BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-18, 15:53:

I just thought of something that would be interesting... […]
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I just thought of something that would be interesting...

Voodoo2 on an FPGA on a mini PCI card for late 90s early 00s laptops. Though either internally cobbling to VESA pins or whatever you'd need to do to get it on the LCD might be a pain. Otherwise I guess it's awkward ribbon cable to VGA out for monitor only.

If it did it over PCI completely like a PowerVR or MPEG card that would be easier. Power VR cards aren't super complex, wonder what the chip situation is like, hmmm.

edit: NEC chips might be "around" ... can't read Japanese tho ... https://datasheet.datasheetarchive.com/origin … SASW0064371.pdf

Sounds reasonable!

There once was at least one V2 for iMac Mezzanine slot, too, so a compact size per se seems doable.
http://www.users.totalise.co.uk/~robert.thoms … n/indexold.html

The PowerVR for Mini PCIe would be interesting, too.
I remember that their had been h.264 decoders for netbooks once.
Were based on a Broadcom chip, I think. Habey HB-VD920 etc.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-18, 15:53:

I just thought of something that would be interesting... […]
Show full quote

I just thought of something that would be interesting...

Voodoo2 on an FPGA on a mini PCI card for late 90s early 00s laptops. Though either internally cobbling to VESA pins or whatever you'd need to do to get it on the LCD might be a pain. Otherwise I guess it's awkward ribbon cable to VGA out for monitor only.

If it did it over PCI completely like a PowerVR or MPEG card that would be easier. Power VR cards aren't super complex, wonder what the chip situation is like, hmmm.

edit: NEC chips might be "around" ... can't read Japanese tho ... https://datasheet.datasheetarchive.com/origin … SASW0064371.pdf

It's a good idea, but many laptops from the late 90's & early 00's have good 3D cards already.

I would dispute the good 3D and that there are still many, there's dozens and dozens with chipset graphics, rage mobilities and S3 stuff, for every one that had Geforce or Radeon, until a few years into the noughts. 2003 or so the proportion with better graphics rose somewhat. Having been a laptop shopper in that timeframe when they were new, it was hard to find one with decent graphics then, sure, the magazines reviewed them, finding them for sale was another matter. I never ordered direct from Alienware or anything like that though, so I wasn't looking at $3000+ machines. Then there was the "forgot how to make hinges" "bad caps" "lead free solder" agents of slaughter which took these things out at a massively high rate. So apart from getting real lucky or spending a fortune on eBay after searching for months, you're not likely to get your hands on one now.

Dos capable sound went away just as the higher proportion of late retro compatible graphics kicked in, or the Turion/Sempron models that survived solder problems would be nice with X200/X300 onboard, which are basically Radeon 9600s. By then, screens were wide too.

Anyway, repro Voodoos are selling for desktops that could have any other card plugged into them, so I don't think the existence of other options is a factor. PowerVR doesn't have quite so much of a following though, but seems way easier to do. It's more of a tinker/novelty option rather than the be all and end all of late 90s 3D.

PowerVR certainly looks compact enough

Adapter for using Slot 2 Pentium II/III Xeon processors on Slot 1 motherboards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_I ... (P6-based)

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-19, 15:23:

I would dispute the good 3D and that there are still many, there's dozens and dozens with chipset graphics, rage mobilities and S3 stuff, for every one that had Geforce or Radeon, until a few years into the noughts. 2003 or so the proportion with better graphics rose somewhat.

My first gaming laptop was from early 2006. It was based on a Clevo M570A chassis. I believe it had an nVidia Geforce Go 7800 GTX and Pentium M CPU. It played all the latest games at high settings.

I dont recall their being any worthwhile gaming laptops much before that. But maybe I am wrong.

I have a Dell D600 from around 2003 with Radeon Mobility 9000. It struggles with games from 2001 onwards really.

While the datasheet is in Japanese, the pin out and supported memory configuration pages are really in English (obviously), so at least that clears obstacle to designing the PCB.
That being said, is there still NOS inventory of the NEC made PowerVR somewhere in the world?
I assume the demand for this chip dried up by 1999, and remember Matrox fire selling their m3D card with this chip over at CompUSA back then ($30 after a mail-in rebate type of a deal).
On an unrelated topic, I have purchased several NOS copies of S3 Savage4 Pro recently.
I will eventually like to manufacture PCI and AGP version graphics cards eventually.
It is definitely a better chip than ATI Rage XL.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-18, 15:53:

I just thought of something that would be interesting... […]
Show full quote

I just thought of something that would be interesting...

Voodoo2 on an FPGA on a mini PCI card for late 90s early 00s laptops. Though either internally cobbling to VESA pins or whatever you'd need to do to get it on the LCD might be a pain. Otherwise I guess it's awkward ribbon cable to VGA out for monitor only.

