VOGONS


First post, by AlucarD86

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Hello people,

title says it all, I am having some difficulties tracking down parts to build a vintage PC, I started out very optimistic but with time wearing out and with no luck on finding the desired parts I am kinda hopeless 😒

so my question is do you guys have some sources or good advice on where to find old parts aside from ebay 😁

the card I am looking for is the Matrox m3D which isn't really a good card but I guess it has "vintage value" or people just dont bother putting it up on ebay. I tried scanning the bowls of the internet but its just simply not there 😁 I could just name this topic also "m3D where the hell are you ?" 🤣 but fun aside for people who have the card, where did you get it from ?

Reply 2 of 23, by idspispopd

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AlucarD86 wrote:

but fun aside for people who have the card, where did you get it from ?

I bought mine new in '98 or '99 when the card was considered somewhat obsolete and therefore sold quite cheap.

Reply 5 of 23, by leileilol

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I got my card....... when the year was 1997 😁

Keep periodically searching ebay. There isn't a PCX2 card on the listings right now but they'll appear from time to time.

Also don't forget about the Videologic Apocalypse 3DX. That's also a PowerVR PCX2 card. Also keep in mind that the Matrox M3D and Apoc 3DX are addon cards and do not have VGA out. They provide 3d accelleration through directly transferring across the PCI bus to your host video card.

Because of the way it does it, it can even work on laptops with PCI slots on docking stations (but very, very slowly 😀 )

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 6 of 23, by fillosaurus

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Aaah, Matrox... Have 2 of them; a 2 Mb Millenium and a 8 Mb G200. From recycling/recovering and handover.

Y2K box: AMD Athlon K75 (second generation slot A)@700, ASUS K7M motherboard, 256 MB SDRAM, ATI Radeon 7500+2xVoodoo2 in SLI, SB Live! 5.1, VIA USB 2.0 PCI card, 40 GB Seagate HDD.
WIP: external midi module based on NEC wavetable (Yamaha clone)

Reply 7 of 23, by AlucarD86

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yeah but it must be the one with the PowerVR chip otherwise games wont even install like Resident Evil PowerVR PC and Tomb Raider I think there is a power VR version of that one as well.

Reply 8 of 23, by sliderider

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PCX/PCX2 based cards don't come up a lot. Sometimes when they do come up, they are poorly described so it's hard to find them in searches. Of the two cards that I have, only one was able to find using Matrox as a keyword. The other one, i don't know how in the hell I managed to find it, was so poorly worded that you would never have known it was a video card that was being listed if the results had been text only with no photos.

Reply 9 of 23, by AlucarD86

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yes I noticed its either that people dont bother anymore with those old cards or they simply put them up there bundled with a lot of other stuff, I hope I will get my system up and running by the end of the summer but right now the graphics card is my only concern, also what would be a good primary GPU and soundcard aside from the m3D which is just an expansion as I heard, cheers

Reply 12 of 23, by Soupdragon

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Wow the price for that auction got quite high at the end. The other cards in that lot looked uninteresting to me. Stick with checking if you didn't win this time. I got one for £26 earlier in the year so they don't always go that high.

Reply 13 of 23, by AlucarD86

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hello yes I have won it and wow in the last 30 seconds the price went up 43 pound 😒 I have talked to the seller he will only send me the m3D because I dont really need the rest of the cards and hopefully it will work. This is kinda a bummer as the Matrox m3D was considered a crappy card even in its days but unfortunately its the only god damn chip that will play Power VR games xD I am confused that people are so interested in it 😒 Anyway BioHazard PVr cost me less than the card it was like maybe 12 pound or so directly from japan 😒

Reply 14 of 23, by idspispopd

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Well, many old video cards are interesting mostly because they enable you to play accelerated ports of older games. See this thread:
3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
Please note that there are quite a few ports for PowerVR, probably more than for any other accelerator except 3dfx. Among those are a few exclusive ports, and some with a maximum resolution 800x600 or even 1024x768 which most accelerators of that era couldn't do.

Than take into account that PowerVR cards didn't sell as well as 3dfx, S3 or ATI cards so they don't show up as often on ebay (as you already noticed).

