OT? Supera and Diamond Multimedia support

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Wed May 28 00:36:01 2003

On Tue, 27 May 2003, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> On Tue, 27 May 2003, Tothwolf wrote:
>
> > If anyone else wants to call and ask questions, the phone number above
> > should get you though to someone. I've asked them about returning the
> > ftp site to its former state, as that would seem to be the best
> > solution for everyone right now.
>
> In the very least you should ask if they would release that entire part
> of their FTP server into the public domain, or at least let someone else
> host it.

I'm working on that too. The real problem seems to be the lack of a
communication channel to anyone with the power to actually do anything.
I'd be happy to even accept a tape copy of the old site if they could
provide it. I'm sure I can find *someone* with the space to host the
files.

I use *tons* of Diamond branded products. The video cards were all pretty
much built with standard chipsets and tended to be well supported in a
non-microsoft environment. Things like configuration programs (often
bundled with ms drivers) and different revisions of firmware are of course
*very* important. I have so many different Diamond products, that I never
kept all the different drivers on disk, and for the most part just used
the ftp site when I needed a file. From what I understand, this is a very
common practice anyway.

Going back to say 1994, I have and still use cards like the Diamond Viper
VLB, which pretty much set the bar for PC video cards. When they were new,
they cost upward of $400, and had an amazing 2MB of ram available.

I personally own 100s of Diamond products, as I once swore by them, and
have even been actively hunting down used/junk cards as I could find them.

> Quite ridiculously lame!

Yup, it is. I just hope whoever made the bad decision corrects their
mistake. One of the main reasons I have continued to use Diamond products
since about 1992 or so is that they were very good about archiving
software such as drivers, utilities, and firmware that went with their
cards.

Also, if you think about Supra products, a large number of them have
upgradeable firmware. I have many, many Supra modems that could be
upgraded to support higher speeds and newer protocols, but since the files
are not there, I have no idea if I'll ever be able to.

-Toth
Received on Wed May 28 2003 - 00:36:01 BST