If it did it over PCI completely like a PowerVR or MPEG card that would be easier. Power VR cards aren't super complex, wonder what the chip situation is like, hmmm.

edit: NEC chips might be "around" ... can't read Japanese tho ... https://datasheet.datasheetarchive.com/origin … SASW0064371.pdf

bracecomputerlab wrote on 2026-01-22, 08:17:

While the datasheet is in Japanese, the pin out and supported memory configuration pages are really in English (obviously), so at least that clears obstacle to designing the PCB.
That being said, is there still NOS inventory of the NEC made PowerVR somewhere in the world?
I assume the demand for this chip dried up by 1999, and remember Matrox fire selling their m3D card with this chip over at CompUSA back then ($30 after a mail-in rebate type of a deal).

With a superficial search I found a couple of places with 4 figure inventory numbers, but I have not reached out to confirm. It would be easier if some turned up on eBay or somewhere, to get a few to mess with. Yeah I saw the pin labelling but assumed there might be some important notes in the text. Though I am not super sure that's a "real" datasheet, since there is not enough packaging and timing info on it.

Right, 1999 or so they were super cheap on a card, I got an Apocalypse 3Dx for $12 from Compgeeks back then, kinda wish I had grabbed a dozen now.

Anyway, still gotta confirm the chip would fit in MiniPCI card dimensions... and it would be a fat boy with PVR on one side, DRAM and crystal on the back and whatever most essential discretes crammed in.

Next guess, 32 bit PCCard for type III slot only maybe.

bracecomputerlab wrote on 2026-01-22, 08:17:

On an unrelated topic, I have purchased several NOS copies of S3 Savage4 Pro recently. I will eventually like to manufacture PCI […]
Show full quote

On an unrelated topic, I have purchased several NOS copies of S3 Savage4 Pro recently.
I will eventually like to manufacture PCI and AGP version graphics cards eventually.
It is definitely a better chip than ATI Rage XL.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-18, 15:53:

I just thought of something that would be interesting... […]
Show full quote

I just thought of something that would be interesting...

Voodoo2 on an FPGA on a mini PCI card for late 90s early 00s laptops. Though either internally cobbling to VESA pins or whatever you'd need to do to get it on the LCD might be a pain. Otherwise I guess it's awkward ribbon cable to VGA out for monitor only.

If it did it over PCI completely like a PowerVR or MPEG card that would be easier. Power VR cards aren't super complex, wonder what the chip situation is like, hmmm.

edit: NEC chips might be "around" ... can't read Japanese tho ... https://datasheet.datasheetarchive.com/origin … SASW0064371.pdf

Those would be cool, I'm a couple dozen projects away from needing a second Savage though.

It does not appear that the very short Japanese language datasheet (14 or so pages) contains anything other than its chip pin out and general memory configuration.
Since this version of NEC PowerVR does not contain a VGA graphics core, one does not need a VGA BIOS ROM.
This makes the ROM copyright issue a non-issue for a "gonzo" retro graphics card.
I guess the chip used in VideoLogic Neon 250 is not really available (they probably weren't produced in numbers), and this one requires far more of design support to make a graphics card.

S3 Savage4 happened to have excellent hardware and register programming documentation on the Internet, and the only missing is a customer reference schematic.
This is why I decided to purchase several of them recently.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-22, 15:00:

With a superficial search I found a couple of places with 4 figure inventory numbers, but I have not reached out to confirm. It […]
Show full quote

bracecomputerlab wrote on 2026-01-22, 08:17:

While the datasheet is in Japanese, the pin out and supported memory configuration pages are really in English (obviously), so at least that clears obstacle to designing the PCB.
That being said, is there still NOS inventory of the NEC made PowerVR somewhere in the world?
I assume the demand for this chip dried up by 1999, and remember Matrox fire selling their m3D card with this chip over at CompUSA back then ($30 after a mail-in rebate type of a deal).

With a superficial search I found a couple of places with 4 figure inventory numbers, but I have not reached out to confirm. It would be easier if some turned up on eBay or somewhere, to get a few to mess with. Yeah I saw the pin labelling but assumed there might be some important notes in the text. Though I am not super sure that's a "real" datasheet, since there is not enough packaging and timing info on it.

Right, 1999 or so they were super cheap on a card, I got an Apocalypse 3Dx for $12 from Compgeeks back then, kinda wish I had grabbed a dozen now.

Anyway, still gotta confirm the chip would fit in MiniPCI card dimensions... and it would be a fat boy with PVR on one side, DRAM and crystal on the back and whatever most essential discretes crammed in.

