pleroma.debian.social

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

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

@alwayscurious mostly a joke

do you remember EDO RAM?

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 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*

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

@ariadne tbf at the time 286s and even XTs were still commonplace

@ariadne you mean like, from the 1600s

@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."

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

@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.

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

@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.

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

@ariadne I remember Windows 3.1 enhanced mode. It's the other qualifiers that caused me to vote no.

Enhanced mode did seem like an improvement over running Windows on a 286.

@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 🙃

@ariadne @foo yep. I recall putting a fastpagemode RAM expansion in one of my Atari STs way back when. But my Atari TT used nybble mode DRAM.

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

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

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?”

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

@ariadne

64MB

You were a BIG dreamer.

No seriously, that was expensive AF back then.

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

@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.

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

@ariadne My dad had been divorced for a long time when the 386SX came out 😔

@ariadne only because he wasn't divorced yet