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Comment by monster_truck | Hacker News Reader

I mowed lawns for two summers to save up for a Voodoo 3000 PCI, still didn't even have half of what I needed. Parents covered the rest. Basically nothing I had hoped to be able to play worked. Spent an entire summer just trying to get Arcanum to even run, never did succeed. Learned a whole lot.

Goddamn if that buyer's remorse didn't scar me for life, the amount of researching I did before any purchase from then on was obsessive. I still think of the card fondly for what it represented to 10 year old me. This story does have a happy ending, we ended up getting a Dell XPS not long after with a Pentium 3 & a GeForce 2, back when they were still beige.

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This is exactly how it was back then, roughly from when the 386-based PC clones appeared up through Windows 7. The best thing you could do was ask the local computer stores about what configurations they were building, since they got to see more hardware come through. But they struggled too. The system the store built for me in 2001 had an Athlon Thunderbird running 1.4GHz and cooling tech hadn't caught up so it hit the failsafe temps during long sessions of Counter-Strike and Serious Sam. Later, wiser me eventually figured out, two computers later, that the power supply was probably the culprit, but this wasn't much of a topic of discussion yet - power supply efficiency wasn't a priority in the 90's.

Fun Fact. My first “tech job” was tech support at EA in the late 90s. Serious Sam was the FPS of choice for late night LAN parties for the EA tech support and QA teams. Tech support and QA were shared resources. They’d shift people from support to QA in summer for fall/winter holiday releases and back to support around the holidays.

Serious Sam was the one FPS that would run decently on our workstations.

Long story but I got promoted to maintainer of the EA game tech support site which is what got me into coding.

I did something similar with a U2W 160 mbps SCSI card and 10k rpm Seagate Cheetah drive circa 2000. I saved up and found an amazing deal on eBay, shipped to the US from Australia. Waited a week, plugged it in, and found out it had no boot ROM. So it worked, but I still had to boot from an IDE disk which ruined my whole vision for the build. I was so disappointed.

Went through almost the exact same situation with a $250 "used" 2U in 2006 that was full of the 15k rpm cheetahs. Had to cannibalize an emachine for a drive to boot from. It was far too problematic to do anything with the linuxes of yore, but it worked great for my network administration training VMs with Windows Server 2003. Those things were loud as fuck.

Ended up giving it away to an irc friend for the cost of shipping, they used it to start a minecraft server hosting business.

20 years later I now have nieces and nephews wondering how I know so much about minecraft, can't wait until they're a little older so I can host one for them. Funny how much and how little things change

I remember exactly that feeling; I had a cricket game where my PC met the minimum specs, but it ran terribly. That's the day I learned that minimum is not enough.

That has changed a little. Today, you can often play OK with minimum specs. You might need to switch to an embarrassing resolution to get 60 fps. In the 90s, with minimum specs you got like 5-10 fps at minimum details (and usually fixed resolution).

> a Pentium 3 & a GeForce 2

That's the spec of my retro PC. I never had one of those back in the day, but it scratches the itch.

I had an Athlon XP with a GF2 and Max Payne and Deus Ex played great.

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