About the other cards: I understand that you don't need any of those but some of these might be of interest for others which might explain the price. Intel i740 cards are quite rare, the Creative Encore Dxr3 might be desirable for some people (DVD accelerator cards have been talked about on Vogons). The nVidia cards seems to be an ELSA Winner 4 400NVS which could drive 4 display from one PCI slot, although one of the necessary adapter cables seems to be missing.

I agree with you, I don't like people bundling unrelated stuff.

About primary GPU and sound card: I think those shouldn't matter too much. The sound card should be supported in Windows 9x, a SB Live should probably be OK, but other PCI sound cards should be fine too. The main video card shouldn't be too slow. I think somebody on Vogons wrote that AGP cards might give worse performance than PCI cards (or maybe it was always slower on mainboards with AGP slot because of the PCI bridge?), but then I used an AGP card and it worked fine. There may be problems with nVidia cards insisting on doing Direct3D support but I think when you only want to use PowerSGL that shouldn't be an issue.
If you absolutely want to be period correct you could use a Matrox Millennium or Mystique but I'd first try whatever you have at hand.

Reply 15 of 23, by Xolares

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I got over the past 4 weeks
Geforce 2 Ultra,
Geforce 4 TI4200,
Geforce 4 Ti4800,
Geforce FX5900,
3x Voodoo 3 16/32mv,
Matrox bulk lot,
PowerVR bulk from a friend in the US
and afew ATi cards from RAGE - Radeon HD2600!
i am still waiting on the MT-32! and i found PCI cards for DOS games to be a pain to use with some games so i get ISA cards
Best card for allround DOS/Windows games is the Soundblaster 16s/AX/Z but i love the Adlib card for old games like Dune II! till i get my MT-32! 😜

and waiting this week to come in the mail http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/300925515962?ssPag … 984.m1439.l2649

2x P3 800MHZ - 1GB PC133 - 3DFX Voodoo 5 5500 64MB - Soundblaster AWE32 28MB 32Pin ISA & Music Quest ISA MIDI I/O + Roland SC-88 Pro - 2x IDE to CF 16GB Flash HDDs-Win98SE SP3 137GB+-Windows 2000 SP4R2-17" CRT NEC MultiSync 1600x1200

Reply 16 of 23, by vetz

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AlucarD86 wrote:

hello yes I have won it and wow in the last 30 seconds the price went up 43 pound 😒 I have talked to the seller he will only send me the m3D because I dont really need the rest of the cards and hopefully it will work. This is kinda a bummer as the Matrox m3D was considered a crappy card even in its days but unfortunately its the only god damn chip that will play Power VR games xD I am confused that people are so interested in it 😒 Anyway BioHazard PVr cost me less than the card it was like maybe 12 pound or so directly from japan 😒

First, gratz with the PowerVR card! Second, damn that is a high price! It is the highest I've seen for a M3D, but I guess the prices of these cards are only going up.

As idspispopd says the card supports lots of games and have several exclusive releases. Also add that the versions of Mechwarrior 2 and Tomb Raider runs and looks better than the 3DFX versions which helps draw attention to it. The card also works as an addon card in many retro systems, just requiring a free PCI slot.

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 17 of 23, by AlucarD86

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thanks everyone for the input, seems like a lot of helpful guys on this board who actually know what they are talking about 😁 as for the card yes the price was around 5 pound before the last minute then it went really up maybe people were really into this card as well, it was also bundled with a lot of other stuff I really dont need, as for me I really honestly started out with just wanting to play BioHazard PowerVR on the PC in 800x600 and maybe record some youtube videos to show off the differences, before that I didnt even know about the Power VR chip back in my shool-days having a PC was like having a fortune really, I was happy enough to drop by a friends house and play some GTA1 or Tomb Raider on his PC which was a crappy one now that I think about 🤣

anyway I still need to build the vintage PC but having the card is a big step forward, the price itself didnt bother me that much for such a rarity also the guy who sold it was really nice and actually also was quite confused that the price went that up since he told me that the card collected dust at his home for a while now 😒

idspispopd great and helpful post you got there, I have a Radeon AGP still lying around here somewhere and getting a Mystiqe is a piece of cake the only real concern is booting Windows 98 SE and installing it since it has a setup from the run cmd if I still remember correctly and urgh ATA hard drives I left those behind a long time ago when I switched to SATA and never looked back.

