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Comment by ecliptik | Hacker News Reader

The hippie copy mentioned was the ad my dad bought our first PC from. He was coming back from a business trip and asked the company computer guy to help him choose one for our family. We ended up with the 486DX2-50MHz "Integrated VESA System" [1].

Calling the Gateway 2000 customer support 800 number was my introduction to understanding computers and I am grateful to their staff for being patient with a 12 year old.

We got rid of it in the early aughts, but I kept the CPU all these years. Recently I found a similar Gateway slimline desktop (badged a 486DX2-66MHz) and have been using Claude to port things to DOS on it, like Cave Story [2][3]. The original 50MHz CPU still works.

1. https://books.google.com/books?id=L2RD68Gg2sMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...

2. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/

3. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YLFztifZKQ8

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For a while in the 90's, I did Gateway 2000 tech support. It's nice to hear you had a good experience :) The mandate was to move quickly while also solving the customer's problem (which is harder than it sounds over the phone).

I was very young and I tried to upgrade the RAM on our gateway computer. I used the wrong type of RAM and fried (or broke) the motherboard. When I talked to gateway support, I think the person on the other end could tell what happened but took pity on me and allowed us to get a new motherboard under warranty. I had completely forgot that story until your comment here, thanks for the reminder on why I double check all the specs before rummaging around in there.

That's great they replaced it under warranty. I thought I broke the IDE connector once on the motherboard when re-connecting the cable because a pin was missing. The Gateway support rep calmed me down on the phone and that's how I learned about cable keying.

>Calling the Gateway 2000 customer support 800 number was my introduction to understanding computers and I am grateful to their staff for being patient with a 12 year old.

You had a better experience than I had. Bought a Gateway, the cheap hard disk in it went back within a few weeks. Took two calls to support (each putting me on hold for maybe 45 minutes) to get them to admit the hard disk was bad and each call was quite long I remember.

They sent out a raw hard disk and I had to install Windows and all the drivers by hand over the weekend because of course it is my fault they used the cheapest drives they could find.

I think they charged me for the new drive and said they would rebate it if they got the old drive back within a month. I think I was able to use the package they sent the replacement in to mail the disk back, but I had to pay the postage.

Good riddance to a bad company.

I had a similar experience in the plentiful 4 era but they were nice and gave me an hard drive and the reinstall cd. It was really nice of them, the computer was probably not in warranty or barely was with a few days or weeks left and they really were nice to teenage me. This was a 40gb seagate hdd and windows xp pre sp2 to date myself lol

For DOS, your choices are basically DJGPP C compiler, or using the HXDOS DOS extender. But how well would Cave Story work on 50MHz?

I've am working my way through benchmarking it on a few different CPUS [1]. A Pentium Overdrive 83MHz gets around 30fps, and the 486DX2-66MHz around 20fps. Because the 50MHz will use a bus speed to 25MHz I am expecting it to be 10-15fps.

Even with a lower frame rate gameplay is relatively smooth with having a fixed-timestamp mode [2].

The biggest difference in performance is the sound backend [3]. Gravis Ultrasound and Adlib for some reason halve the framerate on all cpus and it's the next challenge to point Claude at.

1. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/FPS-MATR...

2. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/tree/main#fixed-timeste...

3. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/SOUND.md

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