Originally founded by Chong Moon Lee and H. H. Huh (the technical designer), Diamond Multimedia was merged (after a long-time companionship) with S3, Incorporated in 1999. The merger was mostly due to S3's willingness to expand their trade from simply producing graphics chipsets to retail graphics cards. The act is somewhat similar with the 1999 3dfx purchase of STB Technologies. The merger was hoped to boost the company's overall capabilities by combining the resources of S3 and Diamond, who were quite close partners over the preceding years. Unfortunately things did not go so well. The greatly anticipated S3 Savage 2000 was a failure, and the excitedly growing 3D sound card market nearly fell apart with the loss of Aureal Semiconductor.
With these market failures, the new combined Diamond/S3 company decided to change direction and leave the PC addon-board market.SONICblue was formed. Diamond Multimedia resurfaced in 2003 after the brand and assets had been purchased by Best Data. Diamond again built expansion boards.
Graphics Cards-
Speedstar:
Diamond's earliest line, now defunct, was the Speedstar series. The line started out as the best ISA graphic card that outran everything else on the market under MS-DOS (when DOS performance was important in the late 80's and early 90's,) but as Microsoft Windows gain market share, it was later relegated to the cheaper, value-oriented chips in low-cost implementations.
Early on, popular chips on Speedstars were Tseng Lab ET4000(A/X). They were consider the best implementation of ET4000 series card on the market and easily besting offerings from Trident Microsystems and others in many cases.
A listing of some of the Speedstar boards
Diamond SpeedStar (Plus/24) Tseng Labs ET4000AX ISA
Diamond SpeedStar 24 Tseng Labs ET4000 ISA
Diamond SpeedStar 24X WD90C31 ISA
Diamond SpeedStar Pro Cirrus Logic CL-GD5426/5428 ISA/VLB
Diamond SpeedStar 64 Cirrus Logic CL-GD5434 ISA/PCI
Diamond SpeedStar Pro SE Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430 VLB/PCI
Diamond SpeedStar SuperVGA Tseng Labs ET4000 ISA
Diamond SpeedStar A50 SiS 6326 AGP
Diamond SpeedStar A55 S3 Trio3D AGP
Diamond SpeedStar A70 SiS 6326 AGP
Diamond SpeedStar A90 S3 Savage4 AGP
Diamond SpeedStar A200 S3 Savage4 AGP
Stealth-
The Stealth cards of the 2D era were usually based on GUI accelerators from S3 Graphics. This line from Diamond is one of their oldest, spanning back to the early '90s. The line started with the most rudimentary of 2D accelerators, but today displays the latest in 3D chips. Initially the Stealth line was Diamond's high-end lineup, but as time progressed the line became more of a mid-range/low-end selection. With more than adequate performance in most cases, the Stealths offered excellent value. This line was Diamond's most popular.
Notable members of the Stealth family have been the Diamond Stealth 3D 2000, by far the most popular S3 Virge-based board. The Diamond Stealth32, using the popular and impressive Tseng Labs ET4000/W32p chipset, was capable of impressive price/performance, especially in DOS. The Diamond Stealth64 Graphics 2001, with the ARK2000PV/MT chipset, was known for excellent DOS performance at the time. The Diamond Stealth II S220, using the Rendition Verite V2100 2D/3D accelerator, was popular with enthusiasts for its excellent price/performance for both 2D and 3D gaming. In fact a BIOS was released by Diamond for the Stealth II S220 which brought its clock speed up to the same level as the high-end Verite V2200 chip, resulting in equal performance at a significantly lower price.
In the middle of the Stealth line-up, Diamond chose to implement a numbering scheme to differentiate their cards in a new way. For example, the Diamond Stealth Video VRAM was rechristened the Diamond Stealth Video 3xxx. The numbers had more than a random meaning. Specifically, they tell the buyer the card's memory amount and type. The Stealth Video 3240 uses VRAM (3), is equipped with 2MB initially (2), and is upgradeable to 4MB (4). If the first digit is a (2), then the card uses plain DRAM.
The numbering scheme confused many people since Diamond just renamed current cards with new names. The Stealth Video 3240 was simply the old Stealth Video VRAM. New cards did also use the scheme, however, such as the S3 Trio64V+ cards.
