Comment by antx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antx | Hacker News Reader

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Heck yeah, I went from a C64 to a 386SX (which youngin me eventually broke by trying to upgrade memory), to a 486DX2/66 which allowed me to FINALLY play doom.

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 bought a Diamond Stealth II S220 as an alternative to a Voodoo

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.

Oh yeah, tomb raider was fun, but vquake was the bomb.

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.

The Rendition Verite chips also had antialiasing, which was awesome. Was a while before anybody else had that.

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. =)

Acclaim, publisher of forsaken, was scrutinized for a rather risqué marketing campaign for the game. Never played the game myself so I don't know if the ads had anything to do with the content.

Did you buy a sound card?

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 at that point (Socket 7 motherboards) they were starting to do integrated sound cards, but they weren't standard. I may have had some kind of SoundBlaster clone.

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.

Bought a Reveal multimedia kit, which came with a soundcard, speakers, a CDROM drive and a few discs (Kings Quest 6, and an encyclopedia (Worldbook?))

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