http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAC-yWCOScw Looks better than the Saturn version, closer to the Model 2 arcade version, although not quite as good. Pretty rare game. This is running on a first generation PowerVR chip, either PCX1 or PCX2, so it's a generation behind VOOT on Dreamcast.
Correct. The Matrox M3D was a PowerVR-based 3D-card (of the first PowerVR-Generation iirc) which came out a bit later than the Voodoo1. Matrox sold it because their own Mystique was lacking features such as texture filtering and lighting, the M3D was an addon card - and an unusual one because it had NO connectors apart from the PCI slot. The rendered image was transferred via the PCI bus into the video memory of the host graphics card, therefore the usable resolutions depended solely on the amount of video ram of the host board (unlike the voodoo1 which had 2MB of texture memory and 2MB of video memory, limiting it to 800x600). The PowerVR chips were featured on a lot of boards, Apocalypse 3D, Matrox M3D and NECs own boards. There were quite a few special ports out for them. Mechwarrior 2 was ofcourse ported to EVERY single 3D accelerator back then, but some games (like this one) were special ports as pack-ins for hardware vendors. Remember that a few Sega games were among the first hardware accelerated PC games with the Nvidia NV1 chipset Diamond Edge-Cards (they even had Saturn Gamepad ports and used Quads instead of triangles for 3D calculations, just like the Saturn). In other news, there is also one hardware accelerated version of Wipeout1 I know of, especially made for Ati Rage cards.
I had a PCI PowerVR add-in board some time ago. It didn't have any connectors just a blank bracket. Never did figure out how to use it.
somewhat of a shame when you consider some of the old pc games that had vastly superior popular-graphics-card-of-the-time ports that youd be hard pressed to get going properly at this point
Just shove it in an empty PCI slot, install the drivers et voilá! That's all there is to it, when you choose the PowerVR card as the 3D renderer in games that allow you to choose your output device, it will calculate the 3D scene and output it via your normal graphics card by writing directly into its memory! Ofcourse this was all a lot easier back when those cards came out, because back then your primary gfx card was probably not capable of doing ANY 3D acceleration at all.
