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Guillemot Acquires Hercules
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Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and think what nobody else has thought.
Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and think what nobody else has thought.
Re:JET: SubLogic? (Score:1)
but this is getting way offtopic
Re:I don't understand this type of logic.. (Score:1)
This [is,could be] good news. (Score:3)
Anyway, I was worrying that with S3's acquisition of Diamond, and Hercules going under (of course, a search on here returns that Hercules was acquired by Elsa on 8-26-98, and then that Hercules went under a year later, I wasn't sure what the hell was going on), my choices for the next video card would be rather lousy. At least nobody's come up with the bright idea that "Hey, we can churn out winmodems for dirt cheap, why not try the same thing with graphics cards? So what's a few hundred lost cycles anyway?"
-transiit
A rose by any other name (Score:1)
Re:Not everything Herc made was great? (Score:1)
I had a Hercules Stingray 128-3D up until about 3 months ago. It had been in my computer for over a year and a half, for little other reason than I didn't want to spend the money to get a new PCI graphics card when I knew I'd be upgrading to a AGP based system.
Let's just say I've had some very, very bad, painful memories with that card. Anything that causes MS Dev Studio in Windows (along with 60% of all the applications I run) to crash randomly -- not just crash, but completly "freeze", warranting the need for an immediate cold-reboot) is bad enough. However, my card was something that could cause 50% of all KDE apps, and all of Gnome / E to completly lock up. Anything that can do that consistently to a Linux system, without a fix other than replacement, is something that belongs in the bottom of a landfill.
Fortunately, I believe that's where my Hercules card might be right now.
Re:This is a Good Thing! (Score:1)
Now don't go ahead and take an anti-nvidia stance here if you make a reply, because 3dfx also shows the same problem in the fact that their V3-3500 product was VERY late to market and including the LCD out raised the price of the board out of the normal person's reach. If 3dfx had just gone for a single high end product like the 3500, they'd be in serious financial trouble right now.
Personally I own a Hercules Dynamite TNT2 Ultra, but the Hercules drivers have been more stable than any other drivers I've used due to the board's extremely high clock and memory speeds. I used to have a very hot case, and I think it may have damage the card..
I hope that Guillemot doesn't drop the ball, and continues releasing drivers for the Hercules TNT series boards now that they're is a new reference driver release available on nvidia's web site.
Re:Monitors (Score:1)
Jón
Re:A Good Thing (tm) (Score:1)
Re:I don't understand this type of logic.. (Score:2)
- Vertex processing - that's the whole point of the geForce, remove more of the CPU bottleneck
- 32bpp rendering - the Voodoo3 *still* doesn't do it, not even slowly (I don't count a lowpass filter on the RAMDAC to hide the dithering as 22bit, either)
- Textures larger than 256x256 - Quake2 already uses textures larger than this and it's been out for *years*
- Architecture - the V3 is still based on a really crappy, ancient architecture without a concept of unified memory. The V3 is basically multiple V1s on the same chip as a 2D core. I don't know about the V3, but in the V2 each texel processor needed its own copy of the texture working set; a 12MB Voodoo2 was basically a fast version of a 6MB Voodoo1 with a larger framebuffer (V1 had 2MB framebuffer, 2 or 4MB texture, whereas V2 had 4MB framebuffer, 2/2 or 4/4MB texture).
- Glide. I can't emphasize enough how bad, scalability- and capability-wise, Glide is. It's tied so anally to one piece of hardware with a fixed set of capabilities. Even if the next Voodoo card *did* have vertex processing, older Glide games couldn't support it, because Glide is so low-level and hardware-oriented. This is opposed to OpenGL, which is low-level but abstract, and has supported hardware T&L since it was called IrisGL back in the mid-80s. (I like to use a similar argument for OpenGL vs. Direct3D, btw. Hopefully there's no D3D pundits on this primarily-Linux site though.
:)
There's a lot more to the speed of a graphics chip than fillrate.---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:also-ran acquires also-ran company (Score:2)
Hercules were a big name back in the mid eighties, for their "Hercules graphics adapter.
