I could be mistaken, but I don't believe you need hardware MPEG decoders on a P120 for running 320x240 full screen video.

Yes, in 1993 the mach32 was ATi's high end offering. The Mach8 was still available as well as the VGA Wonder XL at the low end.

The MGA II add is on page 327 of the PC magazine issue I cited above. It's rather vague as to what it actually is. Sounds like mostly support for PCI and improved 8-bit windows performance.

*edit* PC Magazine reviewed the card in Feb 1994: https://books.google.ca/books?id=v5YwX3auv0cC … 20ii%22&f=false

Looks very much like an Impression Lite chipset with the IS-ATHENA R2 from the picture.
Just compare to http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/matrox … ession_lite.jpg

Ultima I is IS-ATLAS R1 then.
Vlask has a pic of it here: http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/component … 9-matrox-ultima

As for 1993 video I just would try to get a Cirrus Logic GD-5422 PCI card. (also Acumos AVGA3)

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I could be mistaken, but I don't believe you need hardware MPEG decoders on a P120 for running 320x240 full screen video.

Decoding Video-CD quality MPEG was possible on a P120 in software. The problem was the upscaling though.
It helped if your videocard had hardware upscaling/filtering.
I remember upgrading the Trio64 in my P133 to a Matrox Mystique, and suddenly I could watch my video CDs in 1024x768, and had bilinear filtered quality as well 😀

well speaking of the early mpeg decoaders does anyone know if you need a certain model or brand for the "mpeg enhanced" games like the Horde? Does it have to be a ISA Reelmagic card? any particular model?

this board so far is being very picky. I dunno, I expected more features from a Pentium board even if it is first gen. not even floppy controller built in and this winbond card is really iffy and seems to only work when it feels like it. I have 24mb of RAM which seems pretty high end/excessive for 1993/4 so that's okay. The board supports 198MB and I did want to bump it up to 32 just because but apparently its very picky with RAM and won't seem to post with anything except the 24mb. even in using the same ram in lower configs like 8mb it refuses to post.

You should probably just go with an S3 based card for maximum game compatibility in a socket 4 system.

Scali wrote:

Decoding Video-CD quality MPEG was possible on a P120 in software. The problem was the upscaling though. It helped if your video […]
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Anonymous Coward wrote:

I could be mistaken, but I don't believe you need hardware MPEG decoders on a P120 for running 320x240 full screen video.

Decoding Video-CD quality MPEG was possible on a P120 in software. The problem was the upscaling though.
It helped if your videocard had hardware upscaling/filtering.
I remember upgrading the Trio64 in my P133 to a Matrox Mystique, and suddenly I could watch my video CDs in 1024x768, and had bilinear filtered quality as well 😀

Upscaling wouldn't be necessary if the screen resolution was reduced

I worked out all the issues, system is up and running. did some benchmarking between the s3 vision and ati mach32 and the vision came out ahead. The vision does have 2mb of ram installed compared to the mach32's 1mb but I'm not to sure that would mean anything speed wise.

soviet conscript wrote:

I worked out all the issues, system is up and running. did some benchmarking between the s3 vision and ati mach32 and the vision came out ahead. The vision does have 2mb of ram installed compared to the mach32's 1mb but I'm not to sure that would mean anything speed wise.

DOS Speed wise, no. But if you plan to run Windows, it will definitely help to have the RAM

Mach32 (despite the name) actually has a 64-bit datapath to memory. So you are gimping the card by only using one meg. Furthermore, S3 vision is a competitor to the Mach64 (not mach32), so it's not really a fair comparison. I would expect the S3 928 and Mach32 both equipped with 2M to perform roughly the same in both windows and DOS, except for the 928 cards that have DRAM. Probably the Mach32 DRAM based cards (with ATi RAMDAC) are more practical than the VRAM versions unless you need speed running true colour and his res.