Creative 3D Blaster VLB: $395 DOS Graphics Card from 1995 

I dunno, I just bought a 144 IPS and having to reach around behind it to blindly control it sucks. I would love to have one of those... although I suppose it might affect the bezel size...

Yeah, my EV700 didn't have that!

@@genekwagmyrsingh9433 Most monitors can be controlled via Display Data Channel (DDC) / Command Interface (CI) software

The thing is, back in the day you usually read the reviews in whichever magazine you "trusted" before purchase. So the reviews saying "It's crap" is one of the reasons so few people got one to wring the last bit of life from their 486's. Not everything back then was, always, a direct upgrade and pretty much everyone had already been burned once or twice when their new hotness turned out to be a steaming turd.

Imagine a magazine actually telling you the truth about a bad piece of hardware, though! Especially from a big company with influence (at the time) like Creative. Now they would just buy off the journos with goodie bags and get an average score.

That would be my experience with the S3 ViRGE, world's first 3D decelerator. I bought the damn thing 3 days after launch.

@@GrandTheftWatto That's because the people who wrote for PC/Gaming magazines in those days were actually into PC hardware/gaming and had some journalistic ethics, weren't just fresh Creative Writing/English majors with a knack for using SEO keywords and crafting clickbait titles.

these days 600 wont even get you an entry level card... with miners and scalpers and whatnot... even at msrp 600 is still only mid high range, or high mid range even. even at msrp 350 wont buy you anything other than entry level cards these days unless you buy last gen, and good luck finding those...

is still valid, but i had more chances to get coasters with DVD+R Dual layer, rather other kinds of discs.

Yep. Before buffer under-run protection (BURN) coasters were so so common.

Glad I use my discs on the same drive they were burned on.

Still often best to burn them at the second slowest speed so they play more reliably on hifi CD players.

Oh, flash from the past! I remember burning at 8x and nervously and intently staring at the buffering-meter, hoping it would stay on green :)

i remember when i was a kid spending afternoons trying to make these games run at a decent fps, trying every trick known to humanity, and often failing

@@luvincste I used a program called QUEMM386, that loaded the TSR programs into upper memory and freed the main memory for the games... LOL Good times!

Hymen?

Me too!😄 The whole video made feel nostalgic, especially setting up the display settings in dos xD.

@@CelticSaint You know, that one with big-ass sword and puma (or something) for a horse. The Terminator of old school fantasy.

I question anyone that _doesn't_ end up driving in reverse after the first lap to crash everyone.

@Lassi Kinnunen 81 I don't think I ever won a game in Indy 500 *without* taking out the entire field.

Well, I'm just another Nascar crash player.

I was the same way but I got sucked in eventually and now I'm full on into sim racing lol

I did the same shit in dirt to Daytona lmao

That is so sad😔

I mean you can’t take it at face value and compare to other cards today....a $50 modern video is infinitely more powerful than this card.

Plus, when you look at the review rating of 20% "It's crap!!" - then it seems kinda expensive :P

@@fortunax22 i think he means you bought back than a card for gaming for 600 and now people often pay more.

Wait until he covers pandemic pricing of video cards in 20 years, I'd hate to see the price adjustment for inflation on those.

And a year later the N64 came out.

thats why i never got into PC gaming. Imagine buying a new game for the PC and then coming home to realise that it doesnt work because of the million things that went wrong in those days.

@@imwalkworse6298 They usually dropped back into software mode, and there was no way to play the funnest videogames on the PS1 correctly. Yeah I bought Redalert & mechwarrior for PS1, but they never worked and there was no $50 card I could buy to make it work (I never paid more than $50 for a videocard in the 90s)

And the PlayStation had something similar to MMX / SSE while Creative could probably not even set up its own triangles.

Mhm but Playstation ran at quarter of the resolution of this card, no texture filtering, no Z-buffer, a lot of extra wonk with gaps in triangles, more wobbliness, this was the next gen stuff. Then again, Playstation games were actually playable.

Same here, only with original Voodoo. :) It was a night and day difference.

I agree, there are so many neat little graphics APIs that are just about impossible to experience today. The DOSBox team is practically allergic to scope creep, but maybe PCem will support some of them one day.

I am sure they would appreciate your contribution ;)

thats true. seeing this i wanna play that game.

@@kristophertadlock779 I've been messing around with PCem a bunch lately and started reading up on the proposed graphics standards that could end up emulated in the future. The 3D Blaster VLB is right near the top of their list, although the likelihood of it actually happening is currently "low."

