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By Ruffin Bailey Published: 5/29/99 |
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 Wouldn't you know it? As soon as you recommend a company, they go out of business!!! And if you'd kept your ear to the ground, you would have heard it coming... |
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Wouldn't you know it? As soon as I
venture to recommend MicroConversion's Game Wizard 3D acceleration card, they go
out of business. Ye ole xlr8 Game Article kiss of death, I suppose. Some of you might be in the same boat as me,
having already purchased a Voodoo2 that now has questionable future support. Some of you might have been on the
edge of purchasing such a card, perhaps waiting for the SLI drivers to finally be released. Now,
there's no Mac Voodoo2 choice (with guaranteed support) at all! First off, the iMac has split the Mac community right down the middle. We have two major "markets" within the Mac market: 1.) The Million iMac March 2.) Everybody else Though this distinction might seem contrived and none too original, think about it. I'd wager that more than half the G3 Macs out there are iMacs, and that means that half of the next-generation Mac users are going to be iMac users. By definition, that means that about half of the next generation users will not have ANY PCI slots or AGP slots. (AGP is where the WinPC users are putting their high-end video cards.) iMacs just aren't easily upgradable, and their stock components, though initially fairly formidable, do not provide the performance a fanatic gamer demands. But what does that have to do with MicroConversions? I'll get to that in a minute, as we've only covered half of our clues. For now, suffice it to say that there are going to be about a million gamers out there in the near future stuck with stock iMacs and wishing for more. The end of PCI (for MC) Clue two came out last week, when OmniGroup released 3dfx drivers for Mac OS X Server. OmniGroup has also released ports of Quake II and Quake III for Mac OS X Server. It might not be well known, but Quake II has been available for the Mac since last December 23rd (albeit only for Rhapsody and, now, OS XS). When I emailed OmniGroup back in December regarding Quake II they said they certainly hoped to have a Quake II version for OS X as soon as OS X was released. These guys are in it for the long haul, and there's little doubt in my mind that they'll have OS X 3dfx drivers out soon after OS X's release. And if OmniGroup doesn't, someone else will. Furthermore, it looks like 3dfx (the company behind the Voodoo family) isn't going to let third parties sell individual versions of Voodoo cards. That is, there's only going to be one brand of Voodoo3 and 4 and 5 and... and that brand will be the 3dfx brand. If Mac drivers for reference cards are available, the Mac becomes one more market from which 3dfx can directly benefit. It's in 3dfx's interest to cut out the Mac middleman, if they can. What this means is that the 3dfx torch has been passed, and in a BIG way. OmniGroup's drivers reportedly don't require a Mac-specific Voodoo2 card like MicroConversion's Game Wizard; normal reference cards can be used. Translated, that means that any Voodoo2 card will more than likely work with your G3 Mac once you've installed OS X. I believe OmniGroup even showed off Quake running in SLI at E3. (If anyone can confirm that, let me know.) Microconversion's monopoly over PCI Macs would be dead on the arrival of OS X. Group 2 (so eloquently dubbed "Everybody else" above) and their wallets would soon be lost to MC. Because there will be drivers for reference cards made by a non-Mac specific company once OS X is released (again, this is my own personal opinion here), I expected to see MicroConversions take a big hit in the OS X era. Why did they bow out of the PCI market now? The main reason seems to be that there are hacked versions of their drivers floating around right now that allow reference Voodoo2 cards to be used on a Mac. So an unscrupulous Mac user can grab the drivers from some warez hotline server, walk into the local Best Buy, snag a PC Voodoo2 for nearly $100 less than what the Game Wizard's going price, and go home to much improved gameplay. There was only one item that could boost the PCI Game Wizard's value to MicroConversions, and that's SLI drivers. I imagine we didn't see these drivers for two reasons: One, MicroConversions couldn't make the drivers hack-proof, and two, the iMac Voodoo2 upgrade (which doesn't have room for SLI (which requires two cards) even if it wanted it) was taking up most of MicroConversion's time. MC's last gasp -- the iMac Voodoo2 So MicroConversions got around to releasing their new line of Voodoo2 upgrades for the iMac, even for Mezzanine-less models. There's a pretty big market for these puppies. The iMac's stock video card is not a gamer's card. It can't handle the heat games like Quake II and III can dish out. The iMac's processor is as fast as you'd ever want (for at least a month or three), but the ATI card doesn't provide the framerates you'll desire. MicroConversions found a way around the iMac's expandability limitations, however. There was a mysterious testing port on the first two revisions of the iMac called a Mezzanine slot. At the latest MacWorld Expo, MicroConversions displayed an iMac Voodoo2 that connected via the Mezzanine slot. This product that would eventually lead to the MicroConversion's iWizard line of products was displayed to an awestruck crowd. Before my iMac took a turn for the worst, I'd planned on grabbing one of these iMac Voodoo2 cards myself. But there's a downside: Apple