Trident 8800CS! Had hi/lo eeproms with a reflective hologram sticker over the eeprom window. Now we upload microcode/firmware on bootup. We have things so good.
I loved my Trident. It was the first video card I owned that could do 1024x768. It's been so many years that I don't remember all the other steps I went through between Hercules and CGA to a modern nVidia, but almost every one of them was special in some way.
Since I was rather young at the time, my access to anything better was limited. Talking about mode X does make me nostalgic, though I used Allegro instead of writing my own low-level init code.
