Maybe someone will appreciate this - from memory, so dates or CPU speeds may be a little off! Family/my computers over the years, after the BBC micros and Spectrums:
1991 - AMD 386SX, 25MHz. I remember my dad upgrading the ram from 2MB to 4MB at huge expense! Monkey Island, X-Wing, King's Quest - all the classics! These were the days where you had to optimise a boot disc to scrape every singe byte of memory available to run any game!
1994 - Intel Pentium, 100MHz. My first PC with a CD-Rom drive: Hutchinson's Encyclopedia with movies in 256 colours! I think I had the first Broken Sword game on this PC.
1997 - AMD K6, 233MHz with Diamond Stealth II S220 (Rendition Verite 2100), later with a Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 (3dfx). I bought the new Motherboard and K6 CPU myself, and upgraded the Pentium machine and installed the new drivers after school, all before my dad got home from work! The S220 came later with VQuake and Grand Prix Legends - so hard you actually had to be a race driver to play it! I managed to 3D accelerate Tomb Raider at 640x480 on the S220, but with no textures due to the limited VRam! The Voodoo2 solved this, and also let me play my first FPS - Half Life. Never forgot the point-and-clicks though, with Westwood's Blade Runner, Broken Sword II, Monkey Island 3, Discworld 2, Grim Fandango etc. Outcast and its lovely alien world stole my heart even at 320x240, thanks to the CPU-only voxel engine.
1999 - Intel Celeron, 533MHz (Slot 1/Socket 370 Converter) with Matrox Millennium G500. My own PC that took me through Uni. Famous for the mammoth Red Alert 2 LAN games in our smelly student house. MY first DVD drive, and my first DVD - the Matrix! haha
2004 - AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 2GHz with ATi Radeon 9800 Pro. Parts from OcUK and built by me - specifically for Half Life 2! Most stable computer I ever had. Dawn of War and World of Warcraft , although it took me a great effort to quit WOW - sold all my stuff and deleted all my characters to stop me going back
2009 - Intel Core i5 750, 2.66Ghz with ATi Radeon HD5850. Another custom build, but with more cable management this time around! Plays Crysis, MW2, Dawn of War II without breaking sweat. Amazing how far PCs and games have come. I'll throw in some pics for fun (note I've changed the memory from the OCZ shown to G.Skill):
1991 - AMD 386SX, 25MHz. I remember my dad upgrading the ram from 2MB to 4MB at huge expense! Monkey Island, X-Wing, King's Quest - all the classics! These were the days where you had to optimise a boot disc to scrape every singe byte of memory available to run any game!
1994 - Intel Pentium, 100MHz. My first PC with a CD-Rom drive: Hutchinson's Encyclopedia with movies in 256 colours! I think I had the first Broken Sword game on this PC.
1997 - AMD K6, 233MHz with Diamond Stealth II S220 (Rendition Verite 2100), later with a Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 (3dfx). I bought the new Motherboard and K6 CPU myself, and upgraded the Pentium machine and installed the new drivers after school, all before my dad got home from work! The S220 came later with VQuake and Grand Prix Legends - so hard you actually had to be a race driver to play it! I managed to 3D accelerate Tomb Raider at 640x480 on the S220, but with no textures due to the limited VRam! The Voodoo2 solved this, and also let me play my first FPS - Half Life. Never forgot the point-and-clicks though, with Westwood's Blade Runner, Broken Sword II, Monkey Island 3, Discworld 2, Grim Fandango etc. Outcast and its lovely alien world stole my heart even at 320x240, thanks to the CPU-only voxel engine.
1999 - Intel Celeron, 533MHz (Slot 1/Socket 370 Converter) with Matrox Millennium G500. My own PC that took me through Uni. Famous for the mammoth Red Alert 2 LAN games in our smelly student house. MY first DVD drive, and my first DVD - the Matrix! haha
2004 - AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 2GHz with ATi Radeon 9800 Pro. Parts from OcUK and built by me - specifically for Half Life 2! Most stable computer I ever had. Dawn of War and World of Warcraft , although it took me a great effort to quit WOW - sold all my stuff and deleted all my characters to stop me going back
2009 - Intel Core i5 750, 2.66Ghz with ATi Radeon HD5850. Another custom build, but with more cable management this time around! Plays Crysis, MW2, Dawn of War II without breaking sweat. Amazing how far PCs and games have come. I'll throw in some pics for fun (note I've changed the memory from the OCZ shown to G.Skill):
