This bring back fond memories.
I had a 486DX2/66
I had a 486DX2/66
I worked in a computer store while attending college during this time. We were the only "Computer store" in town, but the local BigBox "furniture store" also sold computers too. None of the staff there knew anything about computers.
We would often have people come into our shop asking questions and then going to the BigChain to buy the PC's.
Well, one day a couple came into the store carrying the flyer for the other place. The couple then asked several questions about the computers, "What does this mean, What does that do, Is this part important... etc" I tried several times during the discussion to steer them towards the products that we sold. It was obvious that they were only using my time to educate themselves so they could 'smartly shop' at the other location. So we get to the part of the listing where the choice was DX vs DX2 (33Mhz vs 66MHz IIRC).
Me: "That's needed if you want to use two floppy drives, both a 5.25" and a 3.5" or just one."
fun times..... =)
*Edit/Note: the 2 in DX2 means that it was clock-doubled. I lied to the customer because they were wasting my time.
In my case, I had a Packard Bell - which had 1 floppy & 1 CD-ROM.
https://www.weavweb.net/2020/09/22/packard-bell-486-dx2-66mh...
I lied to somebody that was wasting my time.
I totally remember that and loved it. Thanks for finding the video link. Brings back great memories.
Then followed a Cyrix 5x86 100GP in somewhere around 1996, which was a bit of an upgrade, since I could not afford Pentiums just yet with my own money. In 1997, I bought a Diamond Stealth II S220 as an alternative to a Voodoo, for the same "poverty" reasons. You have to know my parents were ... very much against computers.
As we started to get access to the internet in high school, I learned about overclocking, and oh my! was my system the best candidate for it! I could push the CPU to 120Mhz without additional cooling! The graphics cards, which bore a rendition verite v2100 chip, could also be overclocked quite heavily, but since the chips where bare, without any form of cooling, it became too hot, so I had to "MacGyver" my way around the problem.
I also have very fond memories of the socket 3 era... for me it started with the classics from id software, to Warcraft 2, Duke3D, LAN matches, Carmageddon, Quake, etc.. and all the early mods such as paintball, skin modding, what fun!
I did the same thing, it was a great budget card. vquake was awesome, plus you were able to use Direct3D inside of Windows which the first 3Dfx cards didn't do. It also came with a Descent clone called Forsaken on the demo CD, which was the first colored lighting I had ever seen in a game, and was pretty amazing.
Ironically, the Verite chips didn't handle certain VGA modes that well, so DOS games like Doom were pretty choppy.
Although, eventually, when the miniGL port was released, it was clear that the V2x00s were sub-par, even with 24 bit support and hardware z-buffer. Eventually the voodoo2 just put the nail in the coffin. But for a time, little geek me had fun pushing the hardware limits, even though I knew nothing of thermal management at the time.
Indeed, I remember some DOS games having some... stutters? For lack of a better term. But at that point I was hooked on 3D and Windows 9x, so it didn't matter too too much.
It's funny to think these days how you use to have to buy sound cards (and hardware DVD decoders, but this came later)
I think I used a discrete sound card even later on into the Pentium III days because of either driver issues or quality of the on-board ones.
AA was an underappreciated feature at the time. You didn't really notice it unless you had quite a sharp monitor! Everybody else just got antialiasing "for free" thanks to their blurry screens. =)
The 386SX transition was nice, because it also brought Windows (with its standard printer drivers) and enough memory and video capability to start to do interesting work with graphics. It brought most of what I'd call the baseline capabilities of a modern computer, with the subsequent generations mainly just adding capacity.
It was interesting at the time, though, that the 486 I had was mainly heavily constrained by expansion bandwidth. It had an accelerator for the video, but the connection from the CPU into the video card was just 16-bit ISA. Anything that had to transit the bus was glacial - so it couldn't really do more than 8bpp graphics. It was a great argument in support of local bus (and a source of some amount of envy when VLB DX2/66's started showing up... computationally only about double speed, but so much more capability to drive the screen).
Quite a big jump :)
That's actually the time period when I started to fall in love with game music. I'd download MIDI files of songs from 16-bit games. On most setups, they sounded quite bad. But in MIDI software that supported the AWE32's soundfonts a lot of them sounded incredible.
Gravis Ultrasound (?) falls into the same category for me. Really interesting and capable hardware that didn't penetrate the market enough to warrant significant investment by game developers.
And once 16-bit/44KHz audio and powerful enough CPU's became common, the need for hardware accelerated audio generation for games really diminished. It's all now logically pretty similar to the DAC section of a SB16 with a bunch of software driving it.
It's nice that the level of capability is as high as it is, but I do miss some of the unique hardware designs from that era.
I never owned a GUS, but I seem to remember most games having support for it. It always seemed to taunt me from the game's installer.
Or maybe I'm just thinking of demos and modtrackers. A lot of them used to require a GUS for sound, I think?
Now there's a jump... that must have been around two orders of magnitude more compute performance (not to mention all the rest of the new capabilities.)
> + matrox something and a decent Sony screen .
One of the things I did with that 486 machine was upgrade to a Sony-17SE1 monitor. This is when 14 or 15 inch CRT's were normal, so the 17 was special, expensive, and a very significant financial stretch. Still worth it for all the reasons you'd expect.
I carried the monitor over to the Pentium, which was its own learning experience. The Pentium machine was built to be a dedicated Linux machine, so I had to be fairly careful about the hardware I used. When I ordered it from Micron, I bought it with the cheapest possible video option the offered, and upgraded it myself to a Number Nine 771 (which had a discrete IBM RAMDAC and was much better supported on Linux.)
The reason I mention this is that I got to see the same monitor driven by two different outputs. Even at the same resolution/etc, the quality of the image was much, much better on the 771, for reasons that I am sure were related to the discrete RAMDAC and a better analog section. It's the sort of thing that's totally a non issue these days (digital link ftw), but mattered a lot back then.
It's the sort of thing that's totally a non
issue these days (digital link ftw), but mattered
a lot back then.
Sometimes monitor cables themselves were the culprits. I remember seeing a very noticeable difference between various VGA cables. Unnoticeable in games, but very significant when working with text. Especially when coding on a cramped CRT monitor with the smallest font size my eyes could tolerate, so I could have the maximum amount of code and documentation onscreen at once.
Differences in analog video output were noticeable in the game console space as well.
For example NEC's PC Engine was known for having really sharp, vibrant composite output. Most models of the Genesis/Megadrive did not. Etc.
The Sony 17SE1 I bought was positioned as a relatively high end display. (Maybe something you'd see on a workstation class machine.). The video cable for it had DB-15 at the video card, but the connection to the monitor itself was five separate BNC connectors. Presumably that allowed better performance with DB13W3 and the like, although I never used that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB13W3
> For example NEC's PC Engine was known for having really sharp, vibrant composite output. Most models of the Genesis/Megadrive did not. Etc.
Interesting... I only used a PC Engine once or twice, but I do remember it having better than average video quality. At the time, I attributed it to the better video processor, but it's easy to believe that the analog section was that much better also. (Particularly given that it was composite video, and all the weirdness associated with that.)