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Comment by mschaef | Hacker News Reader

I went 8088->386SX->486DX/33->P5/100->...

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).

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One thing I recall from that time, which seems absurd nowadays, is how I was able to actually run photoshop 2.0 in a 486 after upgrading it from 4 to 8 MB. Jesus, 8MB nowadays probably is not even enough to start booting.

Our Family went straight from the 8088 + cga graphics to the pentium 100mhz (really an overclockerd 90mhz model) + sound blaster card + matrox something and a decent Sony screen .

Quite a big jump :)

same here. We had an 8088 with AdLib, which only had FM synthesis. We stepped up to a Pentium 75Mhz with SoundBlaster AWE32 and 16-bit 44.1kHz audio. And CD-ROM drive! Those were amazing times. Shortly after that the internet hit mainstream and MP3s became a thing, and the world changed forever.

The AWE32 was amazing. I remember being so frustrated that essentially no games seemed to take advantage of it.

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.

> The AWE32 was amazing. I remember being so frustrated that essentially no games seemed to take advantage of it.

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.

That was somewhat surprising to read!

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?

Yeah... Demos and mod trackers made a lot of GUS use. From what I remember, the audio synthesis model was fairly similar. I bet there was a lot of overlap between mod tracker authors and GUS enthusiasts. (And from what I remember, the MOD format itself was strongly derived from the capabilities of the Amiga audio hardware.)

> straight from the 8088 + cga graphics to the pentium 100mhz (really an overclockerd 90mhz model)

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.

Yeah, that used to be really interesting!

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.

> Sometimes monitor cables themselves were the culprits.

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.)

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