Guillemot Acquires Hercules

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.

Comments

This [is,could be] good news.

[transiit]

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

Re:I don't understand this type of logic..

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

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.

Re:also-ran acquires also-ran company

[smash]

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 :)

Re:Hercules and other issues...

[Nagash]

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

Re:This is a Good Thing!

[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.

Are they keeping Herc's developers?

[tjoynt]

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... :)

Re:I don't understand this type of logic..

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

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.

Re:also-ran acquires also-ran company

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

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.

Re:also-ran acquires also-ran company

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

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.

A Good Thing (tm)

[kramer000]

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.

spacewar on hercules was great!

[Splork]

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.

link

[cdlu]

The link goes to some main page with frames, try this one 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 :)

Hercules and other issues...

[Dextius Alphaeus]

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

also-ran acquires also-ran company

[LocalYokel]

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...

Nanao still exists ...

[timothy]

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

You should be careful what you mean

[aheitner]

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 (?)...

Re:This is a Good Thing!

[drix]

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.

Re:Does this mean the Xentor 32 will be back?

[draggy]

The Xentor is by Guillemot, not Hercules. So it was never gone.

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

I don't understand this type of logic..

[Dextius Alphaeus]

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

Re:Some of us still have Herc Cards-Wrong decade!

[mountain]

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).