I have a Trident 9440 in one of my machines. Lousy card, I'd rather be running an S3, especially a Virge. If you had more options than that, I'd hunt down a card with an ATI Rage I/II/II+ chipset, like a 3D Charger, 3D Xpression or an Xpert 98 card. The last drivers for those are still available on the AMD website and some of them even have limited support for OpenGL.

There were many Trios of various speed, so I would go with certainty of Virge.

I remember S3 cards having some major incompatibility with something popular. I just can't put my finger on it. Can anyone remember what I'm talking about? A game, maybe? (NOT a 3D game, I'm not that stupid). Something about the color palette?

Actually S3 cards are supposed to be the best for compatibility. That's one of the reasons why Microsoft emulates a S3 Trio in Virtual PC.

McMick wrote:

A game, maybe? (NOT a 3D game, I'm not that stupid). Something about the color palette?

The only game off the top of my head I can recall screwing up big time on S3 Trio was Demolition Derby 2

I find warcraft 1 gives weird little graphical glitches on s3 cards, though the same applies to voodoos and nvidia cards. Like little visual crackles and pops.

So I use a matrox or 3dlabs card, which dont show this problem, or just use dosbox.

It's not really incompatibility, just poor quality something somewhere. So maybe not what you mean at all.

Trident 9440 is a dog. S3 Virge is far superior. I've found prior S3 chips to be much better too, such as the later 8xx/9xx chips. My ET4000 W32/p blew it away as well.

ratfink wrote:

I find warcraft 1 gives weird little graphical glitches on s3 cards, though the same applies to voodoos and nvidia cards. Like little visual crackles and pops.

So I use a matrox or 3dlabs card, which dont show this problem, or just use dosbox.

It's not really incompatibility, just poor quality something somewhere. So maybe not what you mean at all.

I actually played and finished warcraft 1 on Virge DX 4mb back in those times and I dont remember having any issues with it.

swaaye wrote:

Trident 9440 is a dog.

Yep. In 1996 I was dumb enough to buy one. I only expected it to be slow, but it also had patchy VBE support, crashed Win95 a lot, and made me enjoy my first months of Linux confined to the text console.

The first PCI card I bought was a 9440. I guess I was more impressed with it than you folks because I had upgraded from the 8900. Mechwarrior 2 was actually playable on the 9440.

I have a 4MB VirgeDX right now, so I guess I'll use that. Thanks for the replies!

I had an 8900c myself and moved to a CL GD5426. It didn't take much to blow away a 8900.

The Trident 9440 still blows away pretty much any ISA card. I have one, it's nothing to write home about, but I've seen worse.

Cirrus Logic -- Maybe THAT'S the card with the incompatibility that I'm thinking of. I'd completely forgotten about that company!