Yearning for 1997...

sitheris said:
Ahhh...I remember switching from Software to hardware rendering when I got my Voodoo Banshee for christmas.

Being an avid quake 2 player at the time, my jaw literally dropped when I saw Q2 in hardware-rendered mode. :)
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Oh yeah, the Banshee was my second 3dfx card and made the Canopus seem slow...hehe. Thanks for that memory ;)
 
heh, my first 3dcard was a voodoo banshee....i remember the day i picked it up. at best buy of all places, cuz i just didnt know better then. took that baby home, and popped it in, fired up HL1, i was STUNNED. the 357 was all shiny and looked great! then i fired up q2, and was able to run it in ogl higher rez thant 320x240. oh my! how the times have a changed!
 
BBA said:
Dude...your time scale is off a bit:

Back in 1997 I had windows 98, Quake 2 and a two way cable modem at 3-6 Mb/s. The sad thing is my computer is better now but my internet speed keeps getting worse and worse.

1997...Those were the best days of lan parties I have ever had. I only wish I could take this PC back to those days.
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You're right, my time scale is waaaay off, I'm thinking more like 1993 ish, maybe a bit earlier. Perception of time has never been my strong suit
 
man I remember back in 2005 when the 7800GTX had a whopping 512MB of GDDR3 and we could run games at the blistering resolution of 1920x1400 with Battlefield 2 running at 70FPS. the good old days...
 
1982. Mattel Electronics' Intellivision. TSR's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Amazing graphics and gameplay for 24 years ago. This is what got me hooked on computers, and I get down on my knees and thank heaven for it.
 
Maybe I am wrong but......just thinking of what cards and CPU ect that where out only 8 or 10 years ago. Is it me or is the rate of progression getting faster and faster? Like yeah>?
 
Volkum said:
Voodoos in SLI 4tw!
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Amazingly enough, I sold my two Voodoo 2 cards a few summers ago for like $5 whne my wife held a yard sale.
 
Hmm, I feel like putting together a P2 450 (SECC 2) system with 256MB SDRAM and 2 voodoo 2's in SLI... anyone want to donate parts.... ? EH??????? ANY TAKERS?
 
incomudro said:
Maybe I am wrong but......just thinking of what cards and CPU ect that where out only 8 or 10 years ago. Is it me or is the rate of progression getting faster and faster? Like yeah>?
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murphy's law. everything doubles every 18 months or something like that.
 
Russ said:
murphy's law. everything doubles every 18 months or something like that.
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I hope you mean Moore's law. :cool: Moore is the optomist and Murphy was the pessemist. :D
 
I did not read the entire thread, but the Pure3D from Canopus had 6mb while others *only* had 4mb. Plus, it had TV-OUT :p

Para
 
1997 - I was running an ATI Xpert@Play 4MB PCI (Rage Pro) graphics card. In 1998 I upgraded and put in a brand new Diamond Monster Voodoo 2 12MB PCI card right along side it for better 3D performance. That was the best combination evar, I had fast 2D, fast Video, good TV-Out and 32bit 3D with the Rage Pro, and with the Voodoo2 I had the best 3D performance. That ruled.
 
DrDebug said:
1974.
When I was playing Lunar Lander on a PDP11/05 GT 40.

Vector graphics, green on black, 4 button control.

Those were the days!



Not.... It was a great time and a great game, but I am looking to the next 5 years, when I have my quad core opteron, 8 GB ram, and graphics cards that can deliver Hollywood quality special effects in realtime.
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OH man my professor for my digital design class was telling us about this lunar game that he played so much when he was a kid and then he made us program it into a FPGA oh that sucked lol. hehe you probably are my professor.
 
1987 and my Commodore 64. I spent a whole summer vacation playing Ultima IV and can still remember when I finally beat it one night at 2am. I played all the old Ultimas (including the then re-released Ultima I) and all the old Bard's Tales I-III. Those games were *it* for me.

I went computerless (girls) from 1989-1996 when I then got a cyrix 166 system for $3000 with 17" monitor, 1.2GB HD (downgraded from the 1.6 as no way did I think that could all be used) and a whopping 16MB ram with the then brand new Win95. As a matter of fact, the number one reason I got it was to play... Ultima VII. Was mad though when I found out my included soundesign sound card had to be upgraded to a $250 sound blaster AWE32 to get DOS sound working in Ultima. (yes, they were that expensive)... Anyone remember the 1k dos mouse driver?

BTW, DukeNukem 3D ruled, nuff said. Shorlty thereafter, I think it was on voodooextreme that I heard about 3dfx. I got a Righteous 3D online for like $50 less than what everyone else was paying (woot).... and then the Quake I 3dfx patch came out.