Another awesome game I recently tried to play on Windows 7 and kinda failed is Metal Gear Solid, that one apparently was made for Windows 98 and I will give it a go once the vintage PC is set up as for the real Power VR era it went past me because back in those days I only played PS1 and N64 and wasnt bothered so much with PC to be quite honest and here it was considered rather a luxury to game on a PC.

Reply 18 of 23, by sliderider

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Just a bit of advice before you catch auction fever and go broke buying vintage parts.

If there is a particular part that you have decided on, observe what the prices are that they are actually selling for. Just because someone lists something for a high price, doesn't mean that it is worth that much. Actual selling prices are often much lower so check some completed listings or ask around for advice on what to pay for something before you get cheated.

Don't get caught up in bidding wars. If someone outbids you and you aren't sure you should make another bid then drop out. There is no feeling worse than getting a part and finding out later that you could have gotten it for less.

Watch out for sellers charging high shipping to avoid paying ebay fees. That BIN price may seem like a bargain but if the seller is charging a ridiculous amount for shipping, it's not a bargain anymore.

On the subject of bargains, if you know a part normally sells for more than what a particular seller is asking and you want that part, then buy it quickly before someone else does. In the time it takes you to ask the seller a question and get a reply back or for you to make up your mind whether to pull the trigger on that low BIN price or not, someone else will have it and you'll miss out. This is a highly competitive hobby when it comes to acquiring rare parts for cheap.

Try to get a feel for the rarity of a particular item you want. If a part comes up only once in a blue moon then you have to decide whether it is worth waiting if you let it go or if it's better to pay a little more now just to save yourself from waiting years for the next one. Sometimes you just have to reach a little deeper into your pocket for the especially rare item that you won't see again for years, if ever. Don't go mad, though. Overpaying a little is sometimes OK if it means saving a long wait, massively overpaying usually isn't.

Try to get a feel for who the good sellers are and the bad ones, too. Everyone here and on other forums has sellers they deal with on a regular basis for being good sellers but we also have horror stories about the bad ones so checking if anyone has any info on a particular seller is always a good idea before you get jerked around.

So educate yourself a little and you'll be able to build up a nice collection without being ripped off.

Reply 19 of 23, by AlucarD86

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thanks for the post, very informative and helpful advice you give there ^^ I know my way around ebay and even on the real money auction house in Diablo 3 so I have a good sense of stuff that is going on, however sometimes there are certain things I absolutely want and thats where I tend to loose track but I had a very good conversation with the seller and he even wanted to pull back the m3D from the lot of cards and sell it separately for less than the final price turned out to be, unfortunately there were already 3 bets on it, anyway the crazy thing about it was that up to the very last minute the price on the cards were like 5 pound then it went up pretty fast so probably this was on the radar to some other people but I am confident enough that the card is worth it even thou even I must say that for 48 pound its overpriced, hell I could get DDRam3 memory for less than that and speed up my actual gaming PC I am using.

Anyway once I get the card I will test run it and post some tutorials and videos about vintage parts and building PCs. Money isnt that much of a problem because seriously it comes and goes but experience remains still its a lil bit sad that I could get it much cheaper but because of a bidding war the price went up 😒

By the way what is the m3D truly worth in scale of money ? All I really know about it is that it has the chipset that is required to run PowerVR games and that its kinda hard to find because it wasn't so much mass produced back in the days.

PC Setup: Mainboard ASUS CUBX | CPU Intel Pentium III-S Tualatin 1.4 GHz | Memory 780 MB SDRam | Soundcard Creative SB Audigy SB0160 | GPUs Nvidia FX5900 Ulta Matrox M3D PCI | HDD 2x40 GB WD/Seagate | OS Win98SE and WinXPSP1 in dual boot