Thread

1. monster_truck · 1789538207 · focus · HN ↗

   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.

   1. crq-yml · 1789545537 · focus · HN ↗

      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.

      1. mikeryan · 1789570501 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

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