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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2190 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 13, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Oh, this takes me back. I think my dad beat Quake on a 486, or it was one of these pinout-compatible CPUs from Cyrix or AMD, but when Carmageddon came out, it was a slideshow without MMX. I think that Pentium 166 was the third upgrade I actually remember. The first two were:

  • the Sound Blaster card, easily the biggest upgrade in the whole history of upgrade
  • Matrox Millenium video card, because it was a flaky bitch that gave my dad headaches
  • a CD drive

Okay, fourth.

Anyway, the ten years after Quake were insane. In ten years we went from models that looked like this to models that looked like this. Compared to this leap (accompanied by a jump from 66 to 2500 MHz in CPU frequencies), the next fifteen years feel like running in place (cf Starfield and its staring eye models).

Come to think of it, a jump from Doom to Half-Life 2 (1995 to 2004) is even more insane. The latter feels like a modern game despite being 19 years old, while Doom was a living fossil just nine years after its release.

I do wonder what CPU he had in a 486 system to beat Quake. I never had one, but I guess AMD made a 486 compatible CPU that was the equivalent of a Pentium 75?

Then again, I beat plenty of games on enormously unpowered computers. I beat Unreal on a P120 in software rendering. It was a slideshow, but I had cheat codes!

Could've been a DX4 or one of the third party Socket 3 CPUs, I honestly don't remember. I remember he had to shrink down the viewport a bit to make the game playable.

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