What was your first PC?

Encarta

A while back when John Linneman at Digital Foundry did a Jedi Knight II stream with a series of old GPUs including the PowerVR card (which he didn't get working in the end), it piqued my interest so I went looking on eBay and found a couple of Apocalypse 3DX cards going for silly money.

Sadly I don't know where mine went. I'd hazard a guess at my parents loft, but they had a clear out last year so it's probably in a landfill somewhere now.

Same here. It’s all a blur. Shame they don’t make PCs in that lovely shade of nicotine yellow any more.

I didn't even have the real thing. Imagine growing up with my mother's cooking and fake Encarta!

We were late to the party and our first family PC was a Pentium 133MHz. I think a Voodoo 1 was put in it at a later date. Halflife and Project IGI were popular.

My own first PC was a 2nd hand one a few years later. Pentium 133MHz MMX. This allowed me to save up and get a drop-in replacement of an AMD K6-2 450MHz and a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI card. Lasted me quite a while.

A SuperCharger hardware PC emulation device for my Atari ST, proper hi-tech stuff back in the 90s.

In the last eight years, I've been collecting these old things. I now have a drawer full of video cards from the 1996-2000 era, around 50 of them, I'm guessing even John would be jealous. I also have a big spreadsheet with lots of benchmark results, basically if you want to know how Quake 2 or Incoming ran on a specific card, I'm your man. I think you can even find some of my reviews linked on VGAMuseum. But because I never wanted to spend too much money on it, I'm missing many of the rarer ones. The old PowerVR is among them. At times you just gotta get lucky and hope someone will sell it among other cards in an unnamed lot. That's how I got my Geforce 256 and Trident Blade T64 for peanuts.

I'm surprised to hear about Jedi Knight though. That was a very old D3D game, and in my tests it's been one that almost always worked well, even when I was using it on a piece of crap like say, the Matrox Mystique.

Most of them are commonly found and not worth much. Especially mine, because like I said, I always avoided the expensive auctions. Some cards like the TNT2 M64 and Matrox G400 can be had for a pittance. Even less common models will rarely go for above 30 euro each, if people have no use for them other than collecting.

To make big bucks you should have something that is both rare and also useful for retro gamers. For example, any Voodoo cards reliably goes for above 80 euro. These are not so uncommon (the uncommon ones like Voodoo 5 will go for monstrous sums), but even they still sell for a lot, because they can run Glide games. Same for PowerVR, because some old games have SGL paths that can only be run on those specific cards. There are others too, but it gets complicated.

Either that, or you have something *really* rare, like a Promotion AT3D, or Trident 9850, or any Rendition... anyway, there are several.

I don't know how many collectors are really around, I think it's more often retro gamers instead. That's why you are much more likely to make money off a Voodoo or PowerVR.

386 for Wolfenstein. A mate hand one and Wolfy looked amazing so dumped my Amiga and got my first PC. Upgraded to a 486 DX2/66 after that to play Ultima Underworld 2.

I remember being at work where they got rid of some pentium 100's and some 133's. I ended up with 4 of them and setup a mini lan in my house - I had the p133 setup as a dedicated quake server, as well as quake itself (everyone wanted to use this one, because it was 0 ping), and the other 3 as lan clients. Used to have multiplayer quake sessions with mates + beer + smoke. Ah man, they were good fucking days.

Packard Bell 486 dX2 66Mhz. I think it had 8mb of ram, a 540mb HDD and CD-Rom.



IIRC it came with a few games, but the only one I remember was MegaRace. Played a lot of Doom 2 and Worms on it 😁

I can't remember details apart from it was a 286. I think 2 Meg of ram? Mainly used for Gods and Ocean Software games with some turbo pascal learning.

Ha, seeing that Packard Bell reminded me of the Amstrad 1512 machines we had at college for Office Training. They used two AA batteries for the clock which were under the monitor so if your walkman was dead when you got in you would just find a working machine and whip out the batteries to see if they had enough power to last the journey home on the bus.

Didn't take long for there to be no machines that kept their date-time correctly.