Back then, the choices were MDA, CGA (EGA/VGA later), or Hercules.
MDA and CGA were 320x200 resolution, CGA could do this in 4 colors. In mono, CGA could do higher res (640x200? 640x480?).
Hercules was a mono only card, however it could do some huge resolution (at the time) such as 768x???, which made it THE choice for people who were working with grapical interfaces.
Unfortunately, EGA/VGA cards could not do hercules screenmodes, so it died a slow and lingering death..
how times change...
smash(some of the screen resolutions may me off... but i believe they are approximately correct
Shamrock also does my high school's lunch food (Score:1)
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux [gnu.org] to you mister!
Re:You should be careful what you mean (Score:1)
I agree with the ICD comment, but with the newest driver set, the G400 MAX is even with the TNT2 Ultra, and in some cases, faster. Check out Thresh's FiringSquad [firingsquad.com] review of the G400 (but be sure to look for the update when Matrox release the new drivers)
Re:Hercules and other issues... (Score:5)
Diamond never produced chips, they just licensed everybody else's technology and put it on a board. STB was essentially the same. 3Dfx bought them so that they could control the pricing and production of their Voodoo chipset. Remember when it came out? There had to be zillions of people making it. It did promote massive competition, but also lead to comsumer confusion (who makes what with what chipset?).
As of now, nVIDIA and is the only company that doesn't control the manufacturing of boards with their chipsets. This means lots of companies are taking the nVIDIA chipsets and making minor alterations to them. In other words, all the TNT/TNT2 boards from Asus, Guillemot, Canopus, Creative Labs, Gainward, LeadTek and many others are essentially the same. Even with all these companies, it still boils down to the fact that it's nVIDIA vs. 3Dfx vs. Matrox vs. ATI vs. S3.
nVIDIA and 3Dfx got the ball rolling on the 3D wars because they didn't need to make hardware - all the money went to R&D and drivers. ATI and Matrox have always made their own hardware and as a result, have had a hard time pumping money into R&D to make *really good* 3D chipsets with good drivers (face it, the G400 is really damn good, but it's OpenGL is not up to snuff with nVIDIA and 3Dfx). ATI might have something with the MAXX, but on the surface, it's taking two chips to make it as good (or slightly better) than the rest. 3Dfx was doing so well, they decided it was time to stop licensing technology. They are doing pretty well for themselves, but they haven't made the kind of money nVIDIA has over the last year. However, they continue to push the chipset feature envelope.
With all this going on, it seems hard to believe that competition is going to dwindle and technology will let up. There are five major companies competeing here and it's a war of chipsets. Each is starting to branch off into it's own philosophy of development. nVIDIA is pushing T&L whereas 3Dfx is pushing the T-buffer and full screen anti-aliasing with massive FPS. Matrox is doing the Environment bump Mapping with Dual Head display (they are tending to push more video board enhancements rather than pure 3D). ATI still needs to learn more about 3D IMO, and S3 is, well, S3
I don't think nVIDIA will attempt to make it's own hardware any time soon. They made too much money recently. However, if they did, it wouldn't kill the chipset war. The competition lies in the chipset makers, not the companies selling boards. As long as nVIDIA and 3Dfx are still duking it out, we'll continue to have 6 month product turnover in he 3D market.
Geoff Wozniak
gzw@home.com
Re:also-ran acquires also-ran company (Score:1)
Hercules is one of the oldest brands in the PC graphics business - all the way back to the IBM PC/XT.
Guillemot is well known in Europe and recently amongst the gaming community in the US. I don't know where you're shopping, but CDW, NECX and SPARCO have all got Guillemot cards in stock (I just bought one).
As for the plethora of monitor brands - whats wrong with competition? I for one wouldn't want to be restricted to choosing between Viewsonic and Optiquest (sarcasm - both are the same company).
