LOL! My first gaming machine wasn't to far from that.

Dell XPS P-133 with a 2 MB VRAM Number9 card with a S-3 chipset. I added a 4 MB Diamond Monster Voodoo 1 card to it. I was in game heaven

This machine also had a SB AWE 32 from Dell

I bought this machine brand new 10 years ago, The Voodoo upgrade was a year later in 1996.

ah ha.. DOS gaming,
i miss those days

we don't talk about spyware then =)

can't help but agree with gary,
even during comdex

3dfx outshines the need for gamers enthusiasm
where else, NVidia and ATI are just pure into Business to generate as much profit possible

thats how they started lying on benchmarks.. until Futuremark had to come out with patches to counter that.

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Actually he isn't- The first IBM CGA color adapter came out in 1981 (Motorola based) Hercules raised the bar in 1982 (also Motorola based) and in 1987 the first VGA adapters were introduced by IBM (VLSI).

I suspect ATI was one of the first clone market board makers which were unleashed in the 1987 period when VGA was introduced.

Reseach does show there was quite a bit of gaming going on with the Hercules boards though!

Ati's early success/strength was in supplying oem's with 2d technology, it allowed ati to survive until the introduction of the radeon in 2000 as any previous models 3d technology was underwhelming at best and paled in comparison to what 3dfx and nvidia had

In fact it was ati's acquisition of ArtX and the naming of Bob Orton as ati's CEO that turned ati into a real competitor in the 3d pc marketplace :

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030421S0028


I have a ati collection of 21 cards and have tested them all, so I can speak with knowledge about how poor the cards performed before the introduction of the first radeon, even with the release of the Radeon models ati could'nt back up the hardware with good drivers and this hurt them for a long time as well.

So no I do not believe that ati nor nvidia created the groundswell of enthusiasm for 3d technology in pc gaming, that role in 3d graphics history has to undoubtably go to its rightfull owner which is 3Dfx 

Long live the king -  

chill down evryone we all are go'n too much off topic as we all as I am. , maybe a Topic rename would be a better thing or a lock, either one. This Topic is going nowhere like this.

On-Topic from now on.

The Rampage, okay didn't it used to be called VSA-200 or is that a myth? I did recall this many times in my memories, I would really wonder how a Spectre 2000 and 3000 would of performed, was there also a Spectre 4000 in the planning?

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Might have been, Hank indicated that before marketing actually "named" anything the engineers would just past any nickname they came up with.

Look at the naming confusion with Daytona 

Since Daytona was called VSA-101 it would be no surprise that Rampage might be referred to as VSA-200 being such a large jump in performance.

A single chip Rampage card was suppose to be called Specter 1000 but I have also seen internal notes indicating Rampage 2000 and Rampage Lite!

Wacky engineers.

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It's hard enough to aquire a functional Voodoo5 6000. I won't bother to put this one on my short list. I think I'll stick with Quantum3D cards

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30 cards omg that is very impressive, so there is A New Hope for you gary, norries about that hay , go get that Rampy Jedi Master, really a must have !

hmm I wonder what were the changes and differences between the Rev.A0, Rev.A1 and Rev.A2 modelled Rampage cards... even this, there maybe more that one working Rampage afterall, sounds interesting, I really wonder where the other missing 27 cards are. 3 are known from now on though.