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Hercules Closes Its Doors
ewhac writes "Blue's News is among the first to report that Hercules Computer Technology, one of the longest-standing names in the PC graphics card industry, is going out of business. Hercules' latest claim to fame was the fastest manufacturer-supported implementation of NVidia's TNT2 Ultra graphics chipset, clocking in at 200MHz. People who pre-ordered Hercules TNT2 Ultra cards but who have not yet had their credit card charged are not going to receive them. However, if you happen to be nearby Hercules' Fremont, CA, headquarters and show up in person, they will sell you a TNT2 Ultra for $200 (regularly $250). How good a deal this is without any continuing driver support is unknown."
Yes, but three lefts do.
Last time I checked Miro had problems of its own....
Michael
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Well, since I've been waiting on a TNT2 from hercules for, oh, 24 days now.. That's time I could have been -using- another card, if only I had known earlier :P
Anyhow.. Fremont is only 15 miles from me.. Maybe I should go get one. Probably should have from the begining.
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. -- HS Thompson
I will always treasure my Hercules Monochrome ISA card. That little baby in its tiny, triangular beauty has served my linux servers well -- maybe I outta pull it from it's current position on a dual overclocked celeron system and retire it in a proper manner. *sniffle*
There's a LOT of differences between cards. Look at something like the Gainward, then the v3800 deluxe, then the Canopus - this is why we have sites (like mine) to review cards. and the RAM - everyone seems to use different configurations, and it does make a difference. The ERAZOR III has 4, the v3800 deluxe has 8, and the Guillemot has 16. From the cards that i've played with, 8 is the most overclockable/stable.
Looks like Hercules just wasn't strong enough to compete in the video card market.
OK, bad pun, couldn't help it.
[quote] My Hercules contact also sent me over another email, this time in regards to the USENET post that accused company officials of mismanagement and embezzlement.
"I want to let you know that rumors of embezzlement and mismanagement are false. In fact, the most of the employees, including upper management, have been working for weeks without pay." [/quote]
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Back in the late 1980s, Borland's debuggers supported dual monitors. When I found out about this I spent $300 I didn't have to upgrade my old 286 from CGA to VGA and raped an old XT for its Princeton amber monitor and its Hercules video+LPT card with (c)1982 BIOS. That's how I got into graphics programming--first in Turbo Pascal; later in C.
Years later when I was building a P150 Linux server for my home LAN, I ran across the card in my parts bin and dropped it in. Combined with a scavenged IBM green screen and a nice, clicky IBM keyboard, the system had such a wonderfully retro feel that I found myself going over to tap on it directly rather than telnetting in from my Win95 box in the den. I love having a powerful computer running a powerful OS and connecting to it through such a simple interface.
These days I spend most of my Linux time on a Pentium II laptop running RH6+Gnome, and I enjoy it. But there's something important about using a text-only environment from time to time. It's the difference between a book an a movie, and it reminds me that beautiful environments can obscure as well as clarify, and that I got into this whole mess to play with the computer, not to play with the interface.
Besides, playing Zork on a monochrome monitor feels so much better than getting to it through an xterm.
Anyhoo--thanks, Hercules, for being useful to me back in the day. I'm sorry that you and today's market have nothing in common anymore.
--
This is not my sandwich.
When you think Hercules; you think Monochrome Graphics Card. They were practically synonymous in most people's minds!
There was hardly any advertisement, media coverage or any attempt to change perception! They quietly made the best graphic cards there were and just as quietly them a secret.
Companies really need to take a lesson from Microsoft. It doesn't matter how good your product is; if you market it effectively, it'll sell. Heck, they sell cow-droppings and call it fertilizer for crissake!
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
I just checked their website and it doesn't mention anything about this. They still have the "TNT2, preorder NOW!" adverts posted.
This sucks, Herc was pretty good. I had a HGC in my old 286 and it was great for games. The Sierra titles looked better than CGA and I had a copy of SpaceWar that looked great. When I put together my first Pentium class computer (circa 1996) the ET6000 based Dynamite/128 was the way to go. That thing is rock solid and still pretty fast, 128bit graphics all the way, baby!
