Brenton, at 11:22 on Fri, Aug 05 1994, you wrote to Bill Grimsley ...

BG> In case you missed this, I have forwarded it to TML, as I believe 
BG> that you were running one of these video cards at one stage...

BV> No, I didn't miss it. I just didn't want to reply to it. :)

Oh, fair enough.  At least you're honest.  ;-)

BG> Does anybody else run a Diamond Stealth ISA 1Mb VRAM Graphics
BG> Accelerator card, based on the S3 chipset, either under Windows
BG> or OS/2 ?? 

 BV> The short answer to your question is that I have not used the 
 BV> ISA version of the card. I have had a Diamond SpeedStar-24x based 
 BV> on the WD chipset, an ISA card. It was okay but the drivers were 
 BV> SHIT.

Ah, a different card, and you're right, the drivers are indeed shit.

 BV> I have also had the Diamond Stealth Pro, based on the S3 928 
 BV> chip which was a VLB card. The board was okay but the drivers 
 BV> were SHIT.

So who writes these drivers, and why are they so bad?

 BV> Would I recommend a Diamond Video card to anyone ???
 BV> Depends on wether I'm selling mine or not :)

Jeeze, are you the John Rich of LOCSYSOP or what!  ;-)

 BV> PS. You should be okay with the ISA card though. Especially if 
 BV> the price is right and you can find some "generic" drivers for it.

That's the trouble, the drivers I have are for OS/2 2.1 GA, and although I
have hex-edited the supplied DSPINSTL ute to install the drivers on drive
D: (and they install just fine, exactly as the manual install directions
suggest), it doesn't seem to work too well with the 2.11 CSD, and some of
the DOS drivers are simply not being recognised or loaded, which gives me a
shitty screen font in OS/2 and VDM windowed sessions.

The WPS is fine though, and very quick at 800x600x256 (the maximum I can
use on this little supposedly 14" SVGA), and Win-OS2 absolutely
screams, but I'm just not happy with the driver support, and I don't where
to obtain later ones.  Diamond have a BBS in the US, but I'm loath to waste
several bux on an ISD call unnecessarily.

Never mind, I'll persevere with it for a while, but it may just be too
early a model card to be all that great under OS/2 (the book doesn't even
mention OS/2, BTW), although by all accounts, under Windows 3.1 it is
extremely fast.  Big fucking deal - I don't run Win31.  :-(

I still have the ET4000 card just in case though.  ;-)

Regards, Bill

--- Msgedsq/2 2.2e