very interesting read on this thx! My currect project-machine is a PCD-4H (486/DX2-66) it has a ET4000w32 Onboard with 1MB Ram.
Image is clear (no jailbars) but I put a MGA-Mystique PC 4MB in it. It has no better Image Quality but it seems to me that this MGA is
(a lot) faster and has more/better drivers and it has centered output on VGA-Textmode and lowres VGA gfx-modes, that is very important
to me. ET4000 cards tend to shift the image 5-7mm to the right (EGA is OK though) but that is not very handy.

I will have to prove that my experiences are right and that MGA is indeed faster than the ET4000W32 Onboard.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-04-15, 06:19:

I sincerely want to know who was the target audience of 2D acceleration on 16bit windows.

Anybody who needed more than 640 x 480 x 16, especially on the ISA bus.

High resolution and/or high color + slow bus = even the basic GUI operations like drawing windows and moving them around being painful.
In Windows - or any other GUI - everything benefits from accelerated graphics, even the common office software.
Note that there was a bunch of accelerator/coprocessor cards already in the 80s (PGC, 8514/A), but they didn't sell well.
The success of Windows 3.0 greatly increased the demand, and the stuff like ATI mach8 or S3 911 got relatively common.

I would be interested in how Falcon64 would compare with other cards mentioned here (card example : LINK and chip specs : LINK)

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-04-15, 06:19:

I sincerely want to know who was the target audience of 2D acceleration on 16bit windows.
Serious people used unix workstations (sgi, apollo/hp, sun, sony) or Macs. Games either didnt need it, or needed it badly but couldnt be made to work.

Back in the late 80s/early 90s, multi media was a thing. The oldest use case for multi media in the 80s was some kind of audio-visual encylopedia, like Encarta, I believe. On Mac, there was HyperCard..
CD-ROM technology also was a hot thing. Let's just think about Kodak Photo CD, CD-i and Video CD, they pioneered in the Windows 3.0 MME/3.1 days. Years before Windows 95 was around.

In the 80s, the Japanese generally had a high interest in CD technology. The FM Towns used CD-ROM technology and could boot Windows 3.1x later on.
There also was a video game console based on 80286/Windows 3.1x called "Tandy Video Information System".

But even in 1987, there was an interest in hi-res graphics - the IBM PS/2 monitors supported 640x480 60 Hz (progressive) and 1024x768 43Hz (interlaced) for IBM 8514/A. They were dual-frequency so to say.
The IBM 8514/A supported both resolutions, accelerated, in 256c. The very first version of OS/2 with Presentation Manager has drivers for it (OS/2 v1.1).
It supports 1024x768 in 256c out of box, without any extra drivers. A YouTube user has uploaded interesting 8514/A videos here.

Hm. It's hard to describe. I vaguely remember the pre-Windows 95 days, they were different. There was an interest in newest technology, but it was different a bit.
The early 90s were a bit like the mid-late 80s, culture wise. That's why software for stereoscopic images, red/green 3D glasses, Rubrick cube solving etc existed.

It still had that "Cyberpunk" feeling to it. In the early to mid 90s, Virtual Reality was a thing, too. For a short time. Together with the upcoming world wide web, it was very fascinating combination.
When Windows 95 came along, the experimental phase had turned into a more commercial phase. No idea how to put this into words, exactly.
Things didn't exactly stop with Windows 95. The change was smooth, rather. One era floated into another. Edited.

Edit: @Grzyb thanks for the update and the explanation. 😎 👍

Jo22 wrote on 2023-04-15, 19:27:

CD-ROM technology also was a hot thing. Let's just think about Kodak Photo CD, CD-i and Video CD, they pioneered in the Windows 3.0 MME/3.1 days. Years before Windows 95 was around.

As cited earlier video worked really bad until one year before win95, September 1994 when Microsoft shipped stolen Quicktime code 😀. All Windows 3.0 MME did in 1991 was MCI, standardized control of external players and overlay - Im thinking punching a chroma-keyed window? If you wanted any kind of video on Windows before 1994 you needed additional hardware decoder card plugged into Feature connector, meanwhile on Mac things worked couple years earlier on stock cpu and build in graphic hardware. 1991 release of QuickTime set Apple as the leading video platform, some notable examples are 1991 Adobe Premiere (build by ex Quicktime engineer), 1991 Avid (ported from Apollo $workstations$), 1992 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-04-15, 19:27:

In the 80s, the Japanese generally had a high interest in CD technology. The FM Towns used CD-ROM technology and could boot Windows 3.1x later on.

