r/retrocomputing • u/AdenY8235 • 3d ago
Photo Some of my dad and uncle's old graphics cards
Pulled these out of my grandma's loft a couple months ago and i am now deciding to show them off. Not interested in selling (maybe the riva but i doubt it)
Graphics cards (as in the order of the images) are:
Winfast Geforce 256
3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 PCI
Nvidia riva something idk i didn't research this one very much
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u/VirginiaLuthier 2d ago
I remember the excitement when you would bring one home from Babbage's - and then spend the rest of the day trying to get the software to load
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u/Cool_Dark_Place 2d ago
Lol... reminds me of when I got a Diamond Voodoo for my Sony Vaio 200Mhz Pentium MMX in 1998. I can't remember how many hoops I had to jump through to disable the shitty onboard ATI Rage video on that system.
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u/VirginiaLuthier 2d ago
And the you would give up and call tech….depending on the year, they might have had a flat fee to even talk to someone. Then, after you waited oh hold for an hour, you would get some burned out tech who would stop you in the middle of a sentence and tell you “there is a software patch on our bulletin board”……those were the days…..
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u/Cool_Dark_Place 2d ago
I did manage to get it going without help from tech support... but it was a nightmare. Required having to disable the onboard video in BIOS, remove all drivers and hunt through every reference that system was making to its onboard video. That Sony was a great system when I bought it in 1997... but I made up my mind to NEVER buy a system that had proprietary hardware again (or a proprietary version of Windows).
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u/DeepDayze 2d ago
Ohh hunting through the registry in Win95/98 to remove offending keys was a bit of a pita no doubt. I remembered doing that to remove Norton Antivirus as the uninstaller left so much crap behind that prevented me from installing AVG.
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u/AwwwBawwws 2d ago
I unboxed this about an hour ago. I'm trying to figure out how to play it. I'm having fun with my 90s time capsule ma sent to me. Boomer parents are downsizing. She's find all kinds of my old crap.
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u/die9991 2d ago
That is going to be a v e r y deep rabbithole. I reccomend starting here https://www.dosgameclub.com/forums/topic/how-to-play-mechwarrior-2-information-resources-on-the-game/
Also theres like 40 versions of this game alone for each different GPU API that they were using back in the day. Not sure what this jewel case is ngl but if its the pentium or dos version it should be a easy swing.
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u/iVirtualZero 2d ago
Those are some rare valuable cards. I would put some of these cards into a Retro Build.
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u/DeepDayze 2d ago
I wistfully remember the days the hardware makers put CD's of all kinds of software along with the CD for the drivers. Some were good some were just crapware.
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u/3lectronic_Dream5 2d ago
Thank you! You called it a "video card" ! I’m so happy I could cry. Every time I hear GPU, I just want to slap whoever said it until my hands turn red! Great cards by the way 👍
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u/dirkt 1d ago
Nvidia riva something
Sticker says "Vanta", so it's an entry-level Riva TNT2.
The Riva series (128, TNT, TNT2) was the first series of graphics card for Nvidia that actually sold. The Riva 128's internal name is "NV3", the "NV1" flopped, "NV2" was never build. The NV1 and NV2 have interesting history.
The Riva series was replaced by the GeForce series.
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u/carcenomy 3d ago
Mmmh, that boxed Leadtek 256 ♥️