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Trying to play a game on your severly underpowered system? And what game made you upgrade?

For me I remember playing Quake on my 486/66. Or rather trying to play it. :lol The monsters would all be in slow motion but it was still fun. Upgrading it to a 486/133 helped but they still were in slow motion. Duke 3d always played ok though. Briefly tried a p90 and that helped but then another darn game came out that made my system seem so slow. Rally Championship.

I got the infamous voodoo rush card thinking that would solve my problems. It did play Turok well and that was a fun game. That's one of the main reason I purchased the voodoo rush, because it included Turok,hehe. But RallyC still lagged badly although Quake did play much better. Even with the GL Quake. Which is why I wanted a 3d card in the first place.

My brother beat me to a faster system with a p200 and Rally Championship played so well on that so I had to get me one too. I thought this would be my last upgrade for a while. It did last around a year, I think. Then Unreal came out. aaaaaaaaah! I did happen to get a v2 12mb before and it would play ok at 800x600 but if too much was happening everything again slowed to a crawl. Going down to 512x384 helped but 800x600 looked soooo much better. Quake 2 played ok so that kept me from upgrading sooner than I wanted to.

Then I heard about the 300a. Ahh yes, the immortal 300a. Is there anyone who doesn't smile when thinking of the 300a? I found out I could have a faster than the current intel cpu at a far lower price by overclocking the 300a to 450. So I got me a bh6 and a 300a at a computer show. Not all would do 450 but this one did with zero troubles at all. Heck even my old pc66 ram worked just fine at 450. At the time the fastest intel cpu was 400 and here was many of us at 450! We wuz happy. Some made it to 464 and even 504.

And with the 450/464 all games played just great and all apps ran fine! Unreal was so smooth, it was like I was playing it for the first time,hehe.

Since then the need to upgrade hasn't been needed as much although I did add ram, and went to a 366@568 and now at a 600@800 on a be6. Plus the newer games just don't do much for me like Quake and Duke 3d did. We need more good first person shooters!!

The two things that force my first major upgrade/platform shift was the fact that a 15" monitor sucks for Photoshop and Pagemaker and that a P133 w/a Voodoo 1 wasn't man enough for Unreal.

The min. specs (HA!) for Unreal were either a P166 w/a 3D accelerator or a P200 w/o one. Since I had 104MB of RAM, I thought I could slide by, but I couldn't really.

The bit in the beginning where you come to the closed blast door and you hear the fighting from the other side and the door opens and you see the body go flying while the Skaarj heads off was cool, but not as cool as a P2-333 and an 8MB V2 made it look. (Or a P3-927 and GF2 does for that matter!)

Also, admit it...how many of y'all jumped when the "body" on the bridge moaned and moved? I'd heard something about it before I played and was still shocked. Not as scary as Half-Life, but it got me!

i remember getting dizzy playing wolfenstein on a 386

Quake 2. Soon after playing the game I found the wonderful thing of "voodoo." At that time, I didn't know much about computers and I figured I would just get a 12meg 2D card. That would make it run good, righ?! hah, glad I learned about the 3dcards, hehe. Not only does it run faster, it looks better. The whole lighting of Quake2 amazed me. You miss so much in 2d!

I agree though, we need some new games to come out. The only ones I seem to play anymore are Half-Life and Quake! Where are the games?!

UT is pretty good.


Well the game that made me upgrade was...lets see...starcraft. That thing ran like shit on my 486/80mhz. So i went on the onld Hardware Central boards and picked up a k6-2 350 & some ram & an Asus P5A-B and an 8mb i740 card. I was the fastest kid on the block. Ran starcraft like a champ

Playing Doom and Rebel Assault II on an AMD 386/40 was a painful experience. I remember how much faster they were on my aunt's 486/66... funny thing is now we have an Athlon 900 and my aunt is puttering along on a K5-PR133 (100 MHz)

Yeah Falcon 3.0 on a 486/66 also duke nukem never ran very well on it either.

I remember when my friend FINALLY got a Voodoo ONE about 2-1/2 years ago. He'd been playing Quake 2 on his P200 and didn't realize what he was missing. The first time he fired a rocket and the hyperblaster down a dark hall and the walls lit up, he was like "COOL!!!"

