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

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

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?”

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

@onfy it ran at like maybe 20fps at best, while on a 386DX it would run at 60fps for almost the entire demo

@onfy it can run, but not at best performance due to the 386SX actually just being a 286 core that had 386 compatibility added to it

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

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

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

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”?

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

do you remember EDO RAM?

@alwayscurious mostly a joke

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

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 386SX is still good enough to be in the game

this post brought to you by the disturbing number of alternative bands going "mask off"

yet again, a tool which analyzed your music library and lets you know which bands are affiliated with MAGA ideology would sure be nice in these trying times

@dascandy @anthony_steele the ev6 felt really cheap in terms of construction quality. the chimes for example had this really gritty compression sound to them, similar to SNES SPC700 sounds

@pleia2 @chrisjrn @vmbrasseur your talk was also excellent!

@saabria yes this is exactly what happened to @Elizafox when she borrowed my car