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Anyone remember when gaming PC's worked right?

M

Mr Pepper

Senior member
What happened? I used to love upgrading every now and again, but now I dread it. It's nothing but problems anymore. Then after you do all your research, you have to cross your fingers and throw salt over your shoulder in hopes that you won't get a DOA..

Anyone else feel the same? It seems the rock-solid, golden days of the BH6 and voodoo pass-through are forever lost...

No wonder consoles are taking over.
 
Originally posted by: Mr Pepper
What happened? I used to love upgrading every now and again, but now I dread it. It's nothing but problems anymore. Then after you do all your research, you have to cross your fingers and throw salt over your shoulder in hopes that you won't get a DOA..

Anyone else feel the same? It seems the rock-solid, golden days of the BH6 and voodoo pass-through are forever lost...
Click to expand...

Sorry, I disagree. I remember the 'good old days' of tweaking memory loading in DOS, and the "plug and pray" days of early Win95/98. Plus programs that wouldn't run right on a non-Intel CPU, or that had to have a certain level of CPU to not crash and burn, or that only worked with certain video cards...

If you run things at stock, use standard drivers, and don't buy stuff that's on the absolute cutting edge... everything works pretty damn well for the most part these days.

I got a motherboard during my last build with bad onboard sound, and the RMA replacement was DOA -- but as soon as I got the working one, it all went together without a hitch. Of course, I also violated the "don't buy stuff on the absolute cutting edge" rule, since I got a brand-new ATI R480-based motherboard just after they came out.

No wonder consoles are taking over.
Click to expand...

Consoles are not without their hardware issues either... early units of both the Playstation and PS2 had issues with their CD/DVD drives. I've seen reports of overheating in both the XBox360 and PS3. Although there's much less concern about software compatibility -- but not no concern these days, since some XBox games don't work right on the XBox360, and reports are that some PS2 games don't quite work right on the PS3 either.
 
Good response,

I think my personal issue is that "bleeding edge" used to be stable... back in the day. Or so it seemed. so... when the PII platform, PIII platform, voodoo-2, TNT.. etc. came out, they worked right from the get-go. Maybe it's just nVidia that's rushing everything out the door these days, but I doubt it.

Maybe I just got lucky for 10 years ina row there and new products have always been this unstable.
 
Originally posted by: Mr Pepper
Good response,

I think my personal issue is that "bleeding edge" used to be stable... back in the day. Or so it seemed. so... when the PII platform, PIII platform, voodoo-2, TNT.. etc. came out, they worked right from the get-go. Maybe it's just nVidia that's rushing everything out the door these days, but I doubt it.

Maybe I just got lucky for 10 years ina row there and new products have always been this unstable.
Click to expand...

Well, to some extent, there was less hardware available, so it was easier to get testing coverage. I mean, if your motherboard choices are Intel and... Intel, and if there's only one company making 3D accelerators and you only support operation on one model of card for your program... it's not as hard to test. Today, you don't have a prayer of testing your application with every available video card at every driver level on every possible motherboard (and with every possible version of motherboard drivers, and with WinXP base/SP1/SP2, etc. etc. etc.) Hardware development was also a little slower -- Intel/AMD weren't putting out whole new generations of motherboards/CPUs every few years -- and so there was less variation in designs and drivers.

So in terms of application/hardware compatibility on mainstream hardware, there may have been fewer issues. But there was far less standarization, and sometimes trying to get the hardware working in the first place was much tougher. In general, building and configuring systems is far easier now... modern OSes are much more stable and have better default drivers, and industry-standard abstraction layers like DirectX and OpenGL make it much easier to develop applications that will work on a wide variety of hardware.
 
What? PCs are SOOOOO easy to build today than when I started (early/mid '80s). Back then you had to set interleaves on HDs, low-level format, took hours! Then when the 386 came out and dos 5 and 6, and some games needed nearly all of the 640k and you would spend hours trying to get as much free mem from the 640k just to play a game! And God forbid it you had a sound card! Finding a non conflicting IRQ just to get sound working was a nightmare! Then windows 3.0, 3.1 and its share of nightmares! ugh, building a PC today is childsplay compareed to the "good old days".
 
Maybe I'm the only one... lol

Anyway, I'm not really talking about "easier" to build, although I don't recall ever having much trouble in that department. (abit BH6, PII, voodoo/TnT was cake)

I'm more talking about stability once the thing is built. I have been wondering if half of this next-gen hardware today is even beta tested... Before it get to the end user I mean. 🙂
 
Hmm I think I am with Mathis on this one. Although I will say, IMO the BH6 was the best board ever made 😉


 
Originally posted by: Yreka
Hmm I think I am with Mathis on this one. Although I will say, IMO the BH6 was the best board ever made 😉
Click to expand...

I still have mine! dont use it but it, combined with a Celeron 300A and 2 voodoo2 cards in SLI was THE system in the day!
 
Originally posted by: Oyeve
What? PCs are SOOOOO easy to build today than when I started (early/mid '80s). Back then you had to set interleaves on HDs, low-level format, took hours! Then when the 386 came out and dos 5 and 6, and some games needed nearly all of the 640k and you would spend hours trying to get as much free mem from the 640k just to play a game! And God forbid it you had a sound card! Finding a non conflicting IRQ just to get sound working was a nightmare! Then windows 3.0, 3.1 and its share of nightmares! ugh, building a PC today is childsplay compareed to the "good old days".
Click to expand...

QFT. I go back to the Commodore 64/Apple II days. I remember when IBM announced an early version of the PC in the mid-80's, it was $5000 lol. And the only game you could play on it was Space Invaders. Then better games came around and you had to fiddle around with "extended" vs "expanded" memory. My job doesn't leave me much room to keep up with computers like I used to🙁
 
I think, a lot of times, if you don't demand much from your system they behave better. Like in the HTPC example, gear it towards 1 thing and run with it. The first build I had was a 386 under the direction of a friend. I remember the days of having multiple autoexecs and config.sys to make things run. I notice my systems age very well, but they all start out with some annoyances; and this goes all the way back. My P3BF? Friend has it, never any problems. My current rig was build date 5/03 with any number of upgrades over time, started out with lots of random reboots but now stable as a rock. It took a certain video driver update to manage, now I run the BSOD screensaver to maintain the "Crashey" motif (what I dubbed my PC a long time ago). Hang in there. One day you'll suddenly notice your PC does everything you want without problems; if you're like me you'll sell it to a friend the next.
 
I remember it taking me almost 3 days to set up my rig and my autoexec.bat and config.sys over 10 years ago in order to be able to have enough free conventional memory to play Master and Magic with sound.

Or how about having to tweak IRQ and I/O and the like to be able to use sound AND a mouse in a game! Having to configure the sound individually for every DOS application! Or games just not supporting your sound card.

How about having a myriad of config.sys and autoexec.bat files, each one tailored for every individual program to run, and having to reboot each time you wanted to use each of those programs? For instance: load A to play Game X, then reboot and load B to use the scanner; reboot and load C to use Windows 3.1.

I'm sorry, but I've never faced something remotely similar since. Computer gaming can be a headache sometimes, but nothing compared to the 'golden days' of DOS.
 
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