ATI always had great driver support for Win3.1 / Win9x and Linux (XFree86 / X11). Later versions also had VESA VBE support in the BIOS. Good DOS performance, good windows acceleration, and that near universal driver availability made them (especially the Mach64 bases cards) good cards to keep in spare for testing or using in an early to mid 90's build.

QBiN wrote:

ATI always had great driver support for Win3.1 / Win9x and Linux (XFree86 / X11).

That's interesting. I had the opposite experience with my Mach64 back when I used to try Linux LiveCDs on that hardware. Basically nothing would run it except Knoppix, and with Knoppix you still had to spacebar through a series of complaints. Whereas no problems with the S3.

Notes I took from elsewhere on Vogons at some point:

Stay away from old ATI cards. Bad for DOS games. S3 all the way. I'd look for an S3 Virge of some sort because then you can try out the shitty 3D on a faster machine someday if you're curious

The Mach64's are actually pretty fast in Windows, they just suck for DOS.
The thing is, on a 486 system, a lot more games are going to be in DOS than in Windows, so it's better to go for a balance of performance, which an S3 card would give you.

I installed a mach ati64 pci on one of my s7 asus p166 builds and I got some weird artifacts in some dos games such as in top gun flight sim game. I have since looked around on the Web for an explanation and I kept getting the same response. It's sucks for dos games. All in all though I didn't find it that bad and it worked with most dos games I threw at it but when it failed once in a while it did so miserably

I would like to find a ISA version of the Mach64. 🙁

386SX wrote:

I would like to find a ISA version of the Mach64. 🙁

For Windows, I would agree with you, I would like to have one as well, but for DOS, the good old Tseng ET4000 (for ISA) would be my first choice.

The thing about Mach64s was that they were not only well supported, but they were plentiful. S3 based cards also fell into that category. But ATI was made its own cards back then and was known for providing information to and sponsoring the XFree86 work.

Pewpewpew, I can't speak for recent releases that are X.org based, but but in the mid-nineties I had no issue with Mach64 based cards in either XFree86 or svgalib. I'm talkin old Slackware and Debian releases. Others I had been in contact with on the newsgroups and IRC had similar experiences. Nvidia support was terrible early on (late 90's) for Linux.

I must be remembering the early X.org period. Although, Etch with X.org was 2007... huh. I'm surprised I was messing with the Pentiums that late.