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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."
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.
There is a strong suggestion (but no actual promise, mind) that those who have had their credit cards charged will receive their boards. It just may take a while.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
> It seems to me that being a video card maker, while using someone elses chipset is not very profitable business.
Diamond seems to do better with others' chipsets than their own. Know anyone who likes the Stealth at all? Now what about the Viper line?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Whup, my mistake, Diamond doesn't make the Stealth either, that was usually based on an S3 chip. So Diamond in general seems to be doing quite well without their own chips.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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:
Doing well? Other than being owned by S3 and losing major amounts of money...
Diamond has been on the ropes for a while now, either barely breaking even or actually losing money. That's why S3 could pick them up so cheaply, even though S3 itself is hardly in the best of health.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Maybe this should be taken as a piece of advice for anyone wanting to get in the 3D accelerator market: don't have the best nVidia-based card. :)
I digress, however. My first x86-based PC (an 8MHz 286) had a Hercules monochrome card (HGC). It's too bad this card was unappreciated; people seemed to think that CGA's slow and crappy 320x200x4 color and 640x200x2 monochrome modes could hold a candle to HGC's awesomely fast 720x384 (IIRC - god it's been a long time). It's not like CGA's color mode was normally used for anything more than quasi-grayscale images anyway, seeing as how it had such a horrible choice of palettes. (Of course, the even-slower but neat 160x100x16 mode was nice, but almost never used.)
Hercules has always had the fastest, if not overlooked, graphics cards on the market. Their engineers actually knew what they were doing, rather than just churning out cheap knockoff boards, and later (when it became more effective to use someone else's chipset) reference board after reference board.
This is a sad day indeed. A legacy is ending. Of course, there's other good video card manufacturers out there, but aside from Asus and Elsa, they're all basically reference designs, and the only real comparison between the boards is cost. Hercules cards were more expensive, but when the deciding factor was pure speed, Hercules was always there.
It's too bad that in the late 80s and even early 90s, nobody realized that Hercules was still around, and nearly everyone who'd heard of them equated Hercules with "crappy monochrome graphics" and couldn't believe that they had, say, the fastest ET4000/W32-based accelerator on the market.
The few games that were put out with HGC support (most Sierra adventure games, most Broderbund games, most notably Prince of Persia) looked *so* much better in Hercules than in CGA. Prince of Persia had a very nice 'cinematic' view (long before that was popular) and very sweet-looking dithering whereas the CGA version just looked crude. The Sierra programmers put a nice feature in their games for the HGC version which didn't go into the "mainstream" view until much later with their point-and-click interface; while typing a command, a dialog box would pop up and the game would freeze. (In CGA, the game would just keep on going, and so many scenes in King's Quest and Leisure Suit Larry became more of a speed-typing challenge than puzzle-solving.)
It's too bad that they apparently never got out of their "didn't they do that crappy monochrome graphics card back in the 80s?" brandname funk. They will be missed.
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