@@LGR PCem?

content wise, his old videos are just fine. it's just a little more rough around the edges which is perfectly fine. people like youtube for a reason, it's the every man sharing his passions. it's more real.

It's a common thing for creator type people. You improve as you get more experienced, and that makes it even harder to not notice the flaws in your work when you look at it retrospectively.,

I played Fatal Racing over the network versus a friend, he used S3 Virge and I had the Monster 3D. Those were the easy wins, practically in every game we played, like nfs2 and so on 😆

I remember getting my first monster 3D. My jaw was on the floor. I knew that shit was serious when it made a clicking sound during the VGA passthrough!

Yeah, I remember that. Seeing P.O.D., and then GLQuake run on Glide on a Voodoo 1 around 1996/early 1997 felt like a slap in the face. Then came the Voodoo 2 and Unreal, barely a year and a half later, and they slapped even harder. The evolution of PC 3D graphics between 1994 and the early 2000s was just insanely fast.

Seconded, Scruffy.

And it comes in a box!

I thought so too. Whoever manufactured Creative’s PCBs made a nice finished product, and the layout is pleasant as well.

I'm surprised how brand new it looks.

@@genekwagmyrsingh9433 with the performance in mind, that's not entirely surprising lol

This was a point in graphics history when performance was "it depends". There was so many badly implemented VLB systems (and even PCI with the Pentium initially) coupled with the fact that these cards usually had only a handful of top titles that were fully compatible that you were really rolling the dice as to whether a $350 adapter would be any use to you at all. There is a reason they didn't last too long, and it took DirectX to unify the graphics environment under Windows to really get you to the point where the software renderer was the best bet. Any extra money you had for these toys were typically best used to save up for your next, higher performance, machine.

not even sure anyone actually tried gaming on a 486 other than 8 bit adveture games

really see that 33mhz bus hehe isa was less but separate?

@@pazsion No, ISA wasnt separate and PCI also not. Both VLB and PCI run on 33MHz.

It was often called that in magazines and on newsgroups back in the day!

I remember the ads in magazines back then. I could not believe what I was seeing. Of course, the ad had about the same frame rate as the software. 😄

I'm so used to Plug and Pray I'm still surprised when I plug stuff into a computer and it actually works

Right? I’ve been watching consistently since 2015 and he doesn’t feel like one of those channels that goes downhill :]

@@Sassybng yeah his content is consistent

Because of ... let me guess... the pandemic, right?

@@crunchysoup8515 the funny thing is, this era of early Windows PCs with all the adjustments and drivers and jumpers, was really frustrating! I, as someone a bit older than Clint, would like to forget it and deal either with older microcomputers which were very limited, but less fiddly, or just emulation. Somehow he maintains this nostalgia for DOS and early Windows-Gaming, which had the worst parts ever! It was the Dark Ages of PCs!

Voodoo2 was two years later. Even the first Voodoo came out a good half year after this card.

@@thesteelrodent1796 I'm not sure if you are thinking any of that contradicts the OP. He described an "era", surely that covers more than a couple of years!😳

In '94/95, no one knew the PSX would go on to become one of the most important consoles ever. People were still thinking about the 3DO. Was Sony going to make a console that was as out-of-touch with the market as Panasonic? After all, Sony was the same company that gave us betamax and the minidisc. You don't really know if a console is a legit success in the market until about a year into its lifecycle. Plenty of PC cards had time to come to market and beg for software support they never really got before fading into obscurity.

The Playstation was aimed at an entirely different market, which previously had been associated with things like ET on the Atari 2600. Regarding graphics it was the N64 that really impressed me; so much that I bought one. There again the graphics on that jumped straight from Silicon Graphics workstation to console.

@@MrDuncl The N64 was impressive with its filtered textures, but the lack of RAM, maximum texture sizes, being forced to use cartridge media, and the terrible microcode that Nintendo made people use meant that the machine couldn't really match the PSX. But I agree that it was a good system.

@@jcasetnl they pretty much did. $299. That set the stage for the rise of the PSX. The 3DO was totally dead by this point. The PSX launched with killer titles. It had a massive launch in Japan which meant that it's launch in Europe and the US was going to be huge. Sure, it had to fight a battle with the Saturn at first, but I mean come on! A $349 add-on for your PC that didn't really speed things up, or an entire console that also doubled as a CD player in your living room for $299? It's a no brainer.

​@@cromulence The 3DO was discontinued in 1996 and games were produced for it up till its demise. You seem to shift around dates and events to serve your points.

