DOOM

Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Josh Dersch wrote: That page says "This was the board that launched the Matrox company.", and the Matrox web site says the same thing, but both are wrong. (I wonder whether the Matrox people copied a web source for their own history?) AFAIK, the first Matrox product was the MTX-1632, introduced in 1976, about two years before the ALT-256. It's a 16 line by 32 character display module with a generic interface rather than a specific bus such as S-100. There's a blurb in the "What's New?" column of the October 1976 byte, on page 89. Matrox announced a number of other generic text and graphic display modules prior to introducing any S-100 products. I just corrected a false claim on the Matrox Wikipedia stating that the ALT-256 used a "racing the beam" technique similar to the Atari 2600. It actually had an entirely conventional 8KB frame buffer. Whoever wrote that may have been confused because the frame buffer isn't memory-mapped, but is instead written using a set of four output ports and one input port for status. An 8080 (or even a Z80) at that time was not fast enough to "race the beam" at a 256 pixel-per-line resolution. Other interesting early Matrox products were the MTX-A1 and MBX-B1 display/keyboard controller chips. They were 40-pin NMOS chips. I think they may have been mask-programmed Intel 8041 UPI chips, but I haven't found data sheets on them for comparison. Eric