Oh.... my..... GAWD..... to this day I have never had such a wow factor as with seeing that game on the Righteous 3D.

From there I went TNT, mainly because I thought it was stupid to have to pay for a 3D card AND a 2D card like you had to do with 3dfx. Then TNT2, I skipped GeForce and went GeForce 2GTX, then Geforce3 Ti200, then Radeon 9800 Pro, and finally with what I have now, 6800GT.

Point being, aside from a few titles (Gothic I&II, Starcraft, System Shock 2, maybe a few more) the *fun factor* was deffo more in the earlier games. Games are more than Graphics. I'll Play M.U.L.E. on my C64 emulator before I'll play half the crap on the shelves today.
 
Heck, in 20 years when we're all posting 3DMARK25 from our Quantum Based CPU's, we'll be remembering how silly these silicon based wafers were :)
 
Yeah really, and instead of wires its fiber optics all etched out on our motherboards. Electrical wires? EWWWW so slow
 
Parabellum said:
I did not read the entire thread, but the Pure3D from Canopus had 6mb while others *only* had 4mb. Plus, it had TV-OUT :p

Para
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canopus was the only company NOT selling reference cards. they used the voodoo/voodoo2 chip and designed their own boards. when the tnt's/ tnt2's/tnt2 ultra came out, they did the same(no ref design) the canopus "spectra" series. they were always the best cards, and always offered features no other card had. the canopus tnt/tnt2 had a feature that let you pass the signal from you voodoo card or voodoo sli rig thru the tnt and then to the monitor, to clean up the signal. all others had to run from 2d/3d card thru the voodoo(s) to the monitor which degraded the signal. i am pretty sure they sold a geforce and a geforce ddr, but only in japan. after that they went back to selling pro/serious amateur video/capture/video editing hardware, and i understand they are high end stuff.
anyway, the canopus spectra 2500 tnt was the first aftermarket product that i bought, and installed into my dell 300mhz p2. before this, i had no idea that you could actually increase performance, on your own, without buying a new pc.
 
my nvidia rivaTNT2 32mb card is to this day my favorite video card ive ever owned. Overclocked niceley and just seemed to keep going, sure geforce owned it but it was still competitive, even saw service again recentley when I needed a PCI card for a fortnight whilst I waited for my PCI-E 6600GT after ebaying my AGP one when i went AMD64.

Still worked great in 2D, even indulged in a bit of CS1.6
 
Canopus always makes me smile.

"Whats in that computer there?"

- Oh its a Can O' Puss

"What did you just say"

- Can O' Puss

"I don't think thats appropriate language..."

- ROFL.
 
I remember the system that owned all.

Intel 233mmx
64mb of EDO memory 4x 16mb chips.
Dimond Stealth 64-bit 4mb Video /w
Monster 3D 4mb
Sound Blaster Pro sound card.
2x 850mb SCSI harddrives
2x - 4x CDROM SCSI drives with the caddies
All in a HUGE desktop case I painted black and silver.

Date December 1997.

And with it I showed up to my first lan party. Using THIN-NET networking. And everyone was like WTF is that!!!! It's COOL!!!!!!!! As I played Quake in 3D.
 
BBA said:
Dude...your time scale is off a bit:

Back in 1997 I had windows 98, Quake 2 and a two way cable modem at 3-6 Mb/s. The sad thing is my computer is better now but my internet speed keeps getting worse and worse.

1997...Those were the best days of lan parties I have ever had. I only wish I could take this PC back to those days.
Click to expand...

How did you run Win98 in 1997?

anyway, my favourite year of computing would have been 1995. Man. I had an insane Pentium 133MHz rig, based on the ALL NEW SOCKET 7! Talk about future upgrade capabilities! It had 32mb of RAM (Most puters then only had 8-16mb) It also had a 3 gig scuzzy drive, 4mb 3D accelerated PCI card, with 24-bit DOS app optimization, and an MPEG decoder card.

Lol, that MPEG decoder card was my favourite part of it. I got that whopping computer about 2 days after the movie, "Hackers" hit the theatres. Talk about motivation! My friend managed to get me a pirated copy of Hackers, in hi res mpeg format, on CDs. (remember, this was before DVDs) I used my mpeg decoder card and 4-point speaker system to watch a pirated copy of Hackers. I felt so badass. Teh goodness of teh 90s.
 