Next guess, 32 bit PCCard for type III slot only maybe.

bracecomputerlab wrote on 2026-01-22, 08:17:

On an unrelated topic, I have purchased several NOS copies of S3 Savage4 Pro recently. I will eventually like to manufacture PCI […]
Show full quote

On an unrelated topic, I have purchased several NOS copies of S3 Savage4 Pro recently.
I will eventually like to manufacture PCI and AGP version graphics cards eventually.
It is definitely a better chip than ATI Rage XL.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-18, 15:53:

I just thought of something that would be interesting... […]
Show full quote

I just thought of something that would be interesting...

Voodoo2 on an FPGA on a mini PCI card for late 90s early 00s laptops. Though either internally cobbling to VESA pins or whatever you'd need to do to get it on the LCD might be a pain. Otherwise I guess it's awkward ribbon cable to VGA out for monitor only.

If it did it over PCI completely like a PowerVR or MPEG card that would be easier. Power VR cards aren't super complex, wonder what the chip situation is like, hmmm.

edit: NEC chips might be "around" ... can't read Japanese tho ... https://datasheet.datasheetarchive.com/origin … SASW0064371.pdf

Those would be cool, I'm a couple dozen projects away from needing a second Savage though.

Gotta dump this idea out of my head so I can get on with the bajillion projects I already have...

The pico-286 project puts early ATish emulated hardware in a relatively miniscule package. That's fact one. Fact two is that Sega Game gear had a plug in TV cartridge with tuner, to watch TV on the Game Gear. However, there was a later variance in production that disabled this functionality, so only earlier Game Gears can do TV input off a composite pin on the cart slot.

So proposal to make DOS-Gear or 286-Gear or something cartridge that uses composite in for CGA or downsampled VGA graphics. Thus enabling a simple DOS machine, probably need your bootable media to have a menu system, externally configured, that lets you play some DOS games on the Game Gear.

However, this is a bit of a solved problem vis a vis the handheld console DOS actualisation, because you can do it merely as a software solution in one of two ways. The first is to hack a leapfrog handheld, and use linux emulators, it's only a 600mhz or so ARM so don't expect too much speed. The second is that rash of emulator handhelds that was around 5 years ago, those should also be able to run linux emulators... though I never found one to get into it much myself.

Thus it is a bit of a toy for those who might already have a Game Gear.

I always thought it would be cool if some early 3D card had hidden SLI support and just no one thought to test it.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-04-12, 21:11:

So proposal to make DOS-Gear or 286-Gear or something cartridge that uses composite in for CGA or downsampled VGA graphics. Thus enabling a simple DOS machine, probably need your bootable media to have a menu system, externally configured, that lets you play some DOS games on the Game Gear.

The TV tuner actually takes control of the LCD and drives it with native data format of the LCD, leaving all scaling etc. to the task of the chips in the tuner... But you can definitely hook up a CGA or EGA card to the tuner and enjoy extremely blurry video, and not just in the sense of motion blur. Text will be unreadable since the LCD has only 160 x 144 pixel resolution. There's not much one can do to get readable text except perhaps with some sort of custom solution that does the same LCD drive as the tuner does and utilizes some sort of adaptive font downscale that can recognize a 8x8 character and redraw it as 4x5 or something similar, while not getting in the way of regular graphics too much...

It would be a very interesting challenge for sure 🤣

Discovered the other day that the Matrox Millennium first generation (IS-STORM / IS-MGA-2064W) is ISA compatible but no ISA cards appeared to have been made.

The IS-STORM / IS-MGA-2064W is the longest made GPU chip at 20 years (1994-2014). It does 2D GUI, 3D (hardware gouraud shading, software texturing), Video for Windows acceleration. APIs: OpenGL, Direct3D, Renderware, others.

It is basically identical in function to the previous IS-ATHENA cards, but is 208 pin instead of 240, and uses WRAM. WRAM is identical to VRAM except uses larger bit blocking windows. The IS-MGA-2064W R3 operates at 60MHz instead of the first gens' 50Mhz. Supports 2/4/8MB WRAM.

I did some work on the chances of making a successful ISA card and I think it's worth it if you have already made an IS-ATHENA...
-The datasheet on the IS-STORM / IS-MGA-2064W has no pinout, and requires work.
-IS-ATHENA datasheet does contain information on hardware straps (required to select PCI/ISA mode), pinout, PCI/ISA pin differences. Identical pins on both likely do the same thing.
-IS-ATHENA ISA card has the ISA-specific buffers/latches on known pins.
-BIOS on the IS-STORM is now on the WRAM memory bus, and would likely work the same in either PCI/ISA mode.
-Windows drivers for the IS-STORM probably use the wrong IRQs, but not impossible to change.