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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

When I was building a linux PC in the late 90's, I bought a Matrox Millenium with the memory expansion to 8MB which could do 1600x1200 with 24 bit color.

That was an awesome card for the time, and an incredibly stable analog signal, which Matrox was known for - other cards at the time would get fuzzy, shimmer, or have ringing / ghosting.

At the time, for good support you needed to *buy* an X11 server for accelerated graphics support. I forget which one I paid money for, but within a few years it wasn't necessary as open source had caught up.

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Yeah, I wanted a Matrox so bad at that time because you could also do dual monitor on some of those cards. I had a sick NEC with a degauss button and trinitron style horizontal lines and a shit packard bell monitor. I wanted to do dual monitors so bad with both, despite the resolution asymmetry. Some matrox also had connection points for antennas and video capture. They were truly workhorse cards. But they sucked at 3D and were lapped in the Boot mag benchmarks for Quake 3D et al. I ended up with a 3D Labs Permidia 3D card anyway because I couldn't afford a Diamond or Voodoo and ended up turning textures off fully on Quake 3d in the end. Fun times, shout out Hard OCP.

I remember people I knew wanting the Matrox because it was possible to have duel screen on Linux. They usually had a huge grin on LAN parties, once they got their breath back from carrying two heavy CRT monitors and a PC tower. Good times.

Maybe I misunderstood something at the time, but the mga X11 driver was weird. My understanding, at least at the time, is that it is/was possible to provide an X11 driver that would work regardless of the underlying operating system, providing features such as dual-head support.

This feels intuitively wrong to me now and I doubt that's how it worked. In any case I dutifully copies the Matrox provided X11 driver to OpenBSD and enjoyed multi-monitor support.

There was nothing underlying X servers until about 2010. The X server was the lowest layer.

Looking at a few old mailinglists agrees with you. Apparently the mga_drv and mga_hal_drv could just be copied to any system running XFree86, at least Linux and the BSDs, and would let you utilize dual-head support.

I had dual Trinitrons around that era, to this day when I build myself a new computer desk I massively over build it (the latest one I can stand in the middle without noticeable flex..) because I lived in slight dread that the spacetime warping monitors would crush the one I had at the time.

I think I had a Mystique which may have been a PCI model as well. I remember the signal quality being very visible switching a display from that box into some other one which had some S3 or something. The image looked noticeably blurry or fuzzy with the exact same display and cables on the worse card.

You mean the one from Xi graphics?

That's Accelerated/X right. I had a Matrox Millennium card in my PC when I discovered Linux and remember trying that. Made a lot of difference.

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