Your first PC?

[Buleste]

A Time Computer breaking after 1 month. They never used to last that long. Unlike most PC manifacturers that use trained monkeys to build their PC's, Time didn't bother with the training and sometimes didn't bother with the monkeys either.

[Harrison]

Time were definitely crap. There were quite a few budget PC builders around at the time. Now I think we mainly just have Medion left. And sadly even Evesham is gone.

[Bloodwych]

Wow, some of you bought PC's very late down the road apart from Demon Cleaner and JLPedro!

I think for a great WinUAE experience, that PII 400 would have been spot on! I did build a 233MMX a few years back for fun, as I craved such a machine back in the day. That just about ran an old version of WinUAE for A500 emulation with sound.

My first, I bought one much earlier as I needed it for Uni. It was an AMD 586-P75 133Mhz, overclocked to a 40Mhz FSB and a staggering 160Mhz! It had a whopping 16MB ram, a S3 Trio 4MB video card and a ISA SB16 with accompanying CDROM. Win95 had just been released and it ran really well. Still have the chip and cooler in storage.

I soon became a DOS expert configuring those AutoExec.bat and Config.sys files for games! Although it did all seem a little backward and ancient in comparison to the plug and play Amiga. F1GP on the PC was great, as too was F1GP2 which I could just about run reasonably.

Pentiums were too expensive at the time, so good old AMD were around to pick up the skint crowd LOL! It wasn't a bad chip - at least it had an FPU and it could run Fellow in DOS - Just! So a little early A500 emulation too, which seemed so fantatstic!

[Harrison]

The PII 400 was pretty good at running emulation. It did indeed run WinUAE perfectly well. Especially as I also had 256MB of ram (later upgraded to 512MB). And MAME ran perfectly too. I got in on running MAME very early on just after its initial public release, and actually integrated MAME into my final major project for my degree course!

But the emulator that really blew me away back then was the first N64 emulator, UltraHLE. As I had a Voodoo II card it could be run (as that emulator needed Glide) and it ran games better than a real N64. Mario 64 running in 640x480 with crisp clear textures was quite something. Actually made an N64 owning friend quite annoyed!

[woody.cool]

My first PC was as follows:

HP Vectra 500
Intel Pentium 133 Mhz
16MB RAM
1.2 GB HDD
Aztec 16-bit Sound Card
14.4K Internal ISA Modem
Integrated SiS Graphics Adaptor
8X CD-ROM drive
Windows 95B

I got it around 1997 ish time.

By today's standards it's totally laughable but it was top notch back in the day.

[Harrison]

Computers were definitely moving forward at a much faster pace back then compared to today. A 133MHz CPU in 1997 was a year later already replaced with a 450MHz P2. These days most CPUs have been at about the 3GHz mark for a few years now, with more cores being the main advancement.

14.4K modem. Now that is slow! Imagine trying to use that these days.

[Bloodwych]

Computers were definitely moving forward at a much faster pace back then compared to today. A 133MHz CPU in 1997 was a year later already replaced with a 450MHz P2. These days most CPUs have been at about the 3GHz mark for a few years now, with more cores being the main advancement.

14.4K modem. Now that is slow! Imagine trying to use that these days.

Websites back then were so simple too, so they loaded up ok with slower dialup. Pretty much pure HTML. Some were horribly designed, but at least they didn't have performance sucking and electricity chomping flash ads! Pictures were a pain however, as too was downloading your retro collection from the hundreds of sites available at the time and seeing hours of waiting ahead. The late 90's were the golden era of emulation, before sites got taken down.

Actually, you're right in what you're saying about CPU advancement, but we're are on the verge of a massive jump in power right now. Exciting times are ahead.

The Intel i7 is about to be released with up to 8 cores, each capable of Hyper Threading and they've borrowed some of AMD's ideas about memory controllers and link-ability between CPUs. Its power is scary. AMD are following up with 12 cores!

I'm still on one core LOL!

These will be the first CPUs capable of going back to pure software rendered raytraced games. GPU's are going to play a different role in the future, as once the cores start numbering 16+ games can once again be purely software rendered allowing games designers to control every pixel you see on-screen! Back to the old school days, without 3D acceleration!

The last game to use pure CPU software rendering was Outcast:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gMePgitDers

It had effects never before seen through 3D acceleration and it would take ages before the 3D cards caught up to displaying the same effects. Raytraced games will offer equal unique effects.

[woody.cool]

Hell yeah!

I remember download Amstrad CPC ROMs and Amiga ADFs from FTP sites. I used to use the DOS FTP command, so that I didn't have to wait for Windows to 'calculate remaining time' to download. A extra 0.1K gained by typing crap in

My old P1 ran DOSUAE and Fellow perfectly and WinUAE (back then) worked fine (once I'd upgraded my RAM to 64MB)

Those were the days, websites were stupidly simple. Some where almost plain text!

[Harrison]

From 1996 I just used our university connection which was connected directly to the internet backbone. I discovered that whilst the PCs needed you to login to gain access, and so you could only use a single PC, the Macs had no such limitations and the only login was to access your allocated uni email and storage space. So I would pop into one of the Mac computer rooms early in the evening and set a whole row of them downloading stuff. Was great. Each one downloading at 1MB per second. I hovered up loads of rom sites back then. Saved all the files to Zip disks and took them home. So I only really used my home dialup connection for email and web browsing. Was great.

[Cortona]

I bought my first PC in late '96 / early '97 (it was obviously a un-memorable event!)
It was an AMD equivalent of a P120, which I was rather chuffed with as I only had a P75 at work. Win 95... Can't remember anything else about it, or even the reason I bought it as I had more games on my Amiga. It came with a 14.4K modem. I Played Tomb Raider, Blood (best FPS ever), Doom II, Magic the Gathering and Quake mostly.

Maybe I bought a PC because at that time it's just the way personal computing was going.

Maybe I bought it just for those games, especially Blood.