Question What was the specs of your very first gaming PC?

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MaddMann

A nerd that found his place
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Jan 17, 2020
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My first gaming PC was a Packard Bell.
Intel 286 CPU @ 12Mhz w/ i287XL Coprosessor
3dFX VooDoo graphics card
I don't remeber how much ram it had or what my HD capacity was, but I remember playing Curse of Monkey Island and Chuck Yeager combat simulators on it. The sound of the aircraft engines in that game still bring me a smile and great memories.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmqPoI936K4
 
You've given me flashbacks to the demo cassettes you got on the cover of pc magazines and waiting twenty minutes for my brother to load two levels of Lemmings from a tape.

Holy cow, I can't even imagine running Lemmings from a tape! I was about to say "I was never that patient," but once upon a time I would have been, considering I used to type in what a game programming book would tell me to, just to play a super simple game.
 
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Zloth

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First one I played games on a lot? An Apple ][+. 48K - and I think some of that was ROM. I'm pretty sure the bytes that make up this web page you're looking at right now wouldn't fit on two of those machines. I think each floppy disk could store 140K. (Pro tip: you could use a hole punch in the right spot on a disk, turn it over, and get another 140K from the back side! Try that with your fancy smancy SSDs! ;)) I can't remember the resolution but it wasn't much and, if you had two color pixels next to each other, they turned into one white pixel - so it was more complex than just X by Y anyway.

Sound.... uhh, yeah. You read the memory address at a certain location and the speaker made a single "tick." That's all there was. If you read it lots of times quickly then that makes a tone. Read it less quickly and the tone gets lower. Any sounds you want to make have to be done like that. How Castle Wolfenstein managed to make German speech come out of that speaker, I'll never know.
 
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Feb 10, 2022
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my spec first gaming pc is
cpu:core i5 760 OC 3.2 GHZ
gpu:nvidia gtx 460 gddr5 1gb
and the motherboard and the psu is
gigabyte h55 s2v and simbadda 500 watt
and I still use it until now and what i type is using this pc
 
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My first PC was an IBM Aptiva
CPU: Intel Celeron 300mhz
ATI Rage Pro 2d card (on motherboard)
Voodoo 2 3d card
ram - no idea
HDD - no idea

I wasn't going to count it as 1st gaming PC until I remembered the 1st thing I bought for it was Simcity 3000. So I guess it was.
 

Brian Boru

Legenda in Aeternum
Moderator
My first personal home PC was a Wang 386. I was able to trick it out so it had:
RAM 8 MB;
HD 40 MB;
3.5" Floppy drive—ran the 1.44 MB hard floppies!
5.25" Floppy drive—for the ubiquitous 256 KB soft floppies of the day.
…truly a premium machine of the time—had to be for a price of over £3,000!

An excellent PC, served me well for years without a murmur.

My first games on it were a pack of shareware floppies I bought mail order :)
 
I am about to side track thread. Here are some PC prices from 1989.
You get slightly more for your money now

Quotation of PC’s from 1989 for local college

20 x 286 systems @ $2895 each
• 16 bit 286 CPU @ 12.5 mhz
• 1mb ram expandable to 5mb
• Ems 4.09 supplied and supported
• Real time clock
• 40mb HDD
• 1 3.5 inch 1.44mb floppy
• 1 5.25 inch 360k drive floppy drive
• Serial port
• Parallel port
• 80287-8 maths co processor
• 16 bit vga card and tystar vga high res monitor
• 1 optical mouse

Special features
BMS 386 sx CPU module at 16 mhz with socket for 80387sx. Price = $495
BMS i486 CPU module at 25 mhz available March 1990

Standard upgrades
From 1mb to 1.5mb = $145
From 1mb to 2mb = $290
From 1mb to 3mb = $495
From 1mb to 4mb = $990

Replace 5.25 360k drives with 5.25 1.2mb drives = $35 per drive
Upgrade from 40mb to 80mb hdd = $495.00

Ethernet card
8 bit Ethernet card = $235
16 bit Ethernet card = $255

Software
MS Dos 4.0 = $110
MS Word Education pack of 10 users = $625
MS Windows 2.11 Education pack of 10 users = $388
MS Works Education pack of 10 users = $405


There was more, but I don't feel like typing out the printers. The cost of ram is just... words fail me. I wouldn't mind having the windows 2.11 pack.

Imagine cost of 32gb of ram when 4mb cost $990
 

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