Re:This is a Good Thing! (Score:2)
Re:JET: SubLogic? (Score:1)
Are they keeping Herc's developers? (Score:3)
Givin that I've heard nothing but the best praise for Herc's technical abilities (e.g. best drivers and fastest boards), I would expect Guillement to keep them. But because they already have developers and are located in Canada, they may decide to let them all go.
That would be a great shame, as Herc would be gone in spirit, if not in name.
I'm just speculating, so please, don't jump to the conclusion that this is nessesarily actually going to happen.
In a related note, does anyone know if Guillement will replace their name with Hercules or just release a seperate board under the Herc brand?
One last, final thought: only US$1.5 million? Herc must have been mightily in debt for them to be sold for so little. *I* could probably raise $1.5 million if I needed to...
Re:I don't understand this type of logic.. (Score:2)
That's not all though. Some companies, such as Canopus and Elsa, modified the card designs to change performance. The Canopus Spectra 2500 was nearly twice as fast as all other TNT cards, except the Elsa Erazor 2 which it was about 3x as fast as (Elsa's modifications made sense but ended up being detrimental to performance for some reason).
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:also-ran acquires also-ran company (Score:2)
Hercules was one of the few nVidia-using companies which actually designed their own cards rather than using a stock reference design, the others being Elsa and Canopus. Considering the Canopus Spectra 2500 was nearly twice as fast as reference-design TNT cards, I'd love to have seen them do a TNT2 or geForce 256, but alas, they decided to duck out of the market before they became victims of their own success. Ethically admirable, but stupid businesswise and just left consumers without a TNT card which actually pushed its performance to the limits...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:also-ran acquires also-ran company (Score:2)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:Don't diss the ET4000. (Score:1)
-lee
Herc is cool (Score:1)
A Good Thing (tm) (Score:2)
If they can continue their winning ways with Hercules, all the better.
Re:spacewar on hercules was great! (Score:1)
spacewar on hercules was great! (Score:3)
Some of us still have Herc Cards (Score:1)
I have a Herc Riva TNT that I like a lot. I was concerned about getting DirectX driver updates - Hercules has some of the better TNT drivers.
Glad to hear it.
Re:Some of us still have Herc Cards (Score:1)
Herc w/ vid capture (Score:1)
link (Score:3)
I remember using a great DOS flight sim a while back (comparitavely (for my age)), called JET, which had 16 options for video, one of them being Hercules Monographics Adapter. I hadn't heard of the company since and figured they'd dissapeared ages ago. Goes to show how companies work behind the scenes so much I guess...either that or I am just out of touch with reality
This is a Good Thing! (Score:1)
v2k
Hercules and other issues... (Score:4)
Sidenote: It's a good thing that Nvidia continues to push out the awesome chipsets it does, with S3 gobbling Diamond, and 3DFX taking over STB, the field of competition is dwindling fast. The only thing when that happens is weaker technology, at a slower pace, at higher prices...
-Dextius Alphaeus
Does this mean the Xentor 32 will be back? (Score:1)
-Warren
Re:also-ran acquires also-ran company (Score:1)
also-ran acquires also-ran company (Score:4)
And in other news, some other little-known company was acquired by an even less known company in an $80 stock swap deal.
On the display end of computing, lots of things change. Remmeber these being 'premium' monitor manufacturers?
Before NEC's PC division was bought out by Packard Bell, they were pretty good across the board, at least until they debuted the "world's fastest CD-ROM", which was a 3x (although you could call it triple-speed back then). Then came the ATAPI CD-ROM, and all of a sudden, the price of drives plummeted below $200, thanks to Mitsumi. Those folks have all but disappeared now, too!
I remember when S3 was the dominant graphics chip manufacturer, then Number Nine came out with the Imagine series, then Matrox debuted the Millenium. Diamond was the best manufacturer (and marketer) of cards using that S3 968 chip, which may be a historical reason why they made that stupid merger. I have no idea what Number Nine is doing right now, but they're off the radar screen. Matrox is still kicking, but nobody is giving them the attention they deserve. STB historically made crummy graphics cards, and it's only fitting that 3dfx now owns them.
