I had a crappy computer for a long time as well. Then about a year ago, I had a friend who decided to put together an absurdly ultimate gaming rig and give me his old computer, which is still pretty good by today's standards.

They are?

But, but but.... teh grafix?

You may have a point there. People have different senses of humour.

I remember when getting a hercules card was exciting.

oh, and i remember when i spent more time in the sound configuration menu than in the actual game. i'm sure glad those times are long gone.

God yeah, and selecting the wrong card and testing it would hang the bloody machine.

Sometimes I sitll prefer those over "Graphics and Sound OFF and ON" in modern games. But ok, uniformization of sound drivers is ok with me.

I remember setting up a Pentium 133MHz PC, with Soundblaster 16, Roland SCC-1, Roland CM-32L and 3Dfx Voodoo 1 card (Orchid Righteous 3D), just in order to run games like Scorched Planet and Whiplash (3Dfx version) correctly...

Easy to remember, as that was earlier this week. :) I recently "inherited" an ancient Compaq Deskpro 4000 desktop machine and I was close to throwing it to trash (because I prefer running old games on emulators etc. on modern PCs, if at all possible), but I still decided to give it a go because at least the aforementioned games are quite tricky to get running nowadays. I got Whiplash to run on the special Glide-enabled DOSBox, but it ran in molasses (about 5 fps on a ASUS G75VW) and joystick support was very buggy. Dusted off the Compaq, quite a lot of old dust inside.

First problem: the original 1.5 GB hard drive on the Compaq was full, so I wanted to install a 9GB HDD into it. It didn't work, and finally after lots of googleing I could deduce that its BIOS is probably too old to support hard drives larger than 8GB. After I could track the latest diagnostics/setup disk files, and the latest BIOS, for the Compaq from the HP support pages, I was able to update the BIOS with a 3.5" diskette that I managed to find somewhere in my closet. After that the hard drive started to work, and I was able to install Win98SE on it.

Figuring out which Deskpro variant (and BIOS) exactly I had was a journey in itself, because Compaq had a stupid system where you couldn't even access the BIOS if you didn't have a small non-DOS diagnostics partition on your hard drive. That's why I first needed to find the diagnostics setup diskette images from HP.

One thing that really suprised me was that the 3.5" diskettes I had, around 95% of them were still fully working. I managed to salvage some very old documents and files from early 90s and so on. I was genuinely suprised the diskettes were still working, at all. Wow. I think I haven't had any diskette drives on any of my PCs for like ten years or so, until now...

Moving on, the original CD-ROM drive on the Compaq seemed broken (problem with the tray mechanism, it's tray could hardly push itself out, with a lot of noise), but I have a couple of older CD-ROM drives in the storage, so I replaced it. Then inserting the 3Dfx Voodoo card, SB16 and SCC-1. Oh yeah, the PS2 mouse left button is also a bit broken, needs to be clicked firmly, but I seem to have a couple of other PS2 mice still too. And if all else fails, I installed also some old USB PCI card into it, so it has two USB 1.1 ports now as well. :)

I know, this didn't make much sense just for a couple of old games, but there was certain charm to getting up such ancient machine running fine, making sure it is as top notch as possible etc. A bit like fixing an old car to working condition. But if something still breaks down in it, I think I'll put it to eternal rest, it is taking a bit of room from my limited desktop.


Then again, my gaming laptop (G75VW) seems to run games like Far Cry 3 and COD: Black Ops 2 great, with near maximum graphical settings in everything (maybe switching off 8x MSAA and so...).

MUD's for the win - as good graphics as your imagination and good for your typing skills as well. I remember the days everyone was either playing MUD, SkiJump or using IRC at the school. That just doesnt happen these days anymore.