VOGONS


First post, by kalloggs40

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Hey everyone,

Just wondering i purchased an Ati Rage XL 8mb PCI card, i needed it for early 3d Games like in 1995-1997. I was wondering why are there thousands of them for sale new, are these replicas? Are they still being manufactured? (Originals)?

Reply 1 of 16, by Tetrium

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Dunno. But I do know those old Ati cards were as common as S3 graphics cards back then. We used to have bucketloads of those, very very common back in the day.

They "could" be NOS but I don't know for sure.

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Reply 2 of 16, by Oldskoolmaniac

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Grab one and find out there very cheap, im sure there the real deal they where very mass produced.

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Reply 3 of 16, by kalloggs40

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Yeah its really strange becauase they dont come in genuine looking boxes, more generic like. Maybe they still use for servers and they still produce them. Ebay and Aliexpress are full of new ones.

I have an S3 64v 1mb but it wont run windows 98 in 16million colours, it goes all funny and freezes as well sometime. I run at 256 color fine.

Reply 5 of 16, by oeuvre

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I got one for cheap on eBay and it works great for Windows 95. You can use Mach64 drivers for it under DOS + Win 3.1

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Reply 6 of 16, by PhilsComputerLab

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I'm not 100% sure about the Rage XL, but with later cards there are the "proper" ATI cards, they are quite hard to find. And then there are the masses of OEM cards, eBay is flooded with them, but they can often be slower or lack features like video inputs and outputs. And I also found that researching just leads to conflicting information 😀

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Reply 8 of 16, by kalloggs40

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oeuvre wrote:

I got one for cheap on eBay and it works great for Windows 95. You can use Mach64 drivers for it under DOS + Win 3.1

I gave up on the windows 3.1 project just wont intall any drivers even my ess 1868f sound card or the S3 64v, it just freezes up, but i am looking on buying 4 old 386x's from ebay at the moment.

Its a 2hr drive though

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/232190421404?_trks … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

Oops just noticed he removed the sale!!! damn

Reply 9 of 16, by Ampera

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kalloggs40 wrote:

Yeah its really strange becauase they dont come in genuine looking boxes, more generic like. Maybe they still use for servers and they still produce them. Ebay and Aliexpress are full of new ones.

I have an S3 64v 1mb but it wont run windows 98 in 16million colours, it goes all funny and freezes as well sometime. I run at 256 color fine.

I have an S3 Trio32 VLB card that works 24+8 bpp 640x480 and 15+1 bpp 800x600 with 1024x768 and 1240x1024 running @ 256 colours

Reply 10 of 16, by lazibayer

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kalloggs40 wrote:

Hey everyone,

Just wondering i purchased an Ati Rage XL 8mb PCI card, i needed it for early 3d Games like in 1995-1997. I was wondering why are there thousands of them for sale new, are these replicas? Are they still being manufactured? (Originals)?

I reckon they are not manufactured by any well-known vendors. The cards may be new, but the chips might be either "new old-stock", or salvaged from decommissioned server motherboards. The chip itself is basically a shrunk from Rage Pro and mainly used as integrated VGA chip on server boards. Many of these new cards have only 32bit memory bitwidth as opposed to the 64bit memory on Rage Pro.

Reply 11 of 16, by Imperious

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I have one of these cards. It came out of a Point of sale computer from a shop somewhere.
It worked fine in Win95 and Dos. Good Dos image quality.

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Reply 12 of 16, by yawetaG

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Imperious wrote:

I have one of these cards. It came out of a Point of sale computer from a shop somewhere.
It worked fine in Win95 and Dos. Good Dos image quality.

That might be the other option, that those cards are produced for point of sale and industrial systems that need to survive decades of use. The advantage of that may be that they are relatively bug-free, because crashing an industrial system could have catastrophic results.

Reply 13 of 16, by kalloggs40

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[/quote] have an S3 Trio32 VLB card that works 24+8 bpp 640x480 and 15+1 bpp 800x600 with 1024x768 and 1240x1024 running @ 256 colours[/quote]

Yeah i have feeling something was wrong with mine, even in windows 3.11 it would freeze upon driver install.

Reply 16 of 16, by Pierre32

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matti157 wrote on 2021-11-19, 23:14:

I didn't understand which driver to use on Windows 95. The one in vogonsdrivers that is called "enhanced" does not work.

Pasting an old post of mine from elsewhere, on how I got one of these 'new' ebay cards working in a Win98 system. Might be useful. Might not.

I tried the Pro & 128 drivers from Phil's page, but the installers weren't detecting the card. So I grabbed the big Catalyst pack from Vogons Drivers and tried a heap of different versions, all ending in detection failures. But some of the error messages (ala "try installing the standard VGA driver") pointed me in the right direction.

On Windows startup I had been declining the hardware wizard's offer to locate a driver. But on the next reboot I let it run, and it installed the standard VGA driver. Then from Device Manager I was able to update manually, pointing it to Phil's Pro package - the oldest one. Success!

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ati-9x-driver-archive.html

That said, Phil's page only seems to have 98 drivers. Maybe try some of these: https://vintage3d.org/driver.php