There were cards that could do up to 1280x1024 and provided excellent speed, but they were using dedicated GDI accelerator chips like the Weitek P9000 series. The chips couldn't do standard VGA modes though, so they relied on a (usually slow/crappy) VGA chip to handle common DOS modes. VESA BIOS Extension support with the P9000 was horrible too, it required a TSR to enable due to a buggy ROM. UniVBE was a must with these.

The last generation of ISA VGA cards were quite good actually. In those days I had Tseng ET4000 w32 2MB ISA - it had good Win311 GUI acceleration. I sold it before W95 came out. Now I'm looking to find it somewhere... 😉 But I do have Cirrus Logic 5429 2MB ISA and at the moment I have a 386DX-40 configured to run W95 OSR2.1 with this card. It doesn't feel slow - I'm running at 640x480 16bit mode. I also tested it with 486DLC-40 with Quake timedemo and its actually a bit faster then Cirrus Logic 5428 2MB VLB.

I'm foggy on this but I remember running a Matrox ISA of some sort, and later a Millenium, but in between on a EISA/VLB I had an STB VLB something that I swear had 4MB. I ran 24 bit at 1280*1024 on a 17" nanoa. This was a 486/50, not a DX2 running Acad 11 and that card had a really nice specific driver. For maybe 2-3 years I didn't even have a sound card. My next step was NT and briefly had a dual 486 Vtech and it sucked. I never had a 95/98 machine. I may have those cards still, somewhere.

Yep, I've read about multiple matrox cards that were of later manufacture with 4MB onboard. I see Western Digital made a few choice cards that were designed for high-resolution GUI environments, but again, those were very limited cards that were $2000+ at launch and have since disappeared. It was a professional line of their Paradise Pipeline64 if I recall correctly.

Heh, don't worry... I've got audio well covered. Pretty much the opposite of your past situation. I think I'm going to retire the AWE32 for now and use the Logitech Soundman WAVE - one of the very few cards I know of that made use of Yamaha's OPL4 MIDI synth; once you get past all the crackling and noise, it has a certain crappy charm to it. Amazing how hot the thing gets, though; I mean, the AWE32's EMU8000 chip gets blisteringly hot too, but Logitech's entire board heats up from front to back... the I/O bracket on the thing even starts to warm up to the touch. It's probably the most rock solid sound card I own, though... once you get through the hell of setting it up in the first place, you'd have to physically damage the card itself to make it stop responding.

Eyes still open for the perfect VGA GUI card. With a card twenty years old, I don't think the extra month of watching will hurt 'long as I end up with something worthwhile.

I almost bought a Soundman Wave back in '94 or whatever. I had Logitech's free demo audio CD with recordings of how amazing your PC could sound with a Soundman Wave. I think it was FM synthesis vs their semi-competent wavetable. One of those old things I should never have thrown out! Interesting that it gets so hot....

It's not a half bad card... awfully noisy, but I suppose for its time the OPL4 was quite a bit better than the defacto-FM synthesis that was generally used.

Two updates:

Motherboard came today; Cx486 due in the mail tomorrow around eleven. This was an interesting unboxing; the motherboard itself is NOT a 4GPV4, but it seems to be a very well made unit nonetheless; the CMOS battery isn't leaking, amazingly enough, and the board is in near-mint condition. None of the typical warping or scratches; it was obviously used due to a bit of wear on the ISA slots, but other than that, I'm amazed. Hopefully it all boots well when the time comes. Anyone know anything about what I have here? Model number is on the lower left corner of the board - 4FVAD, revision 1.0; I can't ID it ANYWHERE on the internet, nor the Internet Archives. It looks like it may be some sort of OEM board, but a well made one at that. Here's a picture (shrunk to ~3000x2000, 2MB file):

