Mach64 & Rendition Drivers Now Work With X.Org Server 1.20

Anyone happening to have an ATI Mach 64 graphics card from the mid-90's or a 3Dfx-competitor Rendition graphics card also from the 90's can now enjoy the benefits of the recently released X.Org Server 1.20.

Mach 64 and Rendition are among the X.Org DDX (2D) drivers still being maintained for the X.Org Server. Even though using either of these two decade old graphics cards would be painfully slow with a Linux desktop stack from today especially if paired with CPU and memory from that time-frame, the upstream X.Org developers still appear willing to maintain support for these vintage graphics processors. Well, at least as far as ensuring the drivers still build against the newest software -- we've seen before out of these old drivers that they are updated to work for new releases, but at times can actually be broken display support for years before anyone notices with said hardware.

Adam Jackson of Red Hat who also served as the X.Org Server 1.20 release manager has put out the xf86-video-mach64 6.9.6 and xf86-video-rendition 4.2.7 driver releases. Their prominent fixes are just build compatibility with xorg-server 1.20. See my 1.20 feature overview if you are not familiar with the changes found in this major xserver update that was one and a half years in the making.

What's the oldest PC hardware you still find yourself using? Let us know in the forums for some interesting weekend discussions while reminiscing over the old days.