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Chances are you will never get your card or only get it after so long that the card is obsolete. If figure the employees will be more concerned about saving their own hide than some silly little customer. However you might trying asking your credit card company to contest the charge if you just recently paid for it by credit card. BTW, I live in Fremont, CA! Maybe I can go down there and set them straight for you ;-)
..how I wrote a breakout-type game on a 80286-12 (I think) and a Hercules graphics adapter in Grade 9 computer class. It's been a long time. Too bad to see Hercules go. *sniff*
Apparently Hercules is going out of business because of embezzlement and mismanagement. That's so depressing, being killed from the inside. I still remember when Test Drive came with monochrome drivers for Hercules.
Anybody remember Video 7? About a dozen others? Life goes on ... the graphics bidness is a whole different ballgame now. Interestingly, it was using their own chipsets that tanked Video 7 - now you pretty much need your proprietary solution to sell, which Herc didn't have. Wonder how much longer Nvidia and Diamond will wait before they get together?
Oh no! Now who will support my vintage 1988 Hercules mono video card in my spare 486?!
my hands are up :-)
:-)
well, I think I have to dust-off my old IBM PC (with its extension unit) and/or my old PC-XT to check if the hercules card is still working
Damn. This really bummed me out. Only a year ago, seemed like there were so many companies to choose from. Now since then, we've seen S3, Diamond, Canopus and Hercules all consolidated/pulled out of the market/closed etc. I am more than a little concerned about this.
Hopefully, some of the overseas brands like Guillemot and Miro will see an opportunity to step in. Or else we won't have many options when the next Killer Chipset comes out.
I pre ordered the TNT2 Ultra!!!
I've been trying to get in touch with a human being over there for the last trhee days; because I was charged, but I never got my card!
Anyone here already got theirs? I ordered the the Ultra w/TV-out (no dvd).
Damn, I'll have to get touch with Visa....
Do not read this
Most companies were simply tagging their name on nVidia drivers anyways, so that shouldn't be too much of a concern.
ooh god how I love screwing those /. ers.
/. u!
i waz in a rush and didn't have time to properly place my sig. 'k, heres a better formated message and opinions and all.
ya baby, i wanna
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
"The three principle virtues of Perl programers: mundaneness, sloppiness, and fatuousness."
I have a Hercules Dynamite TNT and I really like it... I was considering buying a Hercules Dynamite TNT2...and now I know why a friend of mine has been waiting for a couple of weeks to get his Dynamite TNT2...
its sad to see a company that has been around for so long close its doors...
Anyone live near Hercules HQ in Fremont and wanna pick a TNT2 for me? =)
--
Let's not all suck at the same time please
Let's not all suck at the same time please
Darn. After examining the TNT2 reviews on several web sites and discovering that the board from Hercules was widely acclaimed as the best of the lot, a couple of us here already had our wallets open and were waiting for it to come into stock at our local supplier.
What a shame for a good company that's been with the PC market since the earliest days.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
For those of you who don't know, hercules was also probably the first company to officially support linux. Around 1994-5, I bought a herc card for the sole reason that the box included "linux" in the list of supported drivers.
Good-bye hercules... You'll be missed.
-- Slashdot sucks.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
It's going to be interesting what's going to happen in the consumer graphics card market. 3dfx now makes their own cards exclusively, as does Matrox and ATI. I wonder if nVidia will pull out of the 3D chipset OEM business.
It seems to me that being a video card maker, while using someone elses chipset is not very profitable business.
Hands up who else remembers having your debugger running on a hercules monitor so you could see the output?
and how about the cga emulators? ahh, the memories.
The company who makes the chipset does release drivers that the card maker can modify to support features they may add to the TNT2 chipset. I would guess that most people are running the nVidia drivers instead of the card manufacture's becuase there have been speed increases in the driver and the card makers are slow to use the new reference drivers to upgrade thier own.
I don't see why this post got tagged with "Flaimbait" because it is a valid point. If each card vendor had to write thier own driver for the one chipset, what would be the point of nVidia releasing specs on the TNT cards to make X and Mesa dricers if they don't work with any of the consumer cards?
-- "Well, Hello, Mr. Fancy-pants. I've got news for you pal, you ain't in control but two things right now, Jack and s
It's going to be interesting what's going to happen in the consumer graphics card market. 3dfx now makes their own cards exclusively, as does Matrox and ATI. I wonder if nVidia will pull out of the 3D chipset OEM business.
It seems to me that being a video card maker, while using someone elses chipset is not very profitable business.