Secondly, I've had a question that I may just start a new thread for. This sound file right here came from DosBox. Beware your volume control. It claims to be emulating an SB16, but no SB16 I've ever heard sounds anything even close to that. It's actually the sample MIDI test file included with the HMI Sound Setup utility bundled with Daggerfall - what exactly is DosBox emulating? I ask this because I like it - it's not an OPL3, and has full stereo (ie, not hard l-c-r). This is recorded from my AWE32 on FM; close enough to a true OPL3 for comparison. Sorry for the painful quality - for some reason, it actually loses notes in the MIDI in combination with the one bass instrument being horribly out of balance (A byproduct of being converted from .hmi to .mid), and the stuttering is a Pentium II's attempt at recording stereo mix into Audacity. Even so, it's a vastly different sound.
Any thoughts? I know absolutely nothing about DosBox, mostly due to the fact that I dont need to emulate hardware that I already have... just thought it was interesting.

The s3 chip based cards were pretty much the staple in the video cards of yesteryear. Tseng labs was okay, but they were always the cheapies. ATI made some good stuff, and we still have a card that ran 1024x768 on our 486. I think the only reason we didn't run 1280x1024 was because the monitor couldn't take it. We always ran super-high resolution and then stuck our faces in the monitor. I still run 2048x1536 at home on a 20" Eizo CRT. Paradise (Western Digital) had some decent cards, but they were kinda proprietary with the drivers and such. It was always better with an s3-based chip. It was really nice towards the end of that era of video cards--everything worked, drivers were stable too.

I faintly remember the STB VLB card and it was definitely worth getting. In fact, anything vlb was worth getting, except for that scsi card. I still remember how my Future Domain ISA card was faster than it, even on the same drive. We could never figure that one out.

That motherboard manual looks so familiar but I can't place it...

TheAdmiralty wrote:

Secondly, I've had a question that I may just start a new thread for. This sound file right here came from DosBox. Beware your volume control. It claims to be emulating an SB16, but no SB16 I've ever heard sounds anything even close to that. It's actually the sample MIDI test file included with the HMI Sound Setup utility bundled with Daggerfall - what exactly is DosBox emulating? I ask this because I like it - it's not an OPL3, and has full stereo (ie, not hard l-c-r). This is recorded from my AWE32 on FM; close enough to a true OPL3 for comparison. Sorry for the painful quality - for some reason, it actually loses notes in the MIDI in combination with the one bass instrument being horribly out of balance (A byproduct of being converted from .hmi to .mid), and the stuttering is a Pentium II's attempt at recording stereo mix into Audacity. Even so, it's a vastly different sound.
Any thoughts? I know absolutely nothing about DosBox, mostly due to the fact that I dont need to emulate hardware that I already have... just thought it was interesting.

Both outputs are wrong. This was recorded with an AWE32 with a real OPL3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSad9FNHgxk

ATi Mach64 in either ISA or VLB with either 2 or 4mb memory. It was one of the last video chipsets released on ISA and VL Bus before PCI came along and one of the best. They're a bit pricey now, though, when you can find one especially VL Bus.

@Samir: I'm definitely on the lookout for either an S3-based card or a Mach64... seems everywhere I turn, someone else recommends them.

@NJRoadFan: Yep, that's what I've got... my AWE32 is model CT3990 which doesn't have a 'true' OPL3, but compared to an SB16 CT1740, it does have the same sound, just quite a bit harsher and less filtered. The problem is that my recording was absolutely butchered by a) a processor incapable of keeping up with Audacity, and b) a MIDI file that was completely shredded by HMI2MID.EXE. I'll have to rerecord the actual file to my laptop from within HMI's Setup to get some decent quality.

@Sliderider: You're not kidding... I think I've seen one on the Internet in the past month, and it sold for $120. I'd be ecstatic if I stumbled into a 4MB Mach64 somewhere, but chances are that I just won't be willing to pay what they're asking for it.

TheAdmiralty wrote:

@Samir: I'm definitely on the lookout for either an S3-based card or a Mach64... seems everywhere I turn, someone else recommends them.

I forgot the Mach64 name of the ATI chipset. There was such a battle between these two in the last days of those cards. Performance wise they were about dead even, although ATI had some extra features and some compatibility issues that kept the market dominated by s3. It's why a lot of the intergrated cards back from that era were s3-based. 😉