Posted by
Hemos
on 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.
This [is,could be] good news.
by
transiit
·
· Score: 3
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:Hercules and other issues...
by
Nagash
·
· Score: 5
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
Are they keeping Herc's developers?
by
tjoynt
·
· Score: 3
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...:)
-- --==Hail Eris!!==--
spacewar on hercules was great!
by
Splork
·
· Score: 3
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 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:)
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
-- -- Java is not a Jedi trait... "do, or do not, there is no try" --
also-ran acquires also-ran company
by
LocalYokel
·
· Score: 4
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...
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.
Re:Some of us still have Herc Cards-Wrong decade!
by
mountain
·
· Score: 5
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).
-- ---
"If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still
wrong?"
Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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...
--==Hail Eris!!==--
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 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
OFTC: By the community, for the community
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
-- Java is not a Jedi trait... "do, or do not, there is no try" --
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?
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:
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...
--
E2 IN2 IE?
Can't speak for today's NEC CRT monitors (but they used to make some great ones ... ), but I like their current flat panels.
...
... 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.
... 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.
... one day I'll be able to afford a flat panel, too.
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
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
timothy
Ah
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
According to the Programmers Guide to the EGA, VGA and Super VGA Cards : Third Edition, page 101...
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"