Unfortunately, he's STILL using that same system!!!

I've been meaning to bring him over to show him some Q3/UT/NOLF/MDK2 at 1024 rez and 32-bit color at 60+ fps to wake his lame azz up!

Loser. If he'd spend less money on tattoos, strip clubs and drinking in bars, he could be l337.

I started off with a p2 300 on a bx with 32mb of ram and an Intel I740 8mb.
Quickly upgraded to 64mb of ram and p2 350.
Test Drive 5 played much better
Quake2 was also very liveable @ 640, until I got my SLI V2's, then I started changing so much stuff around I can't remember half of it.
All I know is my TBird 650 @ 800 and Radeon 64mb are very very nice.

Yea today I played UT and realized I need an upgrade!!!
Actually my first desperate upgrade was the Voodoo 1.
I have only been into comps for 5 years or so..bought a p 133 for the "kids" , yeah right.
Well remember Forsaken? it had a fps counter onscreen...I had an ATI rage 2 megger..my buddy bought a voodoo 1 for $250.00 CDN and showed us all how he got 60 fps now and we were like getting 7 to 11 fps...and he said we were lagging out the multiplayer games so I bought his voodoo 1 for $150.00 and he got a Voodo 2 for over $300.00 after having the voodoo 1 only 3 weeks...lol
Quake 1 fragfests ran much better too...
Anyhoo Blade I still have the 300a @ 450 ...best thing I ever bought for a comp...
I need a cpu but we are supposed to be getting free comps from Ford Motor Co. someday soong...
ah the good ole days...
WW

blood. Anyone ever play that game?? That game kicked much ass!! It made me upgrade from my 486/100 to a Cyrix 133@ a screaming 166. (some upgrade eh? ) Also after that I added a V2 8meg to my "cool" 4meg pci vid card Then the next upgrade was so I could play NFS3 at better frames/res. Sooo I upgraded to a K6-2 333@380, 64megs ram (w00t) and a SCREAMING V3 2000

When I had my 486DX33, I actually made quake run at almost playable speed. All I have to do is used the default resolution, no sound, shrink the viewing window size to a size of a stamp ( you heard it right, a first class stamp ). I had to work with that dinocraw till a about 8 month after the celeron 300a came out. I upgraded with an 300a with a classic abit bh6 and a tnt card. that was one sweet machine for the money.

Lol, anyone notice how the king of o/c (300a) is still a decent chip?? By no means is it for that new power house your building, but for UT in 6x4 or 6x8 its not bad. If paired with a V3 and 128megs of ram it would work fine.

I got into computerd awhile ago, but I put together so so systems just for the hell of it. My first real game drivin upgrade(as far as I can remember) was from a p133, to a p233mmx(which was pretty fast at the time). I then realized that it wasn't fast enough so I upgraded from 48megs ram to 64, and bought a monster3d 2. Then my pc was the biznach fiznatch. I kept it until I upgraded to a p2 333@416(about 6 months ago), then quickly to a p3 600@733, and now to p3 733@825.

Good topic Blade.

I remember walking into a software rental place ( an idea that didn't last long) and seeing doom, I was hooked. I went home and told my brother that we had to upgrade his machine at all cost. We went in together and bought a 486 upgrade chip for his 286 and I installed in not knowing what the hell I was doing, I didn't care what happened as long as I got to play Doom. I had to call someone and ask them if it mattered how the cards went back in, in any order. Well, the chip didn't work so I didn't get to play for about 6 weeks till I went home on leave and played it for three solid days on my moms 486, what a machine that was. I then went through the cycle from a 386 of my own to having to get an extra stick of memory and a new 486 mobo to run the great Duke 3D. From there it was all she wrote, I went as fast as I could but always about a year behind the crowd to save a few bucks. Now my 533 at 800 with lots of memory and the good ol Geoforce 32 DDR will run anything of the shelf, I do think I need a new video card though, going to wait and stay a little behind, you save so much money that way.

Question for the masses, if it wasn't for games would computers have evolved as quickly?
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