More early 90s rave/techno, honestly. Just at a slower tempo. It even has a hoover, listen to Human Resource - Dominator and you'll see what I mean.

Well, downward spiral came out a year before this game, but I agree with the other guy that it sounds more like standard electronica

I completely forgot about this game. Gremlin interactive had the best games at that time.

I second that. Local Bus signal integrity was never great, even back in the day, and one device with really high bandwidth requirements could cause all sorts of issues or be itself defeated by devices on the chain with slow transition speeds.

Also, If I recall correctly, VLB ran at the actual FSB speed of the CPU. That meant depending on which variant of 486, or in this case pentium overdrive, you were using the clock speed of the bus would be affected. In some causes the bus could run at higher clocks that some cards didn't like and that especially became even more of an issue when multiple cards were on the bus.

I had this card, and no end of problems getting it working. Probably bought and tried like 8 different 2D cards alongside it, finally found some configuration that worked. It had a nasty habit of causing the machine to lock up hard depending on which 2D card it was paired with.

It was a game that gave PC gamers a taste of what would become possible in a few short yrs -- simulated 3D graphics rendered in realtime that didn't look like just a bunch of squares & triangles strung together over a flat Earth. The performance on 486 PCs was pretty shitty, but Flying Carpet literally flies on a more powerful Pentium PC (in fact, any Pentium system faster than 120MHz might make the game unplayable). As for the game itself ... Flying Carpet was a fairly innovative spin on the combat flight simulator: you're the apprentice of a now-dead sorceror who accidentally shattered reality into a multitude of alternate worlds; your task is to visit each world, destroy any magical monsters or hostile wizards & gather up all the magical energy ("mana" -- which appears as golden spheres). As you gather mana, you can use it to perform certain actions -- travel super-fast, use new attacks, heal your injuries, build & upgrade a fortress, etc. The end goal is to rid all the alternate worlds of enemies & use the mana to knit the shards of reality back together again.

I had the retail version of flight unlimited too.. I was amazed at the graphics back when it came out

The Flight Unlimited series were what got me into flight simming. They were all ahead of their time (FU1 for the scenery and physics, FU2 for the scenery and ATC/AI traffic, and FU3 for, well, the scenery, as well as dynamic weather).

@@mrbrad4637 Same. You could even forgive the weird bumping the ground textures always did

@@askjacob Yes, I remember it doing that now that you mention it.. It did look amazing from the skys - especially impressive that it was playable on a 486 DX2/66, Infact it ran very well on my DX4/100

liar you have every 3D card ever made somehow, and you're the only person named Nathan

I immediately assumed it was you :D

You might know a fair bit about pixel pipelines, but you still haven't learned the mysteries of texel tubes

you can not call it Accelerator really ... 3d Decelerator ...sure :P

Thank you!

Thumbs up for mentioning the Mitsubishi Apricot. I turned mine into a full multimedia PC complete with 4x CD ROM, two hard drives and 14K4 dial up modem for surfing the web. In terms of capability the biggest leap I ever made in Home Computers.

I'm waiting for that sims knock off game that actually looks better than the sims

@@drunkbillygoat What game was that?

I prefer the earlier days of bare polygons. As impressive as the leaps and bounds of the mid to late 90s were in terms of 3D, I generally thought them a bit ugly, though that could be down to a lot of the aesthetic choices made by developers. I thought the menus of this era of PC games were quite ugly as well.

I was thinking the same they did it for the yamaha chip for the AWE 32 PnP card. Problem is no one even knows what the 2MB daughter cards looks like. If someone could just post a front back pick of it I’m sure someone could clone it.

@@garysharkey17 It's a memory interface, with half the memory on the board. Shouldn't be hard to figure out by tracing a few signals, probing a few and finding datasheets.

I vaguely remember someone on the Vogons board working on a board design. I'll post the link if I can find it.

@@ironhead2008 Ooops. Looks like you never found it!

That would be awesome but there isn’t even pics of it. It would be awesome could make a clone of it. It would be great to be able to possibly get 30 fps on Quake.

It probably would have run pretty decent at a lower resolution

@@thedopplereffect00 Maybe, but they didn't give you that chance...

@@miikasuominen3845 yeah. I think that's why Quake for example allowed you to set from so many different (and weird) resolutions. They knew people wanted to choose themselves between quality and FPS.

@@thedopplereffect00 I think that's more from the developers themselves. iD added most of the 3D-acceleration themselves. And Carmack was VERY adamant, about how things looked and ran. I suppose they (Creative) paid the developers to put support in and (no surprisingly) they put minimal effort in to make as much money as possible ;)