Brent_Justice said:
1997 - I was running an ATI Xpert@Play 4MB PCI (Rage Pro) graphics card. In 1998 I upgraded and put in a brand new Diamond Monster Voodoo 2 12MB PCI card right along side it for better 3D performance. That was the best combination evar, I had fast 2D, fast Video, good TV-Out and 32bit 3D with the Rage Pro, and with the Voodoo2 I had the best 3D performance. That ruled.
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Wow! I hear ya, thanks for that memory ;)
 
Sharkzf6 said:
Wow! I hear ya, thanks for that memory ;)
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The only thing that sucked about the Xpert@Play was OpenGL support. ATI was suppose to have OpenGL support but I never saw a driver for it, one might have been released later, but by that time I already had the Voodoo 2 to do the OGL work. I think that is when I started wondering about ATI's drivers.
 
Hmm I totally quit gaming around that time, pretty much from 1997-2001 (I had a life, GF, no free time, etc...) I yearn for the days when games had substance #1 and graphics #2. Even games like Civilization 4 are dumbed down compared to games from the "olden days"

The original Dune game is more immersive to me than Civilization 4. I won't even get into the whole rehashed FPS thing.
 
Brent_Justice said:
The only thing that sucked about the Xpert@Play was OpenGL support. ATI was suppose to have OpenGL support but I never saw a driver for it, one might have been released later, but by that time I already had the Voodoo 2 to do the OGL work. I think that is when I started wondering about ATI's drivers.
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Yeah, ATI was having driver problems back then. In fact, they really didn't get their driver situation squared away until just the last year or so IMHO. A little OT but since I started the thread I'll take the liberty to point out that they (ATI) still don't have anywhere near the support for GNU/Linux that nVidia does... ;)
 
jackbomb said:
How did you run Win98 in 1997?

anyway, my favourite year of computing would have been 1995. Man. I had an insane Pentium 133MHz rig, based on the ALL NEW SOCKET 7! Talk about future upgrade capabilities! It had 32mb of RAM (Most puters then only had 8-16mb) It also had a 3 gig scuzzy drive, 4mb 3D accelerated PCI card, with 24-bit DOS app optimization, and an MPEG decoder card.

Lol, that MPEG decoder card was my favourite part of it. I got that whopping computer about 2 days after the movie, "Hackers" hit the theatres. Talk about motivation! My friend managed to get me a pirated copy of Hackers, in hi res mpeg format, on CDs. (remember, this was before DVDs) I used my mpeg decoder card and 4-point speaker system to watch a pirated copy of Hackers. I felt so badass. Teh goodness of teh 90s.
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Win98 came out before 1998. Just like Win95 came out before 1995. With Win3.1...well...
 
toddw said:
BTW, DukeNukem 3D ruled, nuff said. Shorlty thereafter, I think it was on voodooextreme that I heard about 3dfx. I got a Righteous 3D online for like $50 less than what everyone else was paying (woot).... and then the Quake I 3dfx patch came out.

Oh.... my..... GAWD..... to this day I have never had such a wow factor as with seeing that game on the Righteous 3D.
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I heard that. I was out of the loop for awhile, went from an onboard GF4 to a 6600GT, and it STILL wasn't as awe-inspiring as that first glimpse into 3D-ness. Mine was with you run-of-the-mill Voodoo1 tied to an S3 that came along with my very first "store bought" pc: a $1,300 200mhz AMD K5(?) from none other than TigerDirect. :D
 
I think the single biggest technology overlooked - Was when videocard manufacturers moved from a discrete Ramdac to an onchip ramdac (for analog displays)

It did leaps and bounds for visual quality for high res displays, chopped the price for the consumer, and freed up valuable PCB space for more caps or filters or ramchips.

I still don't particularily like the DVI spec, its awfully limiting at 1600x1200 (52 or 60 hz) extended to 1920x1280 60 hz its still limiting.
 
Vitamin T said:
Win98 came out before 1998. Just like Win95 came out before 1995. With Win3.1...well...
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What? Windows 3.1 came out before 3100

==>Lazn
 
Remember the good old days of playing CS like there was no tomorrow, then finding out there actually was a tomorrow and being really pissed off. I do.
 
Damn I miss the good ol days of Zork and text/charecter based games like Gnome. Oh yeaaa - those were the days.

I just need to find dentures now.
 
i loved my p133 (no MMX), 32mb EDO, intel mobo, hercules terminator 2MB, 15" samsung monitor beast. king's quest, syndicate and ultima needed MoSlow :p

and that was without using the turbo button :D


OS/2 ROCKS!
 
LordBritish said:
Yes, i miss 4 color CGA graphics from 1983.

Here's Ultima 2 for you kiddies.

Ultima2.gif


:eek: :D

That game was the shizzle back then.

I'm an old fart - lol.
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but how did you manage to get that screen shot now?
 
Oh, I just found that screen shot from some place :D

That's how I got my name in case you didn't know :p
 
I remember the best video games ever made.. nibbles and gorilla... then watching the movie hackers and thinking wow!
 
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