Zero acceleration unless we count sprites. Interesting graphic chip with possibility of overlaying 2 different video modes on top of each other, for example 320x240@256 with 640x480@16 on top, all non accelerated and memory mapped into 512 KB window. 320x240@256 sprite layer can be used as a second layer.
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/s … u/fmtowns_v.cpp

Jo22 wrote on 2023-04-15, 19:27:

There also was a video game console based on 80286/Windows 3.1x called "Tandy Video Information System".

again zero video acceleration 🙁 http://videogamekraken.com/visual-information … y-memorex-tandy :
"Like the CD-i, the VIS was marketed as an edutainment system and just like the CD-i, it failed at delivering a decent experience"
"With the sales going nowhere, they had to liquidate them through their way to fire-sale venues such as Home Shopping Club where the VIS was sold for $399. In the end, the system was sold for 99$ bundled with 20 titles."
"Shortly thereafter, Microsoft publicly denied that Modular Windows was ever a product"
"Tandy lost $75 million on VIS, as of July 1st 1993."
niice 😁

Jo22 wrote on 2023-04-15, 19:27:

But even in 1987, there was an interest in hi-res graphics - the IBM PS/2 monitors supported 640x480 60 Hz (progressive) and 1024x768 43Hz (interlaced) for IBM 8514/A. They were dual-frequency so to say.
The IBM 8514/A supported both resolutions, accelerated, in 256c...

yes the hardware was there, but WHO used it on windows? On Dos there was at least Autocad. 1000x700 interlaced 😮

Jo22 wrote on 2023-04-15, 19:27:

It supports 1024x768 in 256c out of box

hate to nitpick :] but 16 colors out of the box, 256 color required memory expansion. Even clones like 1990 $1000 MCA Western Digital Paradise 8514/A Plus shipped 512KB 16 color only and required additional ram expansion board. ATI mach8 starter $500-700 offerings were 512KB 16 color only, but at least you got proper 87Hz refresh and could buy $600-900 1MB card without hassle. This is imo important bit of information telling us where those cards were were aimed at - DOS AutoCad.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-04-15, 19:27:

, without any extra drivers. A YouTube user has uploaded interesting 8514/A videos here.

emulated and speed up x2-4 🙁
The question is how much something like shown here Micrografx Designer running on windows3 benefits from 2D acceleration, especially on contemporary 1990-94 486DX33 to 486DX4-100, thats between ATI Mach8 to Mach64 release dates.
Even ATI itself wasnt all that sure about Mach8 before release The History of the GPU - Steps to Invention:
"Despite concerns over poor market acceptance and sinking precious capital into an obsolete graphics standard, the management team at ATI charged ahead into the abyss, not knowing what was on the other side. Marketing had convinced executive management that ATI could reposition the 8514/A as a Windows accelerator board and tackle the high-end market."

What was that Windows high-end market damn it!?!? 😀

Somewhat sad/weird anecdote about Quicktime. First Video codec able to play fluid high resolution video (320x200 at the time) was Apple Road Pizza shipped with 1991 Quicktime 1.0, patented by Apple in 1990 https://patents.google.com/patent/US5046119. Algorithm https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/Apple_RP … lors_With_Index tldr:

1color0 = colorB
2color1 = (11 * colorA + 21 * colorB) / 32
3color2 = (21 * colorA + 11 * colorB) / 32
4color3 = colorA

and this is S3TC, S3 texture compression https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression DXT2/DXT3 patented by S3 in 1997 https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2008027413A3 and shipped in 1998 Savage3D:

10 color0
21 color1
32 (2*color0 + color1) / 3
43 (color0 + 2*color1) / 3

mathematically they are the same thing 😮
Now the funny bit - S3 sued Apple and won multiple cases https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/itc- … -124892519.html Apple instead of licensing decided to remove S3TC from all computers/phones/tablets/chips. How did Apple lose a case where they had prior art is beyond me.

Why was Apple leading in Video and Microsoft scrambling in a panic and stealing Apple codebase to compete? The answer is running dedicated research center since 1986, Advanced Technology Group (ATG) started by Larry Tesler
Oral History of Larry Tesler part 1 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZUhobpe6XA
Oral History of Larry Tesler Part 2 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OloLXE4I5fw
Oral History of Larry Tesler Part 3 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJKW7A2rC4s
Oral History of Andy Grignon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_VtQBIEb6I Quicktime 1995-1998, iPod, iPhone

Are there any real speed comparisons of a real 8514/A against ET4000 or S3 card on a lowend machine like a 286/386 ?

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-04-16, 06:11:

Are there any real speed comparisons of a real 8514/A against ET4000 or S3 card on a lowend machine like a 286/386 ?

