Diamond Multimedia

Diamond Multimedia
Headquarters Chatsworth, California
Products Graphics cards, sound cards, Digital audio players
Website www.diamondmm.com

Diamond Multimedia is an American company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players, however the company began with the production of the TrackStar, a PC add-on card which emulated Apple II computers. They were one of the major players in the 2D and early 3D graphics card competition throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

The company was founded by Chong Moon Lee and H. H. Huh, who acted as the technical designer. Diamond Multimedia later merged with S3, Incorporated in 1999 after a long-time cooperative business arrangement, when S3 decided to expand their business from producing graphics chipsets to manufacturing retail graphics cards. The move paralleled the 1999 3dfx purchase of STB Systems, which changed 3dfx from a graphics chipset supplier to companies including Diamond, into a vertically-integrated graphics vendor and direct competitor to S3. However, the first major product after the merger, branded as the S3 Savage 2000, was a commercial failure. Growth in the add-on sound card market, also an ongoing Diamond business, was tempered by the 2000 bankruptcy of Aureal Semiconductor and subsequent asset purchase by vertically-integrated Creative Technologies.

With these market failures, the new combined Diamond/S3 company decided to change direction and leave the PC addon-board market. SONICblue was formed. Diamond Multimedia resurfaced in 2003 after the brand and assets had been purchased by Best Data. Diamond again built expansion boards.

The company was the defendant in a significant copyright case for its Rio digital music player, which the Recording Industry Association of America claimed infringed copyrights; the Ninth Circuit deemed it to be a fair use, however, in RIAA v. Diamond.[1]

Diamond Multimedia is a subsidiary of Tul Corporation.

Graphics Cards

Speedstar

Diamond's earliest line, now defunct, was the SpeedStar series, initially based on the Tseng Labs ET4000 and ET4000AX chipsets, and expanded further in additional releases. The SpeedStar line was launched as a series of high-performance ISA graphics cards that excelled in MS-DOS applications up through the early 1990s. However, as Microsoft Windows gained market share and newer graphics products entered the market, it was later relegated to the cheaper, value-oriented products and the SpeedStar branding was expanded to other products.

Partial listing of Speedstar-branded models

Stealth

Diamond Stealth24
Diamond Stealth32
Diamond Stealth SE
Diamond Stealth64 Video VRAM / Video 3240
Diamond Stealth 3D 2000
Diamond Stealth II S220
Diamond Stealth III S540 Xtreme

The Stealth cards of the 2D era were first launched in the early 1990s and were usually based on GUI accelerators from S3 Graphics. The line later included chipsets with combined 2D and 3D capabilities. Initially the Stealth line was Diamond's high-end brand but transitioned to midrange after the Viper line was introduced.

Notable members of the Stealth family have been the Diamond Stealth 3D 2000, by far the most popular S3 Virge-based board. The Diamond Stealth32, using the Tseng Labs ET4000/W32p chipset, was capable of impressive price/performance, especially in DOS. The Diamond Stealth64 Graphics 2001, with the ARK 2000PV/MT chipset, was known for excellent DOS performance at the time. The Diamond Stealth II S220, using the Rendition Verite V2100 2D/3D accelerator, was popular with enthusiasts for its excellent price/performance for both 2D and 3D gaming. A special BIOS patch was released by Diamond for the Stealth II S220 which brought its clock speed up to the same level as the high-end Verite V2200 chip, resulting in equal performance at a significantly lower price.

In the middle of the Stealth line-up, Diamond chose to implement a numbering scheme to differentiate their cards. For example, the Diamond Stealth Video VRAM was rechristened the Diamond Stealth Video 3xxx. The numbers had more than a random meaning. Specifically, they tell the buyer the card's memory amount and type. The Stealth Video 3240 uses VRAM (3), is equipped with 2MB initially (2), and is upgradeable to 4MB (4). If the first digit was (2), then the card used standard DRAM.

The numbering scheme confused many people since Diamond just renamed current cards with new names. The Stealth Video 3240 was simply the old Stealth Video VRAM. New cards did also use the scheme, however, such as the S3 Trio64V+ cards.

Partial listing of Stealth-branded models

Edge 3D

Edge 3D 2120

The Diamond Edge 3D was the first consumer 3D accelerator card, based on the NVIDIA NV1 chipset. The boards were designed to be an all-encompassing entertainment solution, as the chipset and board included full 2D/3D acceleration, an audio engine capable of General MIDI synthesis, and the ability to use Sega Saturn gamepad controllers.

