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Hardware

Guillemot Acquires Hercules 75

Posted by Hemos from the and-it-still-lives dept.
draggy writes "Seems the doomed Hercules name may live on. Guillemot has announced it acquired the Hercules name and technology. " Sheesh. The memories of actually having a Hercules graphics card - I feel like I'm in middle school again.
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Guillemot Acquires Hercules More

Guillemot Acquires Hercules

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  • Yes, you can. :) I was playing it quite recently on my Pentium 2. (must get AMD....) It works quite smoothly (much more so then JetFight 1 did on computers >486)
    but this is getting way offtopic :) or is it? :)
  • Just for the sake of argument, what did we really gain from having all those card makers based on the same chipset. The only thing I can think of offhand was the shutter glasses...

  • This [is,could be] good news. (Score:3)

    by transiit ( 33489 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @06:41PM (#1574921) Homepage Journal
    This makes me glad. My experience with Hercules doesn't go as far back as to have personally known the monochrome cards, (I didn't venture into the realm of the IBM compatibles until 93), but I've been proud of the Herc. Stingray that I got in 95 (not only one of the finer VLB graphics cards, but the avance logic chipset was supported by X, which meant a relatively painless attempt with a copy of slackware from the back of a book cover) My current box has one of the Herc. Dynamite/128's (with the also well-supported ET6000) and I've had no problems with it, either. The "also-ran" crap that's been floating around in here isn't true: Hercules just wasn't of the general consumer market (even though perhaps they should have been focusing there) , and if I remember correctly, they were doing stuff in the high-end design workstation area.

    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
  • Not that it will be a steller company but look at what happend with Prinston Monitors. I remember them from the 80's they were pretty good monitors but the only relationship with todays company is the name which they aquired a couple of years if i remember corectly.
  • Maybe. I think overall, the Rush's were a little, well, rushed out the door. (Absouletly no pun intended)

    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.
  • I believe Hercules was having difficulties acquiring above average yields of the TNT2 chip for their Dynamite product. Since the TNT2 yields were vastly different on a per-chip basis, they ended up making the chips that could reach higher clock speeds the "Ultra" flavor, etc. A marketing gimmick designed to take attention away from the fact that they were having difficulties in the manufacturing process.

    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 get lock ups in Q3Test every so often, and in other 3D games. (I'm not sure if the problem is only OpenGL, or what at this point, I havent' had time to track it down)

    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.
  • Remember, there are only handful of glass tube makers in the world. (Philips, Nec, Mitshubishi, Sony) Other manufactures just buy the tube from them and put their own electronics and case around them...

    Jón
  • kramer000 wrote:
    I for one am very, very happy to hear this. I have quite a bit of faith in my Guillemont Ultra TNT
    Xenator. It installed like a charm (no driver problems), and delivers some beautiful graphics.
    If they can continue their winning ways with Hercules, all the better.
  • The geForce might not have a much higher fillrate than the v3, but that's such an asininely ignorant comparison for the following reasons:

    • 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.
  • ahh young grasshopper...

    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 :)
  • Electronics and food. What an open-minded company.

    ***Beginning*of*Signiture***
    Linux? That's GNU/Linux [gnu.org] to you mister!
  • >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..

    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)

    by Nagash ( 6945 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @07:22PM (#1574934)
    Well, let's look at who basically makes chips for video boards now-a-days:
    • nVIDIA
    • 3Dfx
    • Matrox
    • ATI
    • S3

    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
  • I'll cut you some slack as you're obviously a yokel just out of short trousers ;)

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    #1 name recognition. #2 board design and driver coding. herc died because of mismanagement (some have said criminally so), not because of a bad product or lack of dedication in their staff. Guillemot seems like a great company, but WHO has really heard of them before, aside from people following the scene? Not your suits. But they all remember Hercules. Guillemot was my first choice so far for a GeForce, BTW.
  • Jet was Sublogic; I remember it well. I also remember hearing that M$ FlightSim was largely stolen from them, I'm just too lazy to go research it. Anybody else ever hear that? (That jet was stolen, not that I'm lazy... )

  • Are they keeping Herc's developers? (Score:3)

    by tjoynt ( 23563 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @07:59PM (#1574939) Homepage
    In their press release, Guillement stated that they puchased Hercules for because they had a "first rate brand". They made no mention of their plans for Herc's employees/developers.

    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... :)
  • Quite a bit more than just shutter glasses. The nVidia chips themselves support TV in and out, but require external logic to actually modulate between digital and analog; hence, most of the TNT cards with TV out had a crappy output chip, but the Asus and Leadtek cards used a much better one which could actually do 800x600 SVHS and the like (and my Leadtek S320 looks sweet on my 35" TV). Also, most cards don't use the TV in, with the Asus ones being the sole exceptions.

