REPRINT RIGHTS FOR SALE for permission

Date of publication (more or less): January 12, 1997

Keeping the Faith in 3D

When I wrote that holiday column, while the upgrade was still in progress, I was ecstatic about the change. For about $400, I expected to get something pretty close to a brand-new, souped-up multimedia machine. People wanted to know how it came out, where I got it, and did it cost an arm and a leg.

So here is my follow-up. First, the shop in question is a little place called General Nanosystems, in Stadium Village in Minneapolis. So folks on the net who wanted to bop right over there may have to drive several thousand miles. But be of good cheer, because upgrade shops exist in most cities. And most repair shops and store service desks do upgrades.

Second, and this will come as no surprise to the techno-weary, nothing is ever as easy as it sounds, or as cheap as projected. Though my upgrade included an inexpensive ($50) S3 Virge 3-D video card, when I got home I discovered that Shadows of the Empire works on only a handful of select (expensive) cards, the kind that run on the DirectX video standard. The very best of these is the Diamond Monster 3D card ($200).

So in one dismaying moment my low-cost upgrade (new motherboard, processor, video card and memory) inflated from $480 to $680. Fortunately, the Monster 3D card is a "companion" to ordinary video cards, connecting each to your monitor via a pass-through cable. Mine could work right alongside the Virge card. So I hadn't wasted the original $50.

But the real cost was reflected in the fact that I had to make three trips back to the shop, thanks to some problems with interrupts. I must give plenty of credit to General Nanosystems. Since everyone buys from them on price points, their margins must be ultra-thin. Their downfall is the customer too dumb to plug in a cable unassisted. So when they saw my giant tower entering for the third time at the front door, they must have pictured winged dollar bills exiting from the window. But they kept the faith and solved the problems at no charge.

So after two weeks, I have the new system on my son's desktop, and the precious program sliding into the CD-ROM bay. We gazed, open-mouthed, as the program booted up.

Folks, let me tell you, this Monster 3-D is a big deal. It gives a generic desktop monitor the same detail, clarity, and breathtaking lifelikeness as a $10,000 arcade machine.

Ordinary video cards permit a degree of dimensionality. If you are playing Doom or Quake, you see the corridors lengthening as you make your way through them, blasting bad guys. But the Diamond card takes things to a gut-churning level of visualization. The card does kinds of image massaging I had never heard of: Gouraud shaping, MIP mapping, texture modulation, and per-pixel alpha blending. "Blockiness," "jaggies," and "object popping" are memories of the 2D past.

But the proof is in the playing. Word of a new video card spreads fast among the leaders of tomorrow, and our phone rang off the hook with kids inviting themselves over to check out the specs. In a matter of days my son went from mere mortal to the toast of his peer group.

With popularity comes envy. Mine. For the first time, my kids have a better system than I have, and it seems an inversion of nature. Why is it that kids get this great stuff, and not grownups?

I began fantasizing what an Excel spreadsheet would look like if cast in the fantasy realm of MechWarrior 2, or Lotus Word Pro if one were to write in a 3D cave, in which words had physical reality. It would be, well, awesome.

But give the boy the last word. I crept up behind him during a session of Shadows of the Empire. He was playing a Star Wars character named Dash Rendar, who was hunting for an interplanetary bounty hunter named Boba Fett. The two could be found way out on an endless cliff ledge, with dizzy mile-high dropoffs on each side. Besides Boba Fett, the cliffs are frequented with Imperial storm troopers, commandos, sentry droids, and a big hairy Wampa who takes a thousand laser blasts to die. The purple sky shone with a hard gleam, and thick smoke hung believably in the air.

"Jonathan," I asked him, "what do you like most about the Monster 3D card?"

"The fact," he said, "that it makes everything so realistic."

Michael Finley is co-author with Harvey Robbins of THE NEW WHY TEAMS DON'T WORK.Visit Michael Finley at his home page, or e-mail him at mfinley@mfinley.com