Monster3D-
The Diamond Monster Sound gaming sound card series was a very innovative line. They were the first to really push the envelope in the at-the-time bleeding-edge PCI audio card market.
The Monster3D line was based on 3dfx Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2 chips - as such, they had no on-board 2D and thus had to be used with a separate VGA card, connected externally. Both Voodoo and Voodoo2 based offerings were in production until the STB-3dfx merger. The series was highly successful and, for a significant part, responsible for the 3D Graphics revolution of the mid-late 1990s. 3dfx's Voodoo chipsets were revolutionary and for several years (approx. 1997-1999) were simply the fastest hardware for 3D gaming acceleration in both the arcade market and home PC arena.
A critically acclaimed feature of the Monster 3D II (and all other Voodoo2 boards) was the capability to connect two identical boards in a SLI (Scan-line Interleave) configuration. In SLI, a pair of Voodoo2 boards splits the effort of rendering the 3D scene, allowing performance to be nearly doubled.
Diamond Monster 3D 3dfx Voodoo1 4MB PCI
Diamond Monster 3D II 3dfx Voodoo2 8MB PCI (2MB video RAM, 6MB texture RAM)
Diamond Monster 3D II 3dfx Voodoo2 12MB PCI (4MB video RAM, 8MB texture RAM)
Diamond Monster 3D II MEGAMonster bundle (Monster 3D II, MEGAMonster Voodoo2 companion board, MEGAMonster (SLI) cable) (a Voodoo2 SLI bundle offered by Diamond)
Diamond Monster Fusion Z100 3dfx Banshee 16MB PCI/AGP (Referred to as the "Mon Fusion" by the sticker on many cards)
Sound Cards- Monster Sound:
The Diamond Monster Sound gaming sound card series was a very innovative line. They were the first to really push the envelope in the at-the-time bleeding-edge PCI audio card market. The Monster Sound cards were among the first to support hardware mixing acceleration with Microsoft's new DirectSound and DirectSound3D audio APIs. Most, if not all, also supported Aureal's burgeoning A3D API.
The original Monster Sound card was highly innovative in this regard, but also controversial because it basically broke DOS game compatibility which was still critical at the time. DOS game audio was only functional within a Windows 95 DOS box, which was a finicky way to try to run these old games. It came equipped with a 2MB AdMOS MIDI daughterboard.
The Monster Sound M80 was similar to the original monster sound, but lacked 4 speaker support. It also had a reduced quality AdMOS MIDI daughterboard (1MB).
Monster Sound MX200 was known for its excellent General MIDI quality because of the high quality patch set (licensed from Roland) it was equipped with on its 4MB Dream daughtercard. Otherwise it was technically identical to the original Monster Sound.
The Diamond Monster Sound MX300 was based on the Vortex2 audio ASIC from Aureal Semiconductor. It was a revolutionary step forward in gaming audio, with impressive 3D audio positioning and other innovative effects. Utilizing the then state-of-the-art Aureal A3D 2.0 3D audio API, the MX300 was capable of producing startlingly immersive audio. Its capability to turn simple stereo speakers into a 3D-audio experience was clearly ahead of the pack for the time, and is unique in its presentation compared to even the renowned and far newerCreative Audigy 2 series.
Monster Sound MX400 was advertised as being one of the first sound cards with hardware MP3 decoding acceleration. Unfortunately this was hardly a worthwhile reason to buy the card because the central CPUs in PCs at the time were more than capable of handling MP3 playback. It was also somewhat complicated to make use of the MP3 acceleration because special software was needed to use it.
The Vortex2-equipped MX300 was a notably superior card for 3D audio. Unfortunately Aureal had gone into bankruptcy and was dissolved so their next-generation chips never saw the light of day. Diamond was forced to go with ESS's less powerful chip to be able to continue the line. The MX400 was the last of the Monster Sound cards.
Diamond Monster Sound PCI
Diamond Monster Sound M80 PCI
Diamond Monster Sound MX100 PCI
Diamond Monster Sound MX200 PCI
Diamond Monster Sound MX300 Aureal Vortex2 PCI
Diamond Monster Sound MX400 ESS Canyon3D PCI.
No comments:
Post a Comment