NUmber Nine, Ticket To Ride

[Nowhere]

Just found this...interestingly named chip. The card itself is Revolution 3D WRAM 4MB PCI (with a US flag next to the sticker ).
The info on web is extremelly scarce...anyone remember something interesting about it/company behind it? (hmm...to be honest the name of the chip is fun enough ) it is surelly totally unknown here/to me...
Anyway, interesting rarity...and I wonder if it'll be faster than G100 I have in this machine right now

[ZokesPro]

I have a game that supports the Number Nine graphics chip. (Resident Evil)

I'd say it's about as fast as an M3D or the Rendition chip or the Voodoo 1.

[Tjalfe]

wow timewarp
does it have a manufacture date on it?.. Number nine has been gone from this part of the world for years.

[Nowhere]

It seems it never actually was in this part of the world to begin with

As for the year - it has C1997 on the back of the card, no other obvious dates, perhaps apart from the ending number on sticker with serial number - 0098.

[agallag]

I remember Number 9. They were actually considered best of the best for a few weeks back in the nineties. They sure died out fast...

[rylan]

I actually know quite a bit about that company... know a bunch of people who worked there, and we used the T2R IV chip a few years back on some of our proprietary boards to drive high res medical CRTs and LCD monitors.

Incase your interested, the DAC on the upper left of the board is made by IBM, probably their 125MHz version if the board supports 1600x1200. I'm surprised it doesn't have a heatsink, since that slug can get pretty hot.

[Nowhere]

It works!
A bit more blurry output than that of G100 though...

Yep rylan, I can see clearly it's by IBM (logo). Peculiar looking too - after all die is visible, which was uncommon back there, I think? (in case you wonder ( ), it says, from top:
37RGB526CF22
2GH2335
IBM 9314
PALETTE DAC
19722002VA
besides I can't use 1600x1200 res here...)
And yes, no heatsink, and no visible signs of it beeing attached there in the past.
BTW, one more curiosity...those 2 huge silver objects are, I suppose, quartz (or something...) oscillators/clock generators. (one is ABRACON 32MHz ACH 9731 and the other ABRACON 25.175MHz ACH 9729). Why would a GFX card need those? Clock on these cards was independent from PCI clock or something? (killer cards for overclockers? ) Oh, and I just discovered a chip that's made by AMD, and many small which appear to have something like Philips logo on top. It seems it's a good, old style equipment with lots of discrete components... Ok, not that many...

But all that is really irrelevant...
Just why Number Nine died, in short? (something Matrox should learn from/has lerned from? )

PS. And here's a map

[High_Jumbllama]

http://www.hal-pc.org/journal/oct98/...nine/nine.html
Compatible with DirectX 3.0 and 5.0.

Had to reach far back to remeber the card name.

[Tjalfe]

This month we will kick things off by introducing you to Number Nine's Revolution 3D. This card is available in both a PCI and a AGP version and is powered by Number Nine's own processor the "Ticket to Ride. This is a powerful chip capable of handling both 2D and 3D graphics operations. The Ticket to Ride is a 128-bit processor that can handle full screen MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video playback at 30 frames per second. Got that, 30FPS. This is not a wimpy card.

man, times changed

[Gurm]

Number nine WAS the best of the best for quite a while. They were slammed by a few unfortunate problems though.

One was their use of the Weitek PowerVGA chip for their most flagship cards in the Windows 95 era. For some unknown reason, Weitek had the WORST time making working Win95 drivers, and by the time that they did, the Number Nine card had been RECALLED. Ouch! So the Win3.1/Win95 transition kicked their ass.

Still they held on for a couple of years, but their dwindling market share compared to 3dfx and nVidia pushed them into a niche... they were the most expensive but no longer the fastest. Matrox could in fact learn a bit from their example.

Anyway, Number Nine's cards ALL had Beatles names or slogans. Hence 'Ticket to Ride'.

As for that IBM DAC, that was common at the time. I still have several cards from the mid-90's with that "exposed die" style. I think they thought it LOOKED more imposing or something. LOL!

I remember being DESPERATE for an Imagine 128 at one point, and instead settling for a Tseng Labs ET6000 with a bolt-on Voodoo card. Wow.

As for the MPEG... they were, of course, talking about hardware acceleration of DVD, something that - at that time - was rare to find. Heck, it was still rare to find real DVD hardware acceleration as recently as the turn of the millenium!

[GT98]

I remember being DESPERATE for an Imagine 128 at one point, and instead settling for a Tseng Labs ET6000 with a bolt-on Voodoo card. Wow.

I had one of those Tseng Labs chips too...it was the fastest Video card under DOS if IIRC :lol:
at the time

[Nowhere]

High_Jumbllama, the reviewer must have never seen Matrox card prior to seeing Revolution 3D. Assuming mine is not faulty, it's definatelly noticeably more blurry than Millenium II and G100 at 1024x768@85Hz. Still, surprisingly, my eyes don't mind much...so perhaps it would be better to call it "more soft"/"less sharp"...

Gurm, so you want to tell me that this card has hardware DVD acceleration, like old PCI DVD stand alone accelerators? Hmmm...there is DVD-ROM in this p2 266...wonder if it'll work (yes, I have also the original driver CD - wonder if everything needed for playback is in there...)

PS. If you're still desperate for Number Nine card, I can send you this one It's not Matrox, but...

[Gurm]

I had one of those Tseng Labs chips too...it was the fastest Video card under DOS if IIRC :lol:
at the time

Actually, I'm unaware of any card besting it even now... for pure DOS VESA speed.

[Gurm]

Gurm, so you want to tell me that this card has hardware DVD acceleration, like old PCI DVD stand alone accelerators? Hmmm...there is DVD-ROM in this p2 266...wonder if it'll work (yes, I have also the original driver CD - wonder if everything needed for playback is in there...)

Well, you'd need a player that supported whatever proprietary extensions they used... none of those old DVD acceleration schemes ever worked especially well with anything other than what was on the DVD, and even then not very well!

PS. If you're still desperate for Number Nine card, I can send you this one It's not Matrox, but...

Ooh! Ooh!

[rylan]

Yeah the crystals are for reference clocks... pretty commonly used then too.
The 25.175MHz one is for VGA timing. The other one I'd presume is a reference for the pci core on the Number 9 chip.
All graphics cards have some sort of clock generation or reference crystal anyway... just that today its more commonly done through a programmable clock synthesis chip.

And yup, they had a theme with naming cards for from Beatles themes. Before doing consumer based cards (which is partially what lead to their downfall), the company did various high end graphics acceleration and processing cards for other applications.

They were actually based not too far from where I work now.