Weirdest actual 3D card for PC's

i'm not familiar with the ms 'invention' but from the way it sounds that should be it.

re giving details, ahh well, how about that:

the idea at apple had been to represent 6 colors with a ~1-bit-per-pixel. yes, you got that right. for the purpose you had a byte for each 7 pixels (i.e. 8/7 bits per pixel) where:

• the last bit of the byte would 'alternate palettes', so to say
• a lit even horizontal position will be either 'violet' or 'blue', depending on 'palette', and a lit odd horizontal position will be either 'green' or 'orange', by same plaette bit.
• two neighbouring pixels lit would produce white.

so at the end you get 2 whites and 2 blacks, and 4 other colors, 6 distinct colors in total. cool, no?

ed: doh, the typos/semantics errors count in the above suggests i should get some sleep.
ed`: nice, there was a factological error in there, too.

 

The STE had a Blitter as well didn't it? (Along with the Falcon and Jaguar iirc)

Anybody program on the Jag?

 

yep, DeanoC, i do admit i may have missed more than a couple of things in this thread - i'll re-read it tomorrow afresh

 

The Atari 8Bit also had a similar mode. It made use of moire patterns and artifacting to get 6 colors from on/off pixels. This was showcased wonderfully in the BroderBund Software game Drol. A few demos also made nifty use of this mode.

 

Speaking about theamiga, I have fond feeling about it's weird hicolor display mode called HAM (short of Hold And Modify) it was at its time great leap from PC's 256 color. A500 series (A1000, A2000 etc) used 6bit per "pixel" and got 4096 colors and AGA series (A1200 & A400) used 8bit per pixel and got ~256k colors. These modes were mostly used in art & paint programs but couple of games used them too. After a while demoscene started to use HAM mode too, it was weird concept but I was enjoying "challenges" using it fastest way possible Another thing, Amiga used bitplane style for it's gfx, and if you wanted to display pixel it was not just "write 1 byte somewhere" but you had to separate a pixel data to bits and insert it bit by bit Routine that was tuned/developed in demo scene was called "chunky to planar" and boy, it was constant battle who had the fastest C2P routine

HAM mode pixel structure was something like this:
bits 5 & 6: select which color component to change next (r,g,b) or use of 16 color palette
bits 1,2,3,4: pointer to color palette or single color value for R or G or B

So it could take max 3 pixels to change color to "final" color.

Ahhh, that was great time

 

the fujitsu pinolite board was a result of rendition's very lame drivers at the time. apparently, some new driver guy at rendition rewrote the GL driver to outperform the pinolite board. that helped kill the project.

IIRC, DX didn't have TNL at the time, and DX programs wouldn't have benefitted from pinolite until DX7. two years later geforce came out...

- sm

 

You mean "PC's 16 colour." The Amiga came out in 85. VGA came out in 87. At the time the Amiga appeared, the PC had CGA and EGA. IIRC there was also PGA at the time, although I don't remember exactly what it was.

 

Ahhh....CGA. 2 Wonderful pallettes of 3 colors (plus a background color) to choose from, IIRC. My favorite was Pallette 2....I believe it was something like puke green, rusty red, and mustard yellow.

I do recall playing "The Hobbit" text/graphics adventure game, and it was quite impressive what they could do with that pallette.

 

Haha. I remember playing a lot of CGA games on my PCjr , but what I liked most was the PCjr's special 16-color modes. King's Quest ruled!

Tommy McClain

 

Gah! The Amiga was a wonderful machine. Overcome by a fit of nostalgia I assembled my A400 and buried myself in the HiSoft Assembler.

I remember the arguments I used to get into with a friend about which particualr architecture was the best. He was a staunch PC fan and I thought the Amiga was the dogs danglies. Event the OS kicked ass for its time.

I also remember how he struggled to get the old copper bar effect on his Paradise EGA card. Much port attacking and lots and lots of assembler with a lovely Pascal framework.

Even the games on the Amiga never seem to have been surpassed. I remember seeing Hybris for the very first time shortly followed by my first full on Demo. Made my x186 - CGA look pathetic, which I guess it was really

Somehow it just doesn't seem as much fun anymore. I guess I just got old and used to it all.

 

darnit. Been trying to get my friend to get me one of those Rendition PCI/AGP reference cards, but Micron's labs are sealed tighter than a drum right now. Ah well...

 

That Verite board with the coprocessor really intrigued back in the day. Hercules' card was called the Thriller Conspiracy. I dug up some info on it for you all to nostalgiatize over

Nifty Fujitsu Pinolite information
http://pr.fujitsu.com/jp/news/1997/Jul/2e.html

http://alag3.mfa.kfki.hu/dcsabas/hardware/3d_cards.htm

http://www.billsworkshop.com/e3.html

 

On the note of Verite' chips, if one were to compare these old architectures to today's, what did these old chips do? Were they 1x1 architectures? What else was in there? Nobody did in-depth analysis back then like we do today.

 

IIRC the V100 had a fillrate of 25 MPixels/sec @ 25 MHz and the V2200 had 50 M Pixels/sec @50 MHz. So unless my meory is completely shot I'd guess it was a 1*1.

Pretty sure it also had a RISC processor in there as well. Byte Magazine once done quite a detailed report on the Verite, Mpact and Voodoo.

 

The Verite did however have two Z-pipes per color pipe for faster HSR. I don't remember if it was just the 2x00 or if the 1000 also had it.

So you never visited Dimension3D back then?

 

I certainly didnt. Someone should have saved those reviews for posterity!

 

Reviews?
I don't remember that I read any. It's the forum that counts. And for a long time Dim3D was nothing but the forums.

 

A bit off topic, but back in Autumn 1997 I was about to built my first PC (was a Mac user prior) and figured out that I might better get to the bottom of things and turned to tomshardware for the prime advise on a new videocard.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/19971109/index.html

Well, I went for a Riva128 and it turned out to be a disappointment. Neither Unreal (D3D) nor Quake II (OpenGL) was any good and I ended up playing both games in software mode. That was kind of a weird experience - even back then...