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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   1974 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 13, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What was your first computer?

Mine was a Commodore 64. I remember going to Sears with my dad to pick up the disk drive; finally we wouldn’t have to wait for a tape drive to load a program. It lasted us a good ten years, from Tooth Invaders and Frogger in elementary school to GeoWorks word processing in high school.

Our second computer was a 486-33 DLC: the math coprocessor was not integrated like an Intel 486-DX but was added to the motherboard. It had a Turtle Island sound card I ruined by running a text file through the DOS MIDI player.

My first family computer was a 486 DX2 that I think my dad built. I remember him bragging it had a screaming fast Vesa Localbus VGA card. Had some sort of Soundblaster 16 or compatible sound card. Although I remember it having occasional hanging note bugs, so I think it must have been a genuine SB16.

I played so many fucking games on it. My dad installed Wheel of Fortune, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Indianapolis 500. A buddy of mine installed Doom 2 and Quest for Glory. And I can't count how many hours I spent playing the shareware/demo's for Doom, Heretic, Warcraft 1 & 2, Command & Conquer. My sister and I even got goofy with the simple joys of recording ourselves using the SB utilities in Windows 3.11.

I couldn't tell you the model of my family's first computer, inherited from a grandmother who taught yiddish for six decades but apparently wasn't as old fashioned as that sounds and had a leftover 486 when she upgraded to a higher number.

She probably even knew what we were getting 486 of! I certainly can't remember what they were, although I do remember a shareware demo of Doom that's probably the same as you—and I definitely remember those SB utilities, and how much they made me wish our computer had a microphone installed!

The 486 was a great computer for a long time. For a good chunk of time, literally everyone I knew who had a computer had a 486 DX2. And it more or less ran any game that came out from 1993 to 1996. Then Quake happened and the rest is history. Between 1997 and 2000 things moved so fast, a $2500 (~$4000 in 2023 money) Pentium 233 MMX with a Voodoo or a Riva 128 from 1997 could barely play Unreal or Half-Life which came out in 1998, only a year later. You can write off 1999 almost completely except for a smattering of games with long development cycles or games which were still 2D.

You can write off 1999 almost completely except for a smattering of games with long development cycles or games which were still 2D.

Is this a contention? Are you are contender, contending me to contentious discussion? 1999 is the anno domini of video games. We got:

System shock 2

Freespace 2

Alpha Centauri

Age of Empires 2

Planescape torment

Pokemon Gold/Silver

Everquest

Unreal Tournament

Quake 3

Every single one of those sequels refines their base game into its ultimate form - in the 23 years since many of them have had additional sequels, but they never reached these heights again. In many cases they are genre defining too - would world of warcraft existed without Everquest? Probably, but shoosh.

The clause "long development cycles or games which were still 2D" is doing a lot of work here, I think; "refines a base game into its ultimate form" from a creative standpoint is "long (multi-game) development cycle", a product that gets to reuse most of its source code, from a technical standpoint. Everquest still seems like a big exception, though.

I felt trolled too before I read the fine print. Please don't say such a thing! The drones need you. They look up to you!

Yes, apocalypse cancelled unfortunately, I misunderstood.

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