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. gosub100 · 1789569740 · focus · HN ↗

      I did something similar with a U2W 160 mbps SCSI card and 10k rpm Seagate Cheetah drive circa 2000. I saved up and found an amazing deal on eBay, shipped to the US from Australia. Waited a week, plugged it in, and found out it had no boot ROM. So it worked, but I still had to boot from an IDE disk which ruined my whole vision for the build. I was so disappointed.

      1. monster_truck · 1789661497 · focus · HN ↗

         Went through almost the exact same situation with a $250 "used" 2U in 2006 that was full of the 15k rpm cheetahs. Had to cannibalize an emachine for a drive to boot from. It was far too problematic to do anything with the linuxes of yore, but it worked great for my network administration training VMs with Windows Server 2003. Those things were loud as fuck.

         Ended up giving it away to an irc friend for the cost of shipping, they used it to start a minecraft server hosting business.

         20 years later I now have nieces and nephews wondering how I know so much about minecraft, can't wait until they're a little older so I can host one for them. Funny how much and how little things change

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