What a shame for a good company that's been with the PC market since the earliest days.
Why then, if the company was so good/so long standing, is it having such woes that it has to close up shop?
Tis indeed a sad thing.
Insert mind here.
Why is this marked down?
All the TNT card makers base their drivers on the NVidia reference, and many do nothing more that change a couple of the string resources before releasing them.
It's true that Hercules sometimes went the "extra mile" by bundling an overclocking utility, but existing (and the few future) owners of Hercules' TNT boards will be well catered for by the NVidia reference drivers and any one of the umpty-dozen 3rd-party O/C tools.
That said, I'm sorry to see them go, but what price now my old full-length 8-bit ISA Hercules mono graphics card with integrated parallel port?
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and so do Asus, Guillimot, LeadTek, et al.
That said, NVidia have signed a deal with ALi to integrate TNT graphics into the ALi motherboards.
Also, given how badly Matrox and 3dfx suck at OpenGL drivers (and drivers in general) I don't see NVidia departing the field of battle for a while yet...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Playing Zeliard and Prince of Persia on the crisp green display of a herc. I think I was 6 or 7 years old at the time and I loved it. It really is too bad a company that used to have so much market share is going under.
If only a certain richmon- based company with lots of marklet share would go under...
Traser
"Insanity is contagious." -Yossarian
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian
Let me guess... you use CuteFTP, right?
This seems a lot like when Diamond got bought by S3... they are discontinuing the Viper V770! And Hercules was one of the companies that was supposed to be one of the main dirtibutors of TNT2 with a couple of other companies (like Creative). So it seems that Creative is gonna have to step in and become the main TNT2 card provider.
It just seems that all the chip companies are starting to make their own boards... which doesn't look good. Less options doesn't seem like a good thing to me.
I smell conspiracy in the air...
Yep, and just because I can, I've decided to list all the programs I can think of I've used which lock up with my grapics card.
;-)
Here we go.
AIM
Cakewalk
CuteFTP
DirectCD
Explorer
ICQ
Litestep
Maple V
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Outlook (and Outlook Express)
Microsoft Access
Microsoft Powerpoint
MS Dev Studio
MSIE 5 (but not 4, and only when the toolbar's visible)
Netscape
Paint Shop Pro
Photoshop 5
Quake 2
Soundforge
Winamp
War-FTPD
Winzip (about 90% of the time I use it)
Yahoo Messenger
A recursive listing of c:\windows\*.exe
A recursive listing of c:\progra~1\*.exe
Countless install programs, including microsoft proprietary, installshield, and several others.
I can think of only 3 programs in Linux (X) that can do it too, but anyway...
Konsole
Eterm
Netscape (running java applets)
Needless to say, most of the programs it locks up with are the programs I use on a daily basis. So, it's not been very fun.
Why haven't I replaced it? All the other graphics cards around here are 16 bit ISA's, and I haven't had the drive to go out and purchase another PCI graphics card, when I am planning on using an AGP graphics card in my next computer.
So, I'd just like to say that when Hercules closes its doors, I won't be one mourning their loss.
I'll be out partying with my Matrox G400
my vote for funniest moderator bashing post.
We need a poll.....
+&x
Not three feet from me is an MSDOS system with both an SVGA PCI card and a Herc mono card, each driving appropriate monitors. For MSDOS and/or embedded DOS debugging, Turbo C++ 3.1, Turbo Debugger, and a Herc monochrome card / monochrome monitor is the _only_ way to travel. TD -do foobar.exe
It does...so much. This company was around forever. I remember Hercules when some of you were in diapers (grin). I remember their monochrome cards in the dos days. And of course they made the best Riva cards too-I guess it's up to Creative now to lead the way
---
Sorry if this is common knowledge or something, but... If you have to go to Fremont, CA to get the card itself, what are the odds that XFree86 is going to support it?
While you might not be able to access the powerful
features of the board, you can always use
nVidia's TNT reference drivers (WinXX only, sorry)
to use the card.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I expect someone will buy all their cards, then sell them off on ebay.
They were like canopus anyway, just not as much overpriced. BTW, the MEMORY runs at 200mhz, the CORE still runs at 175mhz. Its a 175/200 TNTu 32mb card. Paying $250 for a tnt2anything is a joke anyway. The $200 "discount" is the price it should have been to begin with.