The architecture of the NV1 predates the Microsoft Direct3D philosophy and, as such, game compatibility was a problem with the Diamond Edge boards. Limited and slow Direct3D-supporting drivers did eventually show up, but performance was inadequate and buggy. The audio engine further received poor reviews regarding MIDI quality, which was a common standard for multimedia music playback at the time.

Listing of Edge 3D-branded boards

Monster3D

A Diamond Monster 3D 3dfx Voodoo1 and external pass-through 2D video interconnect cable

The Monster3D line was based on 3dfx Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2 chips which did not contain a 2D engine, requiring a separate VGA card connected externally using a pass-through cable. When the 3D engine was called into use, the 3dfx-based card would disconnect the 2D pass-through signal and begin driving the display directly. Both Voodoo and Voodoo2 based offerings were in production until the STB-3dfx merger. The series was highly successful as the Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2 chipsets introduced consumer-grade 3D graphics into the PC and arcade markets, whereas such capabilities had previously been present primarily in very high-end CAD and graphic design workstations.

A critically acclaimed feature of the Monster 3D II (and all other Voodoo2 boards) was the capability to connect two identical boards in a SLI (Scan-line Interleave) configuration. In SLI, a pair of Voodoo2 boards splits the effort of rendering the 3D scene between alternating raster lines, allowing performance to be nearly doubled.

Listing of Monster 3D-branded boards

Viper

Viper V770 Ultra - Diamond's flagship before the S3 merger
Viper II Z200 - S3/Diamond's flagship before the VIA merger

The Viper line was Diamond's high-end offering. Initially it consisted of a graphics accelerator board for VLB or PCI that was a combination of two graphics chips. For non-GUI environments such as DOS, the original Viper used an Oak Technology OTI-087 display chip with its own 256 KB DRAM. This chip was rather slow and basic. The Viper SE card moved to a Weitek 5186 chip with 1 MB DRAM for non-GUI functions. For GUI environments such as Windows, the Viper cards used a Weitek graphics co-processor which accelerated many drawing functions and performed very well for its time. The original Viper used the Weitek P9000/P9001, while the Viper SE used a Weitek P9100, both lines equipped with 2-4 MB VRAM. The separate slow DOS chip was a problem for owners who played DOS games because these chips were quite slow and had limited and buggy VESA BIOS Extensions implementations. While the GUI accelerator was very capable, drivers from Diamond were rather buggy and were only revised a few times during the lifetime of the card.[2]

Towards the end of the 1990s, the Viper line consisted of NVIDIA-based graphics cards. The Diamond Viper V330 used the highly integrated RIVA 128 accelerator that featured very capable 2D, 3D and video acceleration. The later Diamond Viper V550 and V770 utilized the RIVA TNT and RIVA TNT2 accelerators which were evolutions of the RIVA 128.

In 1999, Diamond was acquired by S3 Graphics and became primarily a supplier of products based upon their graphics accelerator chips. The Diamond Viper II Z200 was based upon the S3 Savage 2000, a supposed NVIDIA GeForce 256 killer. Unfortunately the chip itself was not fully functional and the drivers were very buggy.

Partial listing of Viper-branded boards

FireGL

The name "FireGL" stands for Diamond's workstation-class 2D/3D graphics cards. This brand was originally created decades ago as just "Fire" by the design team of the professional computer graphics pioneer SPEA Software AG from Starnberg (Germany) that was about 1996 acquired by Diamond.

Products whilst under the hood of Diamond were:

The FireGL team was bought by ATI (later AMD) in 2001 once the combined Diamond/S3 dropped out of the graphics market to form SONICblue. ATI continues the Fire GL lineup.

As of September 2007, thus long after that business, Diamond was also preparing a new video card, based on the latest-generation R600 graphics core. This was the same core as used for ATI driven FireGL V8650 and V8600 cards. Diamond altered the PCB reference design and labeld their device VFX 2000 series professional workstation graphics card. It came with at least 2 GB GDDR4 memory on board.[3]

Sound Cards

Monster Sound

Diamond Monster Sound MX300

The Diamond Monster Sound gaming sound card series was a very innovative line. They were the first to really push the envelope in the at-the-time bleeding-edge PCI audio card market. The Monster Sound cards were among the first to support hardware mixing acceleration with Microsoft's new DirectSound and DirectSound3D audio APIs. Most, if not all, also supported Aureal's burgeoning A3D API.

The original Monster Sound card was highly innovative in this regard, but also controversial because it basically broke DOS game compatibility which was still critical at the time. DOS game audio was only functional within a Windows 95 DOS box, which was a finicky way to try to run these old games. It came equipped with a 2MB AdMOS MIDI daughterboard.