Why, oh why, are there so many different monitor brands, how can they be so cheap, and why do most of them only appear in small shops and computer shows? Off the top of my head, I can name:
BTW, when did Cirrus Logic and Western Digital quit making graphics chips?
At any rate, I'm just backgrounding how much I know and remember about PC tech from 1994 to the present. In that time, I have never seen either of those two brands "in the flesh", or for sale on any website or Computer Shopper ad that I've read, but I have heard the names before -- supposedly Hercules had the fastest TNT2 just before they went under, but good luck finding one...
also big in the 90s (Score:1)
Unfortunately, have the best product technologically doesn't mean you'll stay in business. Turns out quantity won out over quality (not that the competition was shoddy, far from it).
I'm glad though that somebody bought the rights to their tech at least, so hopefully the purchaser (Guillemot, IIRC) will be even more able to make some really awesome graphics boards.
Re:Some of us still have Herc Cards-Wrong decade! (Score:1)
rodent...
Hercules (Score:1)
Re:Herc w/ vid capture (Score:1)
Yes, the Hercules Thriller 3D with the Rendition Vérité 2200 chipset (I have the one with 8 Mb, video input and output, and 3D glasses VESA connector) is a great card, at least for my P200. Beautiful picture and a good OpenGL implementation.
But overall software support is horrible. I've bought BeOS, but I can't do anything with it due to lacking video drivers.
Re:why so cheap (Score:1)
Checked the labels on your hardware recently? Most of the components in your system were manufactured outside of the US - although the final box was probably assembled in some giant plant in the midde of nowhere.
As for Japan, I'd classify that as a fairly expensive manufacturing base - yet their retail costs are still competitive.
No import duties, no shipping costs, and no overhead
The cost of shipping from Mexico is likely to be comparable to shipping from any part of the US - unless you know of some monitor teleportation device?
Remember, Mexico is dirt poor
So the American Dream is to blame for the loss of manufacturing to other countries? Face it, the US economy is not as dependent on manufacturing as it once was.
Would you rather those jobs go to your immediate neighbour, or to some tin-pot dictatorsip far away?
Re:This [is,could be] good news. (Score:1)
Actually, that's exactly how PC video cards started -- until the late 1980s, they were all fairly dumb frame-buffer cards with no onboard processing whatsoever. Before 1990 (and Windows 3.0), there were a few cards that used TI TMS340 processors, but those were mostly very expensive and meant for CAD use and such; most regular cards were generally all ISA-based VGA clones that *maybe* could do higher resolutions or 256 colors (raise your hand if you remember the Trident 8900 or the Tseng ET4000, or the Paradise PVGA1/Western Digital 90C00 for that matter). I believe S3's first integrated VGA/2D accelerator chips came out in 1990 or 1991, which brought prices down a lot (especially compared to the TMS340 boards). It's been a while since I saw any of this stuff, so I'm sure I made a few glitches...
Nanao still exists ... (Score:3)
Nanao also is making some nice-looking flat-panels, haven't noticed CRTs with that brand in a while
Branding in the computer business unfortunately does not represent uniformity of quality, at least not as much as I'd like. Compaq used to be a good name
Dell (disclaimer: I work for them, indirectly) is one of the fewmainstream computer makers I would actually think of as having consistently high quality for home machines
timothy
Ah
timothy
You should be careful what you mean (Score:2)
It's true that reduction in the number of chipset resellers may hurt consumers, but it'd be tough to argue, since the chipset manufacturers got to set the wholesale price to the resellers in the first place. So 3Dfx, Diamond and nVidia have about the same level of freedom they always have. And of course Matrox and ATI have always made all their own boards.
I for one think it's great the way the 3D market continues to support such diverse offerings. Even though there have been some mergers, the range of architectures has remained the same (with the exception of the demise of Rendition some time ago).
