Soldato
Watching a fair amount of YouTube on retro gaming has inspired me to start a little project of my own.
My Windows 10 machine is great... still. I built it when I first went to uni and it's gone through some iterations (mainly case and cooling upgrades) but it's still basically the same as it was back then except for the 970 which came about because the original GTX 670 died - thanks OcUK for that nice little upgrade! Doubled the memory along the way and added an SSD. It's still great - plays everything I ask it to and probably will for a few more years yet.
I'm a child of the 90s, so my first PC was some horrible gigantic desktop thing running Windows 95 that my grandad had purchased new a few years earlier but I don't remember doing much gaming on it beyond the included ones and some early educational stuff. By the time I was doing any real gaming, I was running Windows 98SE on an Athlon based machine that was my dad's main computer. I remember fighting with my brother to use it - he just wanted to play Half Life whilst I was more interested in RollerCoaster Tycoon, Age of Empires, SimCity, etc.
So my plan is to build a machine of that era... and something else.
I think my gaming golden years were around when XP was the dominant OS. Most of the boxed games I still have are from the 2000s. Me and my brother went through several different graphics cards, GeForce 4 Ti 4200s, ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, I remember being distinctly disappointed by NVIDIA's GeForce FX series. However for this machine I'm going with what's easily available - stuff from around 2009 (which seems really recent... but is nearly 9 years ago!?!).
Before anyone questions why I'm bothering to do this when basically all games are playable in some way using a modern system like I already have - that's not the point. Nostalgia is the motivation behind this, and I'm a bit of a collector of things at heart. If I didn't want to tinker with things I'd just get a console or something (I have several of those) or stick with my current PC. I could never afford these things at the time but now they're relatively dirt cheap.
So I went on a bit of a spending spree on eBay yesterday and I'll update this with pictures when things arrive.
Specs are going to be what I dreamed of owning around the time but as a child/young teen, never could.
Windows 98SE
Pentium III 1GHz
512MB RAM
GeForce 2 GTS
3DFX Voodoo 3 PCI
An ISA sound card TBD
Sharp 17" LCD (with speakers) although currently waiting for a reply on a free 15" CTX CRT
Wyse PS2 Keyboard
Logitech PS2 Three Button Mouse
Windows XP SP3
Intel Core 2 Quad 9550
4GB DDR2
GeForce GTX260
This will just be used with my current peripherals, although that does include a Logitech MX518.
Using web archive, the Windows XP machine would've cost around £1000. I have no idea what the Windows 98 machine would've cost, but I imagine possibly a fair bit more than £1000?
Anyway, I'm sure I'm going to have fun.
My Windows 10 machine is great... still. I built it when I first went to uni and it's gone through some iterations (mainly case and cooling upgrades) but it's still basically the same as it was back then except for the 970 which came about because the original GTX 670 died - thanks OcUK for that nice little upgrade! Doubled the memory along the way and added an SSD. It's still great - plays everything I ask it to and probably will for a few more years yet.
I'm a child of the 90s, so my first PC was some horrible gigantic desktop thing running Windows 95 that my grandad had purchased new a few years earlier but I don't remember doing much gaming on it beyond the included ones and some early educational stuff. By the time I was doing any real gaming, I was running Windows 98SE on an Athlon based machine that was my dad's main computer. I remember fighting with my brother to use it - he just wanted to play Half Life whilst I was more interested in RollerCoaster Tycoon, Age of Empires, SimCity, etc.
So my plan is to build a machine of that era... and something else.
I think my gaming golden years were around when XP was the dominant OS. Most of the boxed games I still have are from the 2000s. Me and my brother went through several different graphics cards, GeForce 4 Ti 4200s, ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, I remember being distinctly disappointed by NVIDIA's GeForce FX series. However for this machine I'm going with what's easily available - stuff from around 2009 (which seems really recent... but is nearly 9 years ago!?!).
Before anyone questions why I'm bothering to do this when basically all games are playable in some way using a modern system like I already have - that's not the point. Nostalgia is the motivation behind this, and I'm a bit of a collector of things at heart. If I didn't want to tinker with things I'd just get a console or something (I have several of those) or stick with my current PC. I could never afford these things at the time but now they're relatively dirt cheap.
So I went on a bit of a spending spree on eBay yesterday and I'll update this with pictures when things arrive.
Specs are going to be what I dreamed of owning around the time but as a child/young teen, never could.
Windows 98SE
Pentium III 1GHz
512MB RAM
GeForce 2 GTS
3DFX Voodoo 3 PCI
An ISA sound card TBD
Sharp 17" LCD (with speakers) although currently waiting for a reply on a free 15" CTX CRT
Wyse PS2 Keyboard
Logitech PS2 Three Button Mouse
Windows XP SP3
Intel Core 2 Quad 9550
4GB DDR2
GeForce GTX260
This will just be used with my current peripherals, although that does include a Logitech MX518.
Using web archive, the Windows XP machine would've cost around £1000. I have no idea what the Windows 98 machine would've cost, but I imagine possibly a fair bit more than £1000?
Anyway, I'm sure I'm going to have fun.
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Although it is a "yesteryear" CPU, it's still usable today if you aren't running the latest GPUs.
which will definitely not be coming in handy.
) but it's not really an era of gaming that I ever experienced being born in 1991. On the look out now for a soundcard, both PCI and ISA.