There are only a few compnies that mean shit in the _gaming_ ($3000 worksation cards do not count, and some of those cards can barely get 10fps for games anyway, they're designed for other uses) 3D world, and some more than others. In _no_ particular order, 3dfx S3 Matrox ATI Nvidia 3Dfx went STB Diamond went S3 Matrox and ATI already had their own fab lines n such, so Matrox went Matrox and ATI went ATI basically. Creative will go Nvidia, just watch :) Or was it them who went S3 and diamond is still alone? I always mix these things up. Either way there are two players left, Nvidia and either diamond or creative, and they will join/buyout, not much choice to it.
...But three lefts do.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Wake up. There are many tnt2 cards, all pretty much the same except for memory, clock speeds, and added features. If you can write drivers for one, you can write them for all in 5 more seconds. Unless canopus made it ;) they always fuck things up with too much tweakage. (they have a spectra TNT2 in japan only,for about $350US ROFL)
well...
it's a pretty sad day.
the problem is that creative is so big that it can crush all other Small Hardware Manufactors.
first, STB is taken over by 3DFx.
then the diamond-S3 merge.
then 3dfx merged with S3.
Now the only BIG Players left are nVIdia and Matrox, it seems that nVidia will start Making thier own cards!
I still think that pepole with fast cpu's 400Mhz+ should get a MG400 Max graphics card. it is simply the best IMO, and mybe when nVidia will make thier own cards, Creative will start making Matrox card.
I must say the Graphic Card industry is like a soap opera!
DataOrb 1999
You must be chinese
Go to Nvidia's website (http://www.nvidia.com), and they have drivers there for Linux. They have a patched version of XFree86 (which I'm using under Slack 4.0 right now), with GLX for download, either in binary, or as patches for XFree86 3.3.3.1.
Quake II runs at 1024x768 hardware GLX accelerated on my AMD K6-2 450MHz on my Diamond Viper 770 TNT2.
Joe
For many years now Hercules has hosted a site called the monitor database. This database contains scan rates for many old monitors and this info is priceless. I would call upon any slashdoters with mirroriong software properly setup to start mirroring the monitor database before hercules closes the web page with it's doors. The monitor database section is at www.hercules.com in the support section. Thanks jason.salopek@usa.net
Most video cards seem to be the same now...one video processor chip (the nvidia in this case), 4 to 8 ram chips, and 2 smaller (interface?) chips. Sometimes there is a voltage regulator. The remainder is resistors and passive components. Also the general layout of the circuits is the same due to the pinout configuration of the video processor. Thus there is not much customization between various boards.
Hercules's first attempt to dig themselves out of their one-product hole probably harmed their chances - it was a pair of cards, one mono and one colour, which were basically done to the original Herc resolution but with downloadable soft text fonts and, in the case of the InColor card, colour text attributes plus a bitmapped color mode that was never used, I believe, except by Hercules's own demos. Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS did use the funky text modes to provide onscreen Greek and italics.
Everybody else was making VGA-compatible stuff and Paradise (now Western Digital) had the market sewn up for a time.
george
We ought to start a petition to have Herc release all the drivers for their cards as open source since they are going down anyway, at least that way they can still be improved.
it aint 'bait.
I had a Herc TNT2 Ultra for about a month and a half. Last week I started having problems and called tech support. Someone there named Joel told me to send the card in and then they would send a replacement. I got an RMA and the address and sent it in 2 days ago. He didn't say anything at all about them having problems. Then I read this about Herc closing their doors and how they won't be filling any more orders. Do I have any recourse here? Is there a chance that I'm just out $250? I feel sorry for Herc for going out of business, but right now I feel more sorry for me and my money.
Next example?
The NVidia site offers drivers for Win9x, NT, OS2, Linux, and BeOS!
Also, the reference drivers support ALL the "powerful features" of the chip.
Get your damn facts straight!
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I'll just say one thing. Hercules has sold me the only graphics card (Stingray 128/3D) that is not only capable of locking up an X Windows session, forcing me to hard-reboot, but locking up and hosing several installed libraries (including QT) in the process.
In MS Windows I get about 3-4 lockups a day, especially when I'm ftp'ing, very annoying.
I'm gonna be happy when I finally get my new system put together. I'll finally be able to, ahem, disassemble my graphics card. Now where'd I leave my blow torch and chain saw?