said that using the Mezzanine slot would void the iMac's warranty. Then the Voodoo2 killer: after the iMac Game Wizard's release, Apple promptly removed the slot entirely from the colored iMacs. Now to pat myself on the back, in an email to Mike I said that I was sure someone was going to pull an iMac floppy that let adventurous Lime, Strawberry, Blueberry etc etc iMac owners solder in their own Mezzanine slot. Quick Aside For those of you not familiar with the iMac floppy, it turns out the iMac has a spot on the motherboard marked FD. Apparently a floppy was part of the original design, but to get a good price point, the floppy was taken out. To save a couple of extra bucks per unit even the port for a ribbon cable from the floppy that was no more was removed. It would be too expensive to completely redesign the iMac's motherboard to completely remove the FD hookup, and iMac-floppy.com took advantage of this iMac "appendix". Now back to the action! Even when the Mezzanine slot was removed in colored iMacs, the spot on the motherboard where the Mezzanine port had been connected was still there, waiting for some madman with a solder gun to install a custom Mezzanine port. That madman was MicroConversions. Here's the conundrum that, in my opinion, kept the iWizard line from saving MicroConversions: To convince enough people to install their iWizard in Mezzanine-less iMacs, MC had to promise to provide their own warranty to cover Apple's warranty that the iMac user was going to lose by mailing in their precious computer for the iWizard upgrade. And that's just what MicroConversions planned on doing. Here's a quote from the iWizard press release: Two and three year warranties will be offered, which cover the entire iMac, since the installation of these features voids any remaining Apple warranty. As a convenience, memory and hard drive upgrades will also be offered. Phew! The bravery! Even though the PCI market had been whisked out from under MicroConversions by hackers and OS X competition, MicroConversions knew that the iWizard line was a brilliant, if risky, idea. MC was left with just one choice to make: Bet the next several years of their lives on the iWizard, or take this valuable idea and "sell" it to someone else? I'm betting www.iwonderinc.com, the company picking up the iWizard line, is the part of MicroConversions that was working on the iWizard at the end, and these select in-house fellers are actually keeping their research on this product for themselves. Unlike the hackable drivers for the PCI Game Wizard, no matter how sly you are writing video card drivers, you can't shove a PCI or AGP reference card into an iMac! This product had a defensible monopoly. The old MicroConversions business model should work. But the iWizard can't support the PCI side of the MicroConversions house, and these are the workers that are probably going to have to make their dime somewhere else. Or perhaps iwonderinc is another company entirely with deep enough pockets to take the iWizard risk. Either way, I wish them luck. There's nothing I'd like to see more than an iMac with a Voodoo3. For this new company to continue to support and develop a lost cause like the Game Wizard just isn't going to happen. Though I wouldn't be suprised to see SLI drivers released in the future, I certainly don't see it happening unless they've already been written. For the purposes of this article, all you need to remember is that the PCI Game Wizard is dead. iWonder probably won't see any profit supporting the PCI Game Wizard, and, as pointed out before, their iMac market and the PCI market do not overlap. The question of customer loyality could therefore be ignored, if iWonder wanted to, without much of a repercussion. Whew! I did want to get that off of my chest, and let you know where I thought MicroConversions and the future of the Mac-Voodoo was headed. Mac-Voodoo progress might slow down for a while between now and OS X, and I wouldn't expect any SLI drivers unless someone at MicroConversions gets really generous. (Please Mr. Kislow!!) I've heard there's been some rumblings on the USENET as to why MicroConversions doesn't continue to stick around selling their drivers for $30 or so. The bottom line is that there probably is a sharware-sized market for such drivers, but as MicroConversions learned the hard way (and I'm ashamed to admit it), the Mac market apparently doesn't have the morals to keep from hacking and distributing whatever software is floating around. Heck, how many of you goons reading this haven't registered Quake and UnrealFinder? Punks! ;^) Remember, for Quake II there's a freeware Java server browser, written and shamelessly hyped by yours truly! When Quake II is finally released, I'll expect you to use it! ;) Come OS X, the Mac's going to be right in the thick of things like it hasn't been before, and hopefully at a much more competitive price point. If you have to have a new card right now, it might be worth getting an ATI card (as I suggested in Shade Tree Gamer: Part 1), but if you're like me and already have a Game Wizard, hang onto it. You might be able to sit it beside a cheap reference card on an OS X Mac in the near future and finally enjoy that long-promised luxury, SLI!!! [SLI Game Performance varies by CPU speed and even game title based on PC tests - see my Editoral on Mac SLI mode published a few months back-Mike] After this little aside, let's cut back to the chase in Part 2 of my Shade Tree Gamer series, to be published the first weekend in June! I'm going to go play some Voodoo2 accelerated Team Fortress... See ya online! | ||||||
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