PC Building and Gaming in the 1990's

kless001

"a $3,000 dedicated game machine, it's a 133mhz pentium, it's got a 6x cdrom drive, a 1.6 gig hard drive"


While I did find the video humorous, I still respect the era, and those brave enough to have worked on their builds. Surely it wasn't as easy as it is today to build your own PC. I'm interested in hearing from those of you who engaged in the undertaking during the 80's & 90's.




I was unable to find much fruitful information about the aforementioned subject. The sharing of links and videos is welcomed! After a build were you praying to the wolf gods of Saturn that your motherboard would at least show some sign of life?

Share your war stories.

AlexDeGruven

I remember going to the computer show and picking up 64MB of RAM for my Win95 machine, blowing away the rigs all of my peers had for a short time.

shwaip

excuse me while i juggle my isa cards around to hopefully resolve any irq conflicts.

AlexDeGruven

Ugh yeah

"No, you can't put the modem in that slot because it tries to grab IRQ9, but that's already taken by the new SB16"

shwaip

maybe pushing the turbo button will help?

shwaip

Doesn't quite make it back into the 90s, but remember attempting to put one of these on an athlon and hearing the "crunch" of losing a corner of your die:



or putting your 60mm delta on your new thin copper fin hsf, only to realize there is no way you're going to be able to deal with the sound it makes?

Linc

I only played this game from 2001 - 2010.

AlexDeGruven

Upgrading from a 1200bps modem to a spankin new 14,400. ZOMGSOFAST!

shwaip

AlexDeGruven said:

Upgrading from a 1200bps modem to a spankin new 14,400. ZOMGSOFAST!

yeah, we got one for christmas one year, that was awesome. Then I spent a while setting up ICS for our computers...over our 10base2 coax network (selected by my dad, because it didn't need a hub).

Cliff_Forster

First PC I ever built completely was an AMD K6 II in 1998. I initially loaded Windows 95 on it to upgrade to 98 months later. I had a Voodo II card in a PCI slot and a sound blaster card and played Quake II beautifully. In 2000 I would build a system with a slot A Athlon 800, with 256 mb of PC 133 and a Voodo 3 initially. I would upgrade to an ATI Radeon card with 64 mb of RAM later on so I could play Giant's Citizen Kabuto and Unreal Tournament at high resolution.

Those were the days.

CB

Every PC I owned between '88 and today I've build myself. I feel like it's actually gotten tougher because of more rapidly changing standards. All the PC's I built between 88 and 02, I feel like all the plugs and assembly instructions remained static, with the exception of needing to start adding heat-syncs with the Pentiums. Maybe it's just because I was also building PCs for other people back then, and so I was keeping track better, but I've built three PCs in the last ten years, and with each of them I was like "What are all these connectors and levers? I don't remember any of this shit being here."

As for gaming, the thing that I remember most about gaming in the 90's, and which serves in my mind as a sort of symbol of the era, is my box full of 'boot discs', which each allowed me to boot the computer with the right mix of RAMs and other settings for a specific game.

PirateNinja

Doom][ was and still is a portal in to hell and a non stop rollercoaster of ultra violence. It's the God of gibs, the father of frags, and the nightmare that got me through the mid 90s until OpenGL came along and blew my mind.
I don't miss irq conflicts, jumper settings, blown caps, massive 800mb hard drives, DUNS, etc. Slot based CPUs were fun, BBSes were great, exiting out of Windows to get back in DOS was the best, and childhood with computing was unforgettable.

drasnor

The feeling of satisfaction you get from writing a lean, working config.sys and autoexec.bat from scratch in ed is indescribable. I had a full IRQ and DMA map written down for my box so that I could spot potential conflicts early on. One time, one of the ISA slots failed and the contacts would bridge across the connector without a card installed so I made an ISA card edge connector out of cardboard and shoved it in there so my PC would boot. Upgrading the COAST module in my P1 from 256KB to 512KB was the single most noticeable performance upgrade I've ever performed.

Canti

Using the command line in MS-Dos to launch Tie Fighter and playing it at 8 fps on a laptop the size of a PS3 with the little red nub in the middle of the keyboard instead of a mouse.