Subject: OT? Supera and Diamond Multimedia support

From: Tothwolf <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue May 27 20:11:01 2003

I guess this might be slightly OT, and maybe a little bit of a rant,
though lots of Diamond products are easily 10 years old or older...

I just found out today that the massive archive of drivers and firmware
that was on the the Diamond ftp server [ftp://ftp.diamondmm.com/] is gone.
I didn't have the bandwidth to mirror it, but I sure hope someone here got
a copy when I recommended months back (Modem/Supra thread) that someone
archive it.

The support page for Diamond products
[http://www.diamondmm.com/support/diamond/] formerly contained links to
files on the ftp server. It now has the following posted:

  S3 or Diamond Brand Support

  We no longer support customer service or warranty claims on any of our
  legacy products sold under the former S3 or Diamond brand. As we no
  longer manufacture these products, and have not for some time, our
  customer care and warranty claim call volumes related to these products
  are extremely low. Because of this, we made the decision to discontinue
  support for these products. If you are experiencing problems with your
  Diamond or S3 legacy product please contact an independent repair
  professional. We appreciate your understanding in this matter and hope
  that this change does not inconvenience you greatly.

The above statement seems totally ludicrous, as how is "an independent
repair professional" (which I think I more than qualify for) supposed to
support these products without the files that were available on the ftp
site?

I put in a call to their technical support staff at (206) 515-1400, and
when I selected option '5' for diamond products, it referred me back to
the above support url, claiming that support files were available on the
website. The phone system then hung up, and I called back again selecting
the Supra support and 'other' products...same thing. I finally got someone
on the line by selecting Supra support and the first and only product the
phone system mentioned. I think it was option 4 and 1. Talk about a
nightmare.

Turns out, they've suddenly had a massive influx of calls from other
slightly annoyed customers who still support and use all this "obsolete
hardware." Personally, I don't see how hardware can be "obsolete" if it
works and does exactly what you need it to. They also seemed to have no
clue that older versions of firmware and such are very important when
maintaining and supporting these things. The ftp server formerly contained
nearly every version that had been released. Now its all gone. Some of
these products were only a couple of years old too. If other hardware
forums haven't had info about this yet, they probably will soon...

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.

-Toth

---

From: "TeoZ" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue May 27 20:37:00 2003

What driver are you looking for? There are drivers for diamond and s3 all
over the net.

I don't see this as being uncommon in the computer industry. Companies get
bought out and the documents/driver are kept around a few years and then
they are dumped to save on the website/ftpsite/bandwidth/domain name
charges.

If you support a particular product you have sold, then you should keep the
relevant drivers and information handy on your machine. As far as repairing
those products, I cant think of anything that would not be cheaper to trash
and replace then to repair. Modems these days are dirt cheap, and you can
still find non-winmodems for sale at surplus sites on the net.

There is also the possibility that drivers for another devise built with the
same chipset would work with your card. My diamond mx300 is an aureal
chipset and I use aureals drivers (still available even though aureal is no
more), my diamond monster 3d II uses the drivers from 3dfx, etc. I dont own
any s3 products besides a bunch of real old video cards and those are
avilable from other sites if needed.

In general just winimage driver disks (for older hardware that had drivers
on floppy) and store them on tape backup or on cd. Its very cheap to do.

---

From: Vintage Computer Festival <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue May 27 20:41:00 2003

> site to its former state, as that would seem to be the best solution for

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.

Quite ridiculously lame!

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

 * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

---

From: Tothwolf <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed May 28 00:36:01 2003

On Tue, 27 May 2003, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> > 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