CompuServe Messages

I know about cheating Windows drivers. One common method of cheating is to incorporate the text "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" pre-cached into the driver code at the sizes WinBench uses, so that it won't have to call TrueType to build those fonts from scratch. I prefer the WinTach benchmark, which runs a driver through four simulations of real-world applications: spreadsheet (tests scrolling [which is itself mostly bitblts], chart drawing, etc.), word processor (tests character generation at various sizes and styles and fonts — its text is NOT "The quick brown fox…" but is instead a full page letter-like document!), paint (tests primitives and fills and pens), and CAD (tests line drawing and redrawing) rather than a set of techie benchmark tests. Hercules includes the Speedy benchmark, which is like WinBench except it runs nine different tests at the same time in multiple windows, so that the driver can't easily cheat since it won't be doing the same thing repeatedly. But Speedy DOES use "The quick brown fox…" as its test text. :/ Yes, the Matrox MGA will blow just about anything else away, because it is a 64-bit full coprocessor (several, in fact). It also costs about as much as a Hercules Graphite would, along with a full 486 DX2/50 system to plug it in to. 🙂 Keep in mind, folks, that unless you plan on doing a LOT of Windows work on the same machine you do your 3DS work on, you're probably better off with a cheap VL-Bus Tseng ET4000 high color/true color card, or some other card that is not a Windows accellerator per se but has fast DOS throughput. 3DS is not Windows, and will not benefit from a Windows accellerator chip. Most such chips (including all of the S3 family, and the Weitek P9000) are MUCH slower at DOS VGA stuff than a Tseng ET4000 is. The Tseng ET4000/W32 chip provides quite good Windows accelleration along with the same DOS VGA speed the ET4000 has always had.