The rate of technological change has if anything increased. The cycle time on new boards is barefly 6 months now. Voodoo3 and TNT2 in the spring, and now Voodoo4 and GeForce in a month or so (?)...
Re:This is a Good Thing! (Score:2)
Re:Does this mean the Xentor 32 will be back? (Score:2)
--
Let's not all suck at the same time please
Re:Some of us still have Herc Cards-Wrong decade! (Score:1)
I actually traded my CGA monitor to a chick for her mono monitor so I could go back to running in Herc mode as I preferred the higher resolution to a crappy four colors.
BTW, anybody know what ever happened to Vega? It was interesting running my Vega VGA card with Windoze 3.0 on my old V20 with 640k! Slow as shit but a far cry from Windoze 1.0.
rodent...
JET: SubLogic? (Score:1)
I guess I started down the warez road early considering I had a box of floppies filled with games from a friend even before the computer made it home from the store. Damn those dual 360k floppy drives were convient!
rodent...
Re:A Good Thing (tm) (Score:1)
Good Thing®
Good Thing©
Good Thing(tm)
etc...
I've seen the term here [slashdot.org], in both the Jargon File [tuxedo.org] and on Everything [blockstackers.com], but trademarks just don't seem to fit the term.
Censorship on Everything?
Fuck That [blockstackers.com] .
Re:JET: SubLogic? (Score:1)
Glad someone rescued them (Score:1)
It would have been a shame and a waste to see the company just disappear.
1999-10-29 17:44:07 Guillemot acquires Hercules (articles,graphics) (rejected)
Guillemot Acquires Hercules: Posted by Hemos on 06:58 PM October 30th, 1999 CST
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Re:Nanao still exists ... (Score:1)
I work at the Cornell Campus Store selling computers, we carry Gateway, Dell, Compaq, IBM, and Toshiba (laptops only.) We sell far more Gateways than all other systems combined, Dell being second. I think we've sold one Compaq in the past three months because the salespeople hate them.
The Dells we carry are overpriced and suck... Their CD-ROM drives are horrendously loud.
Not everything Herc made was great? (Score:1)
Re:Not everything Herc made was great? (Score:1)
I don't understand this type of logic.. (Score:2)
The fact that there has been no real cross technology mergers in my opinion is irrelevant. My point was there were companies like Diamond, Creative and STB that released cards from MULTIPLE companies. Now that alignment is within companies is occuring, I believe we will see less good deals than ever.
True, development time is moving faster. But not at the same pace it has. The GeForce 256 isn't THAT much faster than the v3, (32 bit notwithstanding). I remember the jump from a single voodoo 2, to the voodoo 3 3000, that was a leap.
As for Matrox and ATI, they have never been in the game. I own the rage fury, it sucked, it never got an x-server until I replaced it with my voodoo 3. Matrox took an entire release of another card before they got their open gl ICD out. (Dual head is amazing though, and the linux support is great too). But for 3d? Nahh..
-Dextius Alphaeus
Re:also-ran acquires also-ran company (Score:1)
If you want old brand names, try leafing through an 80s Computer Shopper or Byte sometime. I occasionally find them lying around my house. It brings back such memories seeing AMI or Micronics 386/33 motherboards for $600+, not to mention Matrox video cards that were slow as hell under anything but graphics mode under Windows 3.x. I'm not quite sure the really old ones even supported text mode!
My first PC/XT clone was soooo IBM compatible, IBM sued Panasonic over it.
I have a better processor in my monitor than what was in my Commore 64 or Amiga...
Re:Some of us still have Herc Cards-Wrong decade! (Score:1)
The Hercules monochrome graphics adapter had only one graphics mode: 720x348, monochrome. Its memory buffer in both text and graphics mode was mapped to the same location as that of the IBM MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter -- it didn't do graphics): B000:0.
It's just a gag (Score:1)
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:Some of us still have Herc Cards-Wrong decade! (Score:5)
According to the Programmers Guide to the EGA, VGA and Super VGA Cards : Third Edition, page 101...
Re:JET: SubLogic? (Score:1)