    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.

  • Well, WD no longer making graphics chips is no major loss by any stretch of the imagination. :) As for Cirrus, they're still around, making mostly OEM integration chips (mostly for notebooks and the like), and I seem to recall they had a promising low-end 3D chip which would have been fun for, say, palmtops, if it had actually been used in something.

    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.

  • Yeah, the original Hercules had pageflipping. Very few things used it though, except for a few cheesy demos which came with the card.
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
  • Oh, I know, the ET4000s were great for raw speed (as were the Cirrus 542x chips, and their predecessors the AcuMOS AVGA2 and AVGA3). I'm sorry about grouping it together with the Trident (and Trident still sucks. sorry, personal grudge -- the 9680 is *not* a good XFree86 chip IME), but my point was that most cards in those days (fast, slow or otherwise) were frame-buffers.

    -lee

  • The res of herc for the time is amazing. For kicks, I'm going to install win95 on a herc card later. I've got WIN 3.1 running on a 386 smoothly, and as soon as I get linux going, I'll transfer it to my 386. (Worrying about HDD space)
  • I for one am very, very happy to hear this. I have quite a bit of faith in my Guillemont Ultra TNT Xenator. It installed like a charm (no driver problems), and delivers some beautiful graphics.

    If they can continue their winning ways with Hercules, all the better.
  • I still have the swh.exe Hercules mono version of SpaceWar around somewhere. Great fun, although I had a black and white monitor. I am really sorry that I threw it out several years ago, it would make a great terminal for my Linux box, or I could have dual monitor DOS on my old 386-16 1.5MB RAM that is two small to run Linux.

  • spacewar on hercules was great! (Score:3)

    by Splork ( 13498 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @03:24PM (#1574948) Homepage
    Playing spacewar on a hercules card with one of the old slow-fading phosphor green monitors was great. It was hi-res and left slowly fading trails wherever your ships or shots moved.
  • The memories of actually having a Hercules graphics card - I feel like I'm in middle school again.

    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.
  • You can always get the reference drivers from nVidia even if Hercules driver revision stops. email me for details if your interested.
  • I have a Hercules card that's about a year and a half old that's based on the Rendition Vertite chip and includes video capture - actually a pretty nice card.

  • link (Score:3)

    by cdlu ( 65838 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @03:35PM (#1574952) Homepage
    The link goes to some main page with frames, try this one [guillemot.com] instead.

    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 :)
  • Herc makes the fastest TNT/TNT2 based cards out there and as Eric pointed out their drivers are known as some of the best. I hope the innovation of Hercules mixes well with the Guillimout reputation for being late to market and inexpensive. It seems like the two aspects are mutually exclusive, but there might be some synergy there.
    v2k

  • Hercules and other issues... (Score:4)

    by Dextius Alphaeus ( 101173 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @03:58PM (#1574954)
    Closing your doors because of a lack of funding is one thing. But doing it with the intent of not honoring service agreements / warrantee's is another. I read earlier that this was a problem with people that had ordered cards from hercules (see Maximum PC November). Will Guillemot take on the problems left by Hercules?

    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
  • I sure hope Hercules' TNT2 Ultra (the Xentor 32) will be back because it's still one of the fastest things on the block but after Hercules went under, you couldn't get it anymore..

    -Warren
  • Oh yes... CGA Hi-Res is 640x200, it was kinda fun to watch such really tall pixels, i remember doing some math and using graph paper to keep the proportions in my bitmaps Hercules Hi-Res was 720x350, and the ROM that contained the patterns for the characters in Text Mode could be changed, to obtain APL chars for example (using fonts the hard way). I don't know if the original could do it, but I had an "Hercules-Compatible" card that had TWO pages for Hi-Res, and you could flip between them those were happy times...

  • also-ran acquires also-ran company (Score:4)

    by LocalYokel ( 85558 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @04:09PM (#1574958) Homepage Journal

    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?

    • NANAO
    • iiyama
    • NEC

    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:

    • Komodo
    • ADI
    • Shamrock
    • AOC
    • Tatung
    • KFC (which is still a strange name)
    • Pacom (I own one)
    • MAG (heard from them lately?)

    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...

  • ...or at least fairly well-known in the high-end-consumer graphics card area. Their TNT2 Ultra product was the fastest TNT2 Ultra board out there, until they went out of business this past summer. They didn't ship nearly as many parts as, say, Creative, but what they shipped was the best.

    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.
  • ok, ok! I was working from memory versus literature! :)


    rodent...

  • Just so you know, Hercules were very much alive and kicking until about 6 months ago - they were on schedule to release into the market THE fastest TNT2-Ultra based video card - but apparently they ran out of money JUST prior to release - I assume Guillemot have bought the stock and everything too - which means they should have a large number of VERY nice TNT2 based cards ready for market, as Hercules had manufactured quite a number of cards ready for sale when they closed their doors....