Western Digital Paradise 8514/A Plus claimed 2x faster speed compared to original IBM, both MCA cards in PS2.
ATI was only publishing vague statements about synthetic micro benchmarks comparing against unaccelerated SVGA. 8514/Ultra "up to x100", 8514/Vantage "up to x50".
here Re: Complete newbie advice on ISA video cards required please user benchmarked Mach8 8514/Ultra against Diamond Stealth 24 (S3 P86C801, 8514 compatible acceleration) and Diamond Speedstar 64 ISA CL-GD5434 Re: Complete newbie advice on ISA video cards required please on 386DX40. Sadly using Winbench and without comparison to normal unaccelerated svga.

@rasz_pl Hi there! I'm afraid you're thinking too much DirectX style here.. 😅
Early "accelerators" like PGC, 8514/A or TIGA weren't so much about speed/throughput, but about lowering CPU load and lowering the bandwidth needed.
They also allowed graphics to look more pretty, without sacrificing workflow (think of shading, high colour depths etc).
I think it's accurate what Grzyb said about ISA bus and high resolutions/colour-depths.

Windows, at the time, was used as an intelligent graphics library or framework, essentially.
The wonderful thing was that Windows devices, like printers, were available to all Windows applications.
- GDI was used for printers, too. All in all, Windows was like a hardware abstraction/emulation layer (HAL, HEL) at the time.
That was the main purpose or original purpose of GDI, after all. Hardware-Independency.

Also, a simple "set pixel" can be accelerated by intelligent hardware, too. It's not mandatory to use sprites or tiles to make that work.
Smart Windows drivers use tricks like dirty rectangle (merely update parts of screen that have changed). Standard VGA driver does it, too.
The early Windows Accelerators did implement some form of blitting, too, which was handy for drawing large bitmaps on screen.
Some accelerators also had a video memory that held parts of the Windows GUI, like fonts or the windows decorations (minimize, maximize icons etc).
The mouse cursor was also implemented in hardware.. All this little things helped to improve the user experience.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-04-16, 04:54:

As cited earlier video worked really bad until one year before win95, September 1994 when Microsoft shipped stolen Quicktime cod […]
Show full quote

Jo22 wrote on 2023-04-15, 19:27:

CD-ROM technology also was a hot thing. Let's just think about Kodak Photo CD, CD-i and Video CD, they pioneered in the Windows 3.0 MME/3.1 days. Years before Windows 95 was around.

As cited earlier video worked really bad until one year before win95, September 1994 when Microsoft shipped stolen Quicktime code 😀.
All Windows 3.0 MME did in 1991 was MCI, standardized control of external players and overlay - Im thinking punching a chroma-keyed window?
If you wanted any kind of video on Windows before 1994 you needed additional hardware decoder card plugged into Feature connector,
meanwhile on Mac things worked couple years earlier on stock cpu and build in graphic hardware. 1991 release of QuickTime set Apple as the leading video platform, some notable examples are 1991 Adobe Premiere (build by ex Quicktime engineer), 1991 Avid (ported from Apollo $workstations$), 1992 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe.

I'm not sure if that's the whole story.
It's not as if we lived in a stone age before Windows 95 was around. 🤣 No, things rather gradually evolved over the years.
Windows 3.0 was a breakthrough, but even Windows 1.0 had hi-def applications at some point.
There was video conferencing done on Windows 3.1x before Windows 95, even.

Video worked fine before Windows 95, as far as I can tell.
There was DCI, a video driver specificiation/feature, which was used by Xing MPEG Player (if available) - to name a popular application.
WinG (another technology) was used in both Windows 3.x and Windows 95 days. Alternatively, there was WinDirect API, albeit less popular.
CAD/CAM programs had their own APIs, which some of the graphics card boxes of the era do mention.

Windows 3.0 MME shipped with .MMM codec for playing animations in 1991.
Autodesk Animation Player for Windows (AAPLAY/WIN) was available since 1990/1991 and ran on plain Windows 3.0.

The original Video for Windows, v1.0, released in 1992 runs on 80286 PCs and needs no hardware decoder.
Not for the supplied Video 1 codec, at least.

Besides Video for Windows and QuickTime, there also was Ultimotion codec for OS/2 2.11/Warp and Windows 3.1x.
And there was Real Player on Windows 3.1/95. It was used as an alternative to QuickTime at the time (mid 90s, introduced about '94-'96).
Both were available as browser plug-ins for Netscape 2.x, as well. Real Player also was popular for web radio and web audio (*.RA, real audio).

MPEG boards and video compression boards were mainly needed to create content.
Ideally, the PCs also had them for playing back MPEG/Video CD in real-time, stutter-free (no frameskip) in full colour.
On a low-end system with poor CPU/graphics, things like dithering could have unnecessarily slowed down software-decoding at the time.

That's why even the Philips CD-i player had a dedicated MPEG module in a slot, for playing MPEG-1/Video CD.
CD-i video discs, by contrast, did work without that digital video cartridge, maybe. Have to check.