The Monster Sound M80 was similar to the original monster sound, but lacked 4 speaker support. It also had a reduced quality AdMOS MIDI daughterboard (1MB).

Monster Sound MX200 was known for its excellent General MIDI quality because of the high quality patch set (licensed from Roland) it was equipped with on its 4MB Dream daughtercard. Otherwise it was technically identical to the original Monster Sound.

The Diamond Monster Sound MX300 was based on the Vortex2 audio ASIC from Aureal Semiconductor. It was a revolutionary step forward in gaming audio, with impressive 3D audio positioning and other innovative effects. Utilizing the then state-of-the-art Aureal A3D 2.0 3D audio API, the MX300 was capable of producing startlingly immersive audio. Its capability to turn simple stereo speakers into a 3D-audio experience was clearly ahead of the pack for the time, and is unique in its presentation compared to even the renowned and far newer Creative Audigy 2 series.

Monster Sound MX400 was advertised as being one of the first sound cards with hardware MP3 decoding acceleration. Unfortunately this was hardly a worthwhile reason to buy the card because the central CPUs in PCs at the time were more than capable of handling MP3 playback. It was also somewhat complicated to make use of the MP3 acceleration because special software was needed to use it.

The Vortex2-equipped MX300 was a notably superior card for 3D audio. Unfortunately Aureal had gone into bankruptcy and was dissolved so their next-generation chips never saw the light of day. Diamond was forced to go with ESS's less powerful chip to be able to continue the line. The MX400 was the last of the Monster Sound cards.

Sonic Impact

The Sonic Impact was the value-oriented sound card line from Diamond. Whereas the MonsterSound lineup was targeted at no-holds-barred gamers, the Sonic Impact cards were more generally aimed, and were cheaper and less powerful. Still the lineup consisted of several capable cards.

XtremeSound

Diamond XtremeSound is the first sound card line launched after the company's restructuring in 2003.

Other Sound Cards

Other products

Rio PMP300

Diamond's innovation created the Rio PMP300, one of the first consumer MP3 players, but they soon sold their MP3 player line and no longer provide support for it.

SupraMax DSL modems

The SupraMax line is a popular value DSL modem line. The brand has a lineage going back to Supra, Inc..

Diamond Micronics motherboards

Diamond began manufacturing PC-compatible motherboards after purchasing Micronics Computers Inc. in 1998.

Maximum DVD

Diamond was an early (1997) entrant into PC DVD kits with their Maximum DVD 1000DB-VAR (Value Added Reseller) and 2000-RETKIT (RETail KIT). These kits bundled a 'feature reduced' (several pin headers and other parts not installed) full length PCI MPEG2 analog overlay decoder card made by divion. This card connected to the VGA card with an external passthrough cable, a 3.5mm (1/8") external patch cord to the soundcard's line-in jack, and the analog audio cable from the included Toshiba SD-M1002 DVD-ROM drive connected to the divion card while a second cable passed the audio on to the soundcard's internal connector.

Diamond also made kits called the Maximum DVD 1500 and 2500. (Hardware specifications unknown.) The drivers and player software for these are not compatible with the DVD 1000 and 2000. They are a slightly newer product with the 'Navigator' player software having a cleaner user interface.

None of these DVD kits are DirectX compatible and as the drivers are the VxD type, they will only work with Windows 95 through 98SE. Dual-layer DVDs are not supported in original Windows 95 or 95a, but are in the various versions of 95 OEM Service Release 2. Windows 98 or 98SE is not recommended due to problems that may happen with video color and alignment. Only the bundled player software can use the hardware MPEG2 decoding of the card.

SCSI Adapters

Diamond produced the capable but relatively low-cost FirePort 40 SCSI adapter in the late 1990s.

References

  1. ↑ RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F.3d 1072 (9th Cir. 1999).
  2. ↑ Seemann, Torsten. Diamond Viper Resource Page, accessed March 2009.
  3. ↑ Fudzilla report, retrieved September 3, 2007
  1. "BEST DATA PRODUCTS COMPLETES ACQUISITION OF DIAMOND MULTIMEDIA BRANDS AND ASSETS " by Best Data Products Inc., October 28, 2003, retrieved December 23, 2005
  2. "PC Video Chipset Information" by Michael Scott & Harm Hanemaayer, February 19, 1997, retrieved December 23, 2005
  3. "Wave Issue 9825 5/13/98 Article 1-01" by 4th Wave Inc., May 13, 1998, retrieved January 13, 2005

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