can we just go back to the days where PCs were cute toys your dad had in order to feel like he was going places in the world, and where people would enthusiastically play the second reality demo by future crew in order to show people that the $2000 386...

Demi Marie Obenour

@ariadne is this a joke or do you want a serious response?

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

incidentally the 386SX was never good enough to be in any game, with its 16 bit wide data bus causing basically any sort of DMA heavy application to constantly stall the cpu

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@alwayscurious mostly a joke

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

do you remember EDO RAM?

ティージェーグレェ

@ariadne I remember when someone showed me Second Reality.

I couldn't help but think to myself: "Geeze, this person wasted a LOT of money on crappy hardware just to play something that clearly ripped of Kefrens' Desert Dreams."

Dan

@ariadne had a Compaq Deskpro 386s/20 and can confirm, that thing was a dog. But I gamed on it for many years. It could actually run DOOM - *barely*

Ryan Finnie

@ariadne I remember having normal fast page RAM, like a pleb, and knowing that EDO RAM existed but had no idea what it did other than being superior to my RAM.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@dan clock for clock, 286 actually had better IPC, by about ~10%

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

do you remember your newly divorced dad bragging about how his 386SX was the best computer because “it could run Windows 3.1 in 386 enhanced mode”?

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@teajaygrey afaik desert dream was released only in april 1993, which would mean that second reality was probably already fairly baked by then

Ángela Stella Matutina

@ariadne @dan

Can confirm, I had to run AutoCAD R12 with a coprocessor emulator on a 386SX/25. It didn't run at all, it crawled.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

to the 17% of you who voted yes, we are clearly soul siblings and i identify with your pain

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@foo actually i think fast page is the faster one than EDO. my 486 had EDO, my pentium had fastpage

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

do you all have any idea how pissed i was when i found out that other people with 386DX machines had games running at 30-60fps, while my 386SX system would play these games at like 7fps?

was *so* mad

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

i used to write fake bios programs in quickbasic in order to inspire my dad to buy a new computer

“like imagine how much better it would be if your computer printed out 65535KB OK instead of 8192KB OK, wouldn’t that be cooler?”

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

life is different when you’re 8

when i was 8, i just wanted a 486DX cpu, 64MB of RAM and a sound blaster and maybe a cd-rom that actually worked correctly with mscdex

The Gibson

@ariadne

64MB

You were a BIG dreamer.

No seriously, that was expensive AF back then.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@thegibson they could afford it. we had ISDN at the time.

Gergely Nagy 🐁

@ariadne I remember way back when we had a 386SX, I was so obsessed with Fractint at the time that I persuaded my parents to combine my birthday & christmas presents (the two are more than half a year apart) and buy me a 387 co-processor.

Rho

@ariadne no, but only because I got the computer in our parents divorced