PC Nostalgia (Pick a moment in time)

1996. Only one piece of hardware is relevant to that choice - 3dfx Voodoo. Specifically, an Orchid Righteous 3D card. 21 years ago and I still remember the brand and model. It's far and away the most memorable thing about a PC since my first PC and I go back quite a way. My first PC used a 386 (25MHz IIRC), had 1MB of memory and the extraordinary overkill of 2 5.25" FDD and 2 HDD with 40MB each.

The Righteous 3D cost silly money and it only did 3D, so you needed another card for 2D. When I bought it, the only thing I had that used the 3D hardware was the demo that came with the driver disk. It was a flyby of a wizard's tower. In 3D. Rendered in realtime. That wasn't a thing that existed...but it did, right there on my PC. That might have been the only thing that used the 3D hardware (I don't recall whether the 3D version of Quake was out then) but it was so amazing that it was all that was needed. I phoned a friend and babbled at him about it. He came round, watched the demo and immediately went to the shop and bought a card for himself. He didn't even ask how much it cost. I would have had to check my receipt to have told him because I hadn't cared either. Not because I had lots of money (I didn't) but because it was too amazing to care. I could eat bread and beans for a couple of weeks, whatever.

The only comparable computer-related thing for me was seeing a ZX Spectrum for the first time. Colour, sound and graphics! Wow! I spent 180 hours on a farm picking runner beans to pay for it and thought it worth the labour.

But the Voodoo was more. It wasn't an improvement on something. It was a whole new thing.
 
1986 I was 7. Me and Dad jumped in the Cortina and drove to the high street, in to Dixons and he bought a Sinclair Spectrum +2 128k.

And so it began.
 
Angilion said:
1996. Only one piece of hardware is relevant to that choice - 3dfx Voodoo. Specifically, an Orchid Righteous 3D card. 21 years ago and I still remember the brand and model. It's far and away the most memorable thing about a PC since my first PC and I go back quite a way. My first PC used a 386 (25MHz IIRC), had 1MB of memory and the extraordinary overkill of 2 5.25" FDD and 2 HDD with 40MB each.

The Righteous 3D cost silly money and it only did 3D, so you needed another card for 2D. When I bought it, the only thing I had that used the 3D hardware was the demo that came with the driver disk. It was a flyby of a wizard's tower. In 3D. Rendered in realtime. That wasn't a thing that existed...but it did, right there on my PC. That might have been the only thing that used the 3D hardware (I don't recall whether the 3D version of Quake was out then) but it was so amazing that it was all that was needed. I phoned a friend and babbled at him about it. He came round, watched the demo and immediately went to the shop and bought a card for himself. He didn't even ask how much it cost. I would have had to check my receipt to have told him because I hadn't cared either. Not because I had lots of money (I didn't) but because it was too amazing to care. I could eat bread and beans for a couple of weeks, whatever.

The only comparable computer-related thing for me was seeing a ZX Spectrum for the first time. Colour, sound and graphics! Wow! I spent 180 hours on a farm picking runner beans to pay for it and thought it worth the labour.

But the Voodoo was more. It wasn't an improvement on something. It was a whole new thing.
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I was the same and got the orchid righteous. You are right, I can't remember what my main card was. Like you said it was all about the orchid righteous.
 
First days of the Counter Strike stand out to me.

Very first 3dFX cards, then the Voodoo 2 which was a beast.

But overall.... has to be the Amiga 500 \ 1200 days. Nothing has compared since for the magic factor.
 
Several.
Christmas '83 and the Acorn Electron and the introductory tape. Marslander and TurtleProc. A year later playing Elite with my father, the trader, and I the combat king.
August '86 and the Atari ST. My father drip fed me 1 game per week from the included 23 game pack. Life lesson right there. in '88 I was given DEVPAC2 for Christmas which kick started my interest in coding.
August '91 and the Olivetti 386SX 16Mhz. Jerking about in MSDOS 5.0 trying to get above 600KB of working RAM from extended and expanded memory in order to get various games working. Coding in dBase III/IV, COBOL and Turbo PASCAL for college work.
 
Oh the joys of spending an hour or two just trying to get an extra 1KB of free ram by tweeking autobat and config files just to get a game working. Youngsters today dont even know they are born.

And even after that you sometimes had to spend another hour or so to get sound working depending which soundcard you had. I remember the Gravis Ultrasound and later having the soundblaster AWE64.
 
So much choice...

Do i go back to 1984 with my C64 and football manager?

Or 1998 with my voodoo 2's in SLI?

Both amazing times, growing up with a c64 was both frustrating (multiple broken joystix and tape players) but also unreal because the games were so original and captivating.
 
As well as the Electron my other 8bit was a ex-display spectrum 48 which I procured for 8 pound from WHSmith, High Holborn in '86. I used to frequent the store after school for years. Leaving the morality of piracy to one side, I think I only ever owned 3 or 4 games! My father used to conjure these c60 tapes full of them every so often! Naughty naughty!
 
Halfmad said:
Knew you'd be on here talking about Ultima mate ;) Yes I'd rewind to then too, or perhaps to when Half-life deathmatch was THE game to play and we had the old AGHL game newgroup matches. Epic times, sadly don't seem to have the AGHL screenshots anymore :(
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Yeah I should have mentioned HL DM and TFC tbh. Those were amazing times despite everyone being a HPB :) I still have various AGHL pics, specifically of everyone doing some hijinks on some train map of sorts...
 
I have very fond memories playing ultimate online, delta force, counterstrike and championship manager as a teenager.

I'd like to recapture the joy for gaming I had at this time. Unfortunately I haven't experienced this for a long while, often getting bored of games quite quickly. The perils of growing up I suppose!
 
Computing in general, late 1984 rushing home from school to immerse myself in Elite until bed time, no game prior or since had that effect upon me (Elite Dangerous which I have is pretty but somehow just not the same.)

Pc wise playing Combat Flight Sim 1 & 2 in my old p200 MMX, SLI Voodoo 2's and taking advantage of dial up lag to get kills playing online with guys from the states with ping rates I dread to think of!

Happy days. :)
 
For me, it would be Christmas 2001 when my TinyPC running 98SE blew up and I built my first PC on an abit board with a PIII 1200Mhz CPU and 2GB Ram with XP and a dedicated GFX card. Shortly after, I bought MOH:AA and was hooked on WW2 style online gaming....
 
I would say 96-97. Moved from using a Serial Cable for 2 player Doom, Duke Nukem etc to 4 player with my mates via a 10Base T BNC (coax) bus network.

Remember those? T-peices and terminators. Oldskool.

In retrospect - they were crap. Single collision domain!
 
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