  • 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.

  • Most monitors are foreign manufacture.... better ones from Japan.

    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?
  • 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?"

    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)

    by timothy ( 36799 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @04:23PM (#1574968) Journal
    Can't speak for today's NEC CRT monitors (but they used to make some great ones ... ), but I like their current flat panels.

    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 ... now, though they make some cool high-end stuff, the low-end machines are buggy and cheap-seeming (and ugly). NEC, same deal. Companies cash in respected names, ruining them in the process.

    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 ... Micron is another. But even Dell can't cut corners everywhere and expect the rep to hold. Good reputations have a much shorter shelf life than bad ones.

    timothy



    Ah ... one day I'll be able to afford a flat panel, too.

    timothy
  • Note that there have not yet been any mergers between separate technology manufacturers. nVidia, S3, and 3Dfx make their own chips, but STB and Diamond never did. So there are as many 3D architectures and product lines as there ever were.

    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 (?)...
  • Interestingly enough, Guillemot makes the only TNT2 Ultra on the market that's as fast as the Dynamite. I'm baffled as to why they even bought Hercules; it's obvious that they have engineers that are up to par. It would make a bit more sense if CL or Diamond bought Hercules, considering the fact that they currently have substandard products (comparatively) on the market.
  • The Xentor is by Guillemot, not Hercules. So it was never gone.

    --
    Let's not all suck at the same time please

  • He was talking about back in the early 80's when you had a choice of MGA (IBM Monochrome Graphics Adapter) or a Herc Mono card. If I remember correctly the Herc went up to 720x480. Likewise there existed a utility called SimCGA which did exactly that on MGA and Herc cards.

    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...

  • I seem to recall that it was SubLogic that produced JET. Yeah, it was a killer game in it's day and one of the first ones that I copied (along with King's Quest 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...

  • Am I daft, or just missing something?
    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] .

  • I hadn't heard that, but the thought had crossed my mind playing MS flightsim. It would fit the pattern from our dear friends at redmond though. The 'look and feel' of the cockpit was very similar. Does SubLogic still even exist?

  • 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!!!

  • As to Gateway - I don't know about ther "Performance", etc. series, but the E-series (slightly more expensive, but cheaper than Dell OptiPlexes by a long shot) are REALLY nice systems with the exception of the fact that your video card choices are ATI or no card at all. Especially the E-4200s.

    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.
  • Remember their Voodoo Rush boards? Those sucked so much that it killed the Hercules name for me. Horrendous drivers that crashed all the time, and screwed up the display when it didn't crash, and blatant lies on the box about NT support. I bought one and returned it for a Monster 3D within days. I kept the Monster until last semester when I bought a TNT.
  • I think that the voodoo rush pile of garbage that bore the herc name was more aproblem of 3dfx than herc...
  • Remember BEFORE 3dfx and stb combined? There were like 15 different versions of the voodoo 2. Now we only have 4 different versions of the voodoo 3, all made from one company, and price locked by one company. Sure the prices drove competition to the point where it took Canopus to Japan, who cares, that's good business for the consumer. (I do like Canopus's hardware though, but they always seem to be the last out of the gate too)

    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
  • Hercules is hardly a little known company. Maybe you newcomers don't know about/remember the innovations that Hercules made in the 80s, but video cards basically *sucked* until Hercules saved us. Not to mention the speedy cards they sold in the 90s...

    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...
  • He was talking about back in the early 80's when you had a choice of MGA (IBM Monochrome Graphics Adapter) or a Herc Mono card. If I remember correctly the Herc went up to 720x480.

    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.
  • Not serious, it's just like saying, Oh, that's a "Good Thing" as if "Good Thing" happened to be a definable term. Don't pay any attention to geek-humour :)

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • If I remember correctly the Herc went up to 720x480.

    According to the Programmers Guide to the EGA, VGA and Super VGA Cards : Third Edition, page 101...

    The Hercules adapter is based on the Motorola MC6845 Graphics Controller Chip. The Hercules Corporation quickly dominated the field of monochrome graphics and established the Hercules standard. The Hercules board provides a standard 80-character-by-25-row alphanumeric display and a relatively high resolution in the graphics mode of 720 horizontal by 348 vertical pixels. The outputs drive a digital monochrome monitor with sync frequencies of 50Hz vertical and 18.4kHz horizontal.

    The Hercules board was the third display format standardized for the PC family of computers, following the Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) and Color Graphics Adapter (CGA).

  • Re:JET: SubLogic? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You know, I still have a copy of JET sitting on my shelf here... I wonder if I could make it run on a PII/400 at 17 billion fps.

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