories are sweet, -sliding out of the tunnel while the seagulls shouting and watching the hole landscape turn into a "yellow-ish" color while the sun set into the ocean 8) ........and downloading EVERY demo that was released trying to get it to work on the -ever-so-tweak-needed-board- ...hmm...but somehow I kinda enjoyed it more back then.....this HAS to be warning, have to check my birth-certificate.....ain't I 25 anymore?? ;)

// Tompa

edit: PS. to be honest, at the moment, I regret I sold it and bought a TNT-1 instead ds.
 
No PowerVr QuakeII shots? No SGL Unreal shots?

Heh. That's a shame. I've never gotten my m3d running right on my system under Windows98... what drivers did you use?
 
Ozymandis said:
No PowerVr QuakeII shots? No SGL Unreal shots?

Heh. That's a shame. I've never gotten my m3d running right on my system under Windows98... what drivers did you use?
Click to expand...

hum...unless if you'll REALLY want those shots...I can try to get them posted 2 weeks after...today (that's when I assume those 4800 boards are available on shelfs)

as for the m3D driver...the latest one for 9x/me is this:
http://www.xcl-clan.com/download2.php3
 
I still have my Videologic Apocalypse 3d. I remember back then when I bought a clock crystal and soddered it to the board to try and over clock it. It worked for awhile then it burned out. 8)
 
IIRC, it was clocked at either 60MHz or 66MHz and it only did 1 pixel per clock so it would be 60 or 66Megapixels/s with 1X overdraw. With 2X overdraw it would be 120 or 133Megapixels/s effective. I believe bilinear filtering was free. At the time the Infinite Planes technology was brilliantly displayed in Ultimate Race during night time driving. It took awhile before stencil shadows became available to do the same effects as PowerVR's Infinite Planes.
 
I still have my m3d card lying around somewhere. I've only hung on to it in case I can actually get the SGL version of Virtual On someday.
Has anyone ever seen this particular title in action?

PCX2 was a damn good chip for its time, the image quality was much better than a Voodoo 1 but it needed a more powerful CPU than the 3dfx card. I think it used the host CPU to do some of the binning.
 
IIRC, the triangle setup had to be done on the CPU for PCX1/2 so I guess its performance depended on the CPU if you played games at say 640x480. Anyway I have Virtual ON SGL version. It was a very nice version of VO for the time. It ran at around 30-35fps on my old Celeron 300. I don't know if it was fillrate limited or not. I also have the SGL version of Tomb Raider and Resident Evil. 8)

If you want Virtua ON, get the DC version. It's so much better than the PCX1/2 version. You can also play VS mode with two DC and two monitors. VO looks and plays very nice using the DC VGA Box.

PS, if you must have the SGL version of VO send me an email. I can burn you a copy if you like or I can just send you the files through ftp or something. I don't have broadband though, but I have access to it at work.
 
PC-Engine, you have the Series version of Virtual On?!?!?!

Willing to help me out with acquiring a copy? That game is ultra-ultra rare, I've been trying to track down a copy for a couple years now.
 
Ozymandis said:
PC-Engine, you have the Series version of Virtual On?!?!?!

Willing to help me out with acquiring a copy? That game is ultra-ultra rare, I've been trying to track down a copy for a couple years now.
Click to expand...

Sure no problem just send me an email 8)
 
Got my old M3d working. Runs suprisingly fast in Quake2 24bit, with good image quality as well... playable at 800x600 even. But no Direct3d games work, not even ones that are meant to work with the card... they just freeze, leaving me with a mouse cursor. Still, cool to mess around with the few SGL games I have.
 
Cool are those the latest reference drivers that were made?

I wonder are those the latest reference drivers for the powervr pcx2 I remember them being better than the matrox m3d ones...which were the only ones I could find recently other than the stock drivers that came with the cd...it was my first 3d card- what got my into tweaking my system and learning how to optimize it n' stuff. Ahh I remember Hexen 2 and Quake2...editing the cfg's...finding out what all the powervr pcx2 settings did. Hmm...wonder how it will do on a 1.5ghz xp with a 333fsb and mem bus all maxed out...heh.
It did run at 66mhz and display buffer was done on the 2d card. It came with 4mb of sgram if I remember not sure the clock but it could have been same as core clock and it did rely on the host cpu for sorting hence it would scale and did really well on the p2s when they came out...course I had a mighty p133 I learned soon afterwards to bump up to 166-heh.
Though 2.26 version of Unreal still has options for sgl, I heard it was broken. Though I do remember Unreal was real pretty with the pcx2 =-)
 
Simon F said:
Kyronet,
You can copy these as well if you want:
TombraiderA
TombraiderB
Click to expand...

Sorry Simon,
I cannot access the URLs, you've posted. (dead link?)
Could you post them up again?
Sorry for the inconvience. But it would be nice to have them added to KyroNet's PCX2 section.

In fact, I've started the section on PowerVR Series 2: Neon250.
But I do not have a Neon250 board, do you have any idea of where I can obtain some screenshots taken with Neon250.

-------------------------------------
George from KyroNet
http://kyro-net.paraknowya.net
 
kyronet said:
Simon F said:
Kyronet,
You can copy these as well if you want:
TombraiderA
TombraiderB
Click to expand...

Sorry Simon,
I cannot access the URLs, you've posted. (dead link?)
Could you post them up again? Sorry for the inconvience. But it would be nice to have them added to KyroNet's PCX2 section.
Click to expand...
Odd.. they worked here and we are even behind a firewall. Perhaps, because it's a free server, it might be doing some sort of blocking if it's not got an associated HTML file. You could try this

In fact, I've started the section on PowerVR Series 2: Neon250.
But I do not have a Neon250 board, do you have any idea of where I can obtain some screenshots taken with Neon250.
Click to expand...
Gosh. No idea I'm afraid.
 
kyronet said:
In fact, I've started the section on PowerVR Series 2: Neon250. But I do not have a Neon250 board, do you have any idea of where I can obtain some screenshots taken with Neon250.
Click to expand...
SharkyExtreme.com did a review of the Neon250 a long, long time ago. They have a few screens of Quake3 in 32-bit color.

Review page 1 -> here

Review page 7 with screenshots -> here
 
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