QUAKED: The Cyrix MediaGX and the Rise and Fall of Cyrix Corporation 

Rescue them all :)

Hey thank you! I definitely plan on it. I'm going to do a follow-up to this and see if I can get a GX1 going in this board, as I found a PGA one for real cheap. They seem to be marginally faster, so I'd be interested to compare. 3D Studio and 3DMark99 on both CPUs would be a cool test! I think I'll give that a go! Thanks for the ideas, and thank you for all your awesome support! :)

Hey, thanks for watching! I hope you enjoyed! And oh, wow, that’s too cool! The MediaGX definitely feels pretty fast. It’s well-optimized and even the graphics core that it contains is pretty acceptable. It provides halfway-decent Windows acceleration, great DOS compatibility, and it’s plug and play, which is nice! NFS III would definitely do it though-I could see that game being a bit too demanding, but wow, what an upgrade! A Fury Maxx too!? How cool! I’ve always been fascinated by that card and the 1GHz Athlon was a legend. Was it a slot model? Or PGA? Thanks for sharing and thank you again for watching!

@@RetroTechBytes My Athlon was a PGA model, using the FIC AZ11 motherboard. I picked the Fury Maxx with very little education too, not knowing how... unique... it would be. I hadn't even experienced hardware-rendered 3D before that so I was green as hell, but I liked the pictures of the card on TigerDirect and I liked the fact that it had two GPU's... because two is better than one, right? Of course! That and I recall it being on-sale for a substantial discount off the "original" price, which may have been tied to its finicky reputation but what did I know - I just felt like I was getting a special deal. I got along just fine with it too, and I kept it in my PC until I wanted to run Windows XP and discovered there was no driver. I still have the card but when I retrieved it to use in a 2019 Slot 1 Pentium III retro build, I discovered it had developed issues with the secondary GPU. Vertical lines of partially-corrupted pixels to be specific. Honestly I'd like to get it fixed or buy a fully-functional duplicate for nostalgia sake.

Hahaha it’s definitely quite a long one, but I figured why not start big? Either way, I hope that you enjoy! The MediaGX is such a cool alternative to the 486 and people haven’t really tapped that market yet, so they’re still out there! And they’re SO easy to work with!

@@RetroTechBytes that's awesome. Too bad the entrance barrier is so big today, back then the companies could be a bit more adventurous and offer some competition.

Hey, thanks for this idea! Now this is something I need to try. The V2200 is definitely pretty decent with a 486, and the GXm is a bit faster, albeit still a 486-class machine (ish). I'm curious as to whether the Voodoo 1 would actually be slower overall here; I'm inclined to agree with you due to the Verite's ability to not only handle triangle setup in hardware, but also because it seems to more effectively accelerate overall slower systems. I'll give that a shot! Thank you again for your support and for this idea!

You know something? I hadn’t thought about that. I’m going to give that a go. UNISOUND works wonders and I think you’re onto something. I do know that the MediaGX’s implementation of the SB16 is imperfect, but, if anything can get it going, it’s UNISOUND for sure! Thank you for the suggestion!

@@RetroTechBytes you can use mediagx pc104 board to build a much smaller dos gaming box.

@@RetroTechBytes mediagx is an imperfect S3 video + imperfect ess audio.

Interesting idea! That would be a cool and super small DOS box for sure! And yeah, that sounds about what it is for sure!

In my GCT-MGX integrated mainboard (Cyrix MediaGX-S @ 200 mhz CPU + Cyrix CX5510Rev2 Chipset w/ ICS 5342-3 GenDAC for the integrated video) the sound is handled by a separate CMI8330A audio chip, which works fine with UNISOUND. I believe they supplemented the audio portion of many 5510 chipsets based on the injunction that prevented OEM's from shipping computers that included the audio features during a lawsuit that Creative Labs filed in 1997. The graphics core is pretty anemic in "2D" applications including Doom and has generally terrible compatibility with older DOS games and UniVBE making it poorly suited to retro gaming on it's own.. in Quake/early 3D performance it's a bit slower than the original S3 Virge chipset which would be a cheap upgrade to greatly improve performance + compatibility with older DOS titles in addition to enabling some advanced VESA resolutions for games like Duke 3D and Quake.