Macintoshs needed System 7 and an 68040 or higher CPU for playing back Video CD, I vaguely remember.
They also needed an MPEG decoder in the early days, I believe.

But when 486 PCs became more and more powerful, software decoding became a real alternative.
Xing MPEG Player is/was such an alternative at the time (Windows 3.1 and 95 versions available; 95 version supported MMX later on).
The upcoming PCI graphics cards often had video features, such as colour conversion, hardware-zoom etc.

But what exactly does "stole Quicktime code" actually mean ? Who ported QuickTime to Windows ? Was there a license agreement involved ?
Microsoft and Apple had an ambivalent relationship in history, always blaming the other. Didn't they both stole in one way or another ? 😀
The TrueType font technology found its way into both Windows 3.1 and System 7, too. There were so many parallels between both platforms, anyway.

Edit: Didn't QuickTime itself support DCI enabled drivers, among other things ? Why support such an "illegal" technology ?

PS: It's not easy to name all use cases for hi-def Windows graphics.
The most fitting answer might be "for about everything".

Things that come to mind..

Communications programs for services like AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe or T-Online.
They made use of animations, buttons, GIF pictures, colour gradients etc.
In short, were graphics intensive and used GDI resources.

Kodak Photo CD supported pictures in up to 4096×6144 pels resolution, 24-Bit colour depth,
now try do display those 70 MB worth of data on an unaccelerated system in 1993! 😜

Then, Windows programming in Visual Basic 1-3 really flourished in the years before Windows 95.
There was a huge market for VBX extensions, too. Making your own pretty Windows applications was easy before Windows 95.
The visual part, at least. The form designer was fun to use, bitmaps, sounds and MIDI could be easily embedded.
Long story short, it made multi media programming easy as pie. Only the hardware was the limit.
This was something very unique to the 16-Bit era, I think. It was very playful and colourful.

Some people may also used Windows as an interface for house automation.
Which means, big pictures and buttons for the graphical interface, etc.

Also interesting in this context, maybe - the GDI of Windows 95 is still largely "16-Bit" (cooperative multitasking, same API calls) and very similar to Windows 3.1x GDI.

In fact, Windows 95 can still operate on existing Windows 3.1x graphics drivers, which implement the majority of GDI functions themselves.

Using old drivers on 95 may even solve compatibility issues, if an application was written in the transitional time between 3.1x and 95.

What's new in Windows 95 is the use of mini drivers and the support for new brushes/graphic primitives (bezier curves come to mind).
When using mini drivers, the majority of GDI is located on the Windows side,
with graphics drivers merely containing the hardware-related functions (low-level stuff).

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/it-was-a-problem … ack-in-the-day/

To establish interaction with 16/32-Bit DLLs and functions, Windows uses thunking.
Anyway, you likely heard about that before.

There are a few Windows 3.95 applications that require/use the new functions of Windows 95.
In the early days of Windows 95, existing 16-Bit development software could use new API functions, because they were accessible through Win16 API.
The result is a NE executable that wants to run on Windows 3.95, rather than Windows 3.1x.

The reverse is also true, by the way.
A few Win32 applications were written with Windows 3.1+Win32s in mind and won't work with Windows 9x/NT.
That's because they rely on coopetative multi-tasking and make direct calls to Win16 DLLs,
in a way that's not supported by anything but Win32s.

That's why I think that both Windows 3.1x and 95 have their place.
One cannot always replace the other.

Edit: Last but not least, there are two use cases of Windows 3.x for Windows gaming: 16-Bit QuickTime and WinG.
16-Bit QuickTime (for 16-Bit QT titles) is known to be unstable on Windows 95,
while Windows 98/Me may have have palette issues with WinG.

Here are some pictures, partially taken in 2016 on real hardware running Windows 98SE and Me.
Re: Uses for Each Windows

If you're tinkering with old multimedia hardware, like old ISA TV tuner cards or MPEG boards,
Windows 3.1x or its drivers may come in handy.
They support DCI or other features, which may not be available in Windows 95 anymore.
There was a DCI32 planned, but it was scrapped eventually.

Another thing is support for CD-i and Japanese/Asian CD-ROM formats.
They're supported by DOS-based MSCDEX, but not by Windows 95's built-in equivalent.

So for that early 90s experience, either a real Windows 3.1x Installation is required or
Windows 95 must be operated on DOS drivers for full CD-ROM support (incl. MSCDEX), which cripples performance.
Alternatively, an experimental driver can be used, also.
See http://www.icdia.co.uk/articles/filesystem.html

Edit: Formatting fixed (on PC)..

Edit: My apologies for the long text again.. I got carried away again. I hope you don't mind. 😅
Windows 3.x kind of is a favorite topic of mine, it was my main "OS" throughout the 90s.