Comment by prescriptivist
4 hours ago
Yeah, I wanted a Matrox so bad at that time because you could also do dual monitor on some of those cards. I had a sick NEC with a degauss button and trinitron style horizontal lines and a shit packard bell monitor. I wanted to do dual monitors so bad with both, despite the resolution asymmetry. Some matrox also had connection points for antennas and video capture. They were truly workhorse cards. But they sucked at 3D and were lapped in the Boot mag benchmarks for Quake 3D et al. I ended up with a 3D Labs Permidia 3D card anyway because I couldn't afford a Diamond or Voodoo and ended up turning textures off fully on Quake 3d in the end. Fun times, shout out Hard OCP.
I remember people I knew wanting the Matrox because it was possible to have duel screen on Linux. They usually had a huge grin on LAN parties, once they got their breath back from carrying two heavy CRT monitors and a PC tower. Good times.
Maybe I misunderstood something at the time, but the mga X11 driver was weird. My understanding, at least at the time, is that it is/was possible to provide an X11 driver that would work regardless of the underlying operating system, providing features such as dual-head support.
This feels intuitively wrong to me now and I doubt that's how it worked. In any case I dutifully copies the Matrox provided X11 driver to OpenBSD and enjoyed multi-monitor support.