That’s actually a funny story, but basically, I had some issues getting my Voodoo 1 going in 98SE. It turns out that it’s a common driver thing, and GLQuake just worked better in NT4 for me. That being said, the overhead on the OSes shouldn’t be significantly different, but I do think I’ll revisit it with 98SE and DOS, just for consistency. I want to try benchmarking with a Cyrix GX1 as well, if this board can handle it!

Interesting. Now this is something I'll have to try! I have tried that GUS PnP on another system that had an AT PSU and had a similar issue, but I'm not convinced it's the card because some games do indeed work. The GUS PnP is just a pain in the butt, honestly. Great idea, terrible implementation in terms of drivers. But hey, thank you for the support and for the suggestion!

@@RetroTechBytes it may very well be the drivers, but the voltage blaster project is still handy to have around. I've heard that GUS drivers aren't too good. I personally stick with either ESS or Yamaha sound cards with a Dreamblaster MIDI daughterboard because I got sick of crappy Creative Labs drivers and hanging note bugs.

Yeah, that's where I'm at too. ESS/Yamaha cards tend to just work by comparison. I love the AudioDrives and I've found the ESS OPL-3 to be perfect, and in Windows, the enhanced-mode OPL-3 is very cool. With a Dreamblaster, you just can't beat it! OPTi boards are okay too, but some of them have weird quirks. Same with Crystal cards, but I'm probably one of the 3 people who likes Crystal FM haha

Agreed! Cyrix CPUs get even weirder too! There are certain registers in the 5x86 that can enable branch prediction. And the 6x86 and 6x86MX (and MII) have like 5-10 registers that let you gain at least 10% in performance if you set them right! As for the 5x86, it's wild to think that a 486-level CPU can operate like a Pentium in that sense with its branch predictor. Unfortunately, the 6x86 wasn't too spectacular compared to the 6x86MX. Truthfully, a 6x86MX PR200 is one of my favorite CPUs to work with. It's fast and stable, and it's essentially a Pentium 233MMX in integer math! Its FPU is a bit weak, but with a Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2, it performs really well in 3D. Even something like a Matrox G200 makes up for the FPU deficiencies in these chips!

I always used Cyrix back in the day, can't remember the exact chip I had but I overclocked it to 333Mhz! eventually the gold IHS thing lifted off the package and it died :( wish they were still about today.

@@RetroTechBytes I had an IBM 686 MX PR333 which was just the Cyrix processor branded as an IBM part. That worked really well with a 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee. If I recall correctly we worked out a way to achieve a modest CPU overclock over standard but importantly we were able to do so with 100 MHz front side bus on a super socket seven board with an ALi Aladdin chipset. It actually made the chip scream in relative terms.

Hey, thank you for watching! There’s thankfully a bunch still floating around and they’re really pretty great to mess with! You can’t really go wrong with anything Cyrix. Even if they’re not the greatest, there’s a cool factor to their stuff that just is so starkly Cyrix!

Thank you Dave! I couldn’t have ever gotten here without you! From the very earliest of days, I can say I’ve had lessons from the best, and couldn’t be here without them!

Hey, thanks for watching! Yeah, I’m gonna admit this video is very rough, especially compared to my later work, but it’s where I started and I’m proud of having gotten better, so I’m going to leave it up. Thanks for checking it out, though, and I’m most glad to hear you found it interesting! If you want to see other, better videos, feel free to check out some of my friends’ channels, located in the description of my last few videos, or feel free to check out my later videos!

@@RetroTechBytes i did not mean to be antagonistic, it was just an impulse comment, so please dont mind it. however i would consider to normalize reedit and reupload this video as it is indeed an interesting topic. ive never heard about a cpu integrated sound card from the era, and i'm genuinely surprised. cyrix for me was always a lowcost solution, which should be avoided, but this idea to compete is actually a creative. i miss those days when the cpu market was not a duopoly and they were actually trying. but anyway, keep up the good work

Funny enough, now that I've made more videos and gotten more comfortable with things, that's just what's gonna happen...