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- Hacker News
- That was an interesting read. Unfortunately I never has the pleasure of owning a Matrox. I got really close to buying a Millennium G200 back in the late 90s, but decided to go for the RIVA TNT instead. Was in the nVidia camp (with brief stints in Intel and ATi) until I swithed to ATi/AMD for good around 15 years ago.by d3Xt3r
- I have a friend whose wife has strong sight challenges. He once swapped a much newer and more powerful card with me for my last matrox card, iirc it was a millennium ii. The matrox utilities included with the drivers had one of the best desktop zoom systems ever delivered on windows and this was worth more to them than anything else.by raggi
- Memories! Back at university I got a G400 and, with the open documentation they released, was able to make a driver for BeOS. It worked but looking back it’s stark how much I have learned since then. One feature I particularly love is a dual head setup app using combo boxes instead of menus!
Th code is still online, in full early 2000s web styling. https://64kib.com/old_foft_site/
by foft - I had, briefly, some Matrox card with 3D acceleration on a DOS PC. It drove a PGA (Professional Graphics Adapter) monitor, a standard that predated VGA and went nowhere. The monitor was quite good but useless with anything else.
For a time in the 1980s, I was writing drivers for graphics boards, and later doing 3D animation software. I tried a lot of graphics boards from now-forgotten vendors. Texas Instruments had the first PC RGB monitor and display that could display white text without color smear. The Wang Professional Image Computer was incompatible with everything else in PCs, with a different card form factor, a different monitor interface, and a different memory/device address layout that allowed 720KB of memory instead of 640KB. Plus their own version of DOS. Fujitsu lent me a prototype Fujitsu Sapphire, which never worked right. When I went to return it to their location in Sunnyvale, they'd moved out, shutting down their 3D graphics business. Dynamic Pictures had a decent 3D board, the Oxygen 202, that worked with NT 3.51. It took a while to get that working, but eventually it worked and I got 3D work done.
by Animats - Founded in 1976 by Trottier and Matić, and according to the article and Wikipedia, since 2019 has been owned 100% by Trottier. There's no indication that the founders lost majority ownership at any time, and although they sold off one division in 2019, it appears that Trottier still owns 100% of the remaining two divisions today.
That's pretty remarkable, isn't it? How many tech companies that had a period of being a household name have lasted 50 years and are still majority-owned by all or some of the founders?
by abirkill - When I was working on early 3D video games in the 1990s, all these companies would give you prototype 3D cards to make sure what you made was compatible. This was pre-direct X. On Battlezone, many of us had different video cards to maintain compatibility. I had a G200. It wasn't the fastest card, but I always thought it looked great.
Later we got to demo early builds on pre-release TNT2 cards and it caused a panic for us because our game had always been graphics limited, and the graphics pipeline was built to be very steady. Incredibly smart programmers wrote our renderer from scratch in those days. Suddenly the frame rate was really fast, and choppy, because the hit from physics and AI between frames caused stutters. After that NVIDIA dominated.
- When I was building a linux PC in the late 90's, I bought a Matrox Millenium with the memory expansion to 8MB which could do 1600x1200 with 24 bit color.
That was an awesome card for the time, and an incredibly stable analog signal, which Matrox was known for - other cards at the time would get fuzzy, shimmer, or have ringing / ghosting.
At the time, for good support you needed to *buy* an X11 server for accelerated graphics support. I forget which one I paid money for, but within a few years it wasn't necessary as open source had caught up.
by zdw - Lesser known feature was that the Matrox MGA/G200 chips were capable of delivering "sync on green" via regular VGA cable. This was a specialized format were VSync/HSync weren't transmitted over dedicated pins, but encoded into the green signal. This was required by some (then) older workstation monitors. In the early 2000s, I managed to get a 20" SGI workstation monitor for 20€ at ebay (at times where 20" monitors were above 1000€) - because no one could use them with regular PC hardware. Using a single "sync_on_green" flag in my XFree86.conf file, and it would work flawlessly on my linux box.