Soooo, a friend of mine got me this on a flea market:
Looks like it's a Evans & Sutherland 3D acceleration card with the "Freedom" chip. "Park City" might be the model name of the actual card, but so far I haven't been able to confirm this.
The card uses a whole bunch of chips, among them is S3 Vision 968:
This is of course a workstation card with support for OpenGL and hardware 3D acceleration in CAD and other professional applications. Now, the biggest question for me is, can it run glQuake?
I remember reading about John Carmack once getting sick with office bullshit and locking himself up in a hotel to work on Quake 3 engine in early 1998:
I’m getting a hotel room in a state where I don’t know anyone, so I can do a bunch of research with no distractions.
I bought a new computer specifically for this purpose - A Dolch portable pentium-II system. The significant thing is that it has full length PCI slots, so I was able to put an Evans & Sutherland OpenGL accelerator in it (not enough room for an intergraph Realizm, though), and still drive the internal LCD screen. It works out pretty well, but I’m sure there will be conventional laptops with good 3D acceleration available later this year.
Now, the Dolch he mentions has got to be a Dolch PAC 65 machine that uses a passive SBC backplane instead of a typical AT/ATX motherboard. Which means, no AGP slot. It also means that the display on that thing is driven by a videochip integrated into the processor board that connects using an LVDS-like cable. Here comes the "pass-through" part of the card:
On the other hand, a 1995 card could be too old for early 1998. Then again, Integraph Realizm is 1996 as well, and it looks like later E&S AccelGraphics boards are either half-length or they use AGP.
Thankfully I also got a set of 5 floppy disks with the card that contain drivers for WinNT 3.51, utilities and demos.
Tried running the demos on the disk (on a GeForce 3, because I had nothing else running ATM):
(you can see a short video if you click the thumbnail)
Looks like the model is missing the textures (that's what the SIMM72 memory module is for on the E&S card) and lightning (supposed to be produced by the spheres orbiting the head). Guess my next step would be to build a WinNT machine — I suppose it's going to be a WinNT 4.0 since most OpenGL games (including glQuake) don't support 3.51. If I am not mistaken, WinNT 4 should support the 3.51 drivers, too.
Does anybody have more info on this card? Maybe some drivers for later WinNT or Win9x? So far I've only found this press release that mentions "game development" as one of the possible markets for the card and promise of a Windows 95 driver "when ready". Archive.org doesn't have a full copy of Evans & Sutherland website for 1995-1996 and there are no mentions of Freedom on later copies.
