The 486 was such a massive improvement over the 386. And the DX2/66 felt like almost as big of an improvement over the 25/33MHz 486's.
The 486 landscape was weird. You had crippled, 386-like versions such as the 486DLC/SLC, Intel's DX4's that hit 75 or 100MHz, and clones that went up to somewhere around 133MHz (by this time the Pentiums had hit the streets, so the 486's on steroids were for budget users). And they were often given similar sounding names to the 586, to further confuse buyers.
It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-end system basically obsoleted in two generations. And, the DOS to Windows transition didn't help matters. It seems really odd in a time where you could still be using a 10 year old i7 and be just fine.
Ahh, my first PC after jumping ship from the Amiga like a filthy traitor, but having to accept facts that Commodore was dying and PC taking the market by storm. During the 386 days I honestly think it was still so immature for gaming that the Amiga still felt better, but by 486 and when I switched there was no longer a contest although PC was still unfriendlier for games with the AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS and Conventional RAM acrobatics. It was funny, PC at this time felt like powerhouses but ancient at the same time, coming from the Amiga. Ancient powerhouses! It's like they had recently discovered 16 bit sound, like... what...
But anyway, I jumped on board with the 486 DX2/66 which was the bee's knees. After a year or two, I overclocked it to 80 MHz to run Duke Nukem 3D or Quake or whatever for a _very precious_ +5 fps or so because your framerate was often in the 20 fps range. Made a huge difference. So 20% clock speed was big! I even upgraded to DX4/100 during a weekend of tinkering with my high school friends for another +20% and at that point FPS games of the time ran pretty well indeed! As well as the recent Windows 3.11 of course which was starting to feel like nothing special! Damn that computer was really fast! I topped it off with a Soundblaster AWE32 and MIDI music sounded amazing too with its software soundbanks.
Following this I went to Pentium 133 MHz, and it feels like the world of computing changed less and less following that. Things got more convenient as the x86 architecture won rather than having a smorgasbord of viable home computing options, but also a little bit more boring.
I’d say things got “boring” quite a while after the pentiums. All the peripherals like the cd burner got faster. Memory got larger and faster. Video got substantially faster. Network went from 10mbits to 1gb over time. Smarter power management started to exist. USB came online. Wi-Fi started to exist.
I’d say things got “boring” after the clock wars. Now says the clock is basically the same as it was 5 or even 10 years ago (though massively more parallel, etc). Average memory size seems to have peaked around 16gb (though substantially faster and more parallel). Average disk size has remained about the same (though way, way, way faster thanks to SSD’s).
Also things have gotten much smaller and more energy efficient. Back in the day your motherboard had all kinds of discrete shit on it. The board was huge in comparison to a modern board.
Note: it’s been a good 10 or 15 years since I’ve built a desktop PC from parts… I kinda miss it.
Boring maybe. But I'll take the sheer joy of plugging in a random USB device and having it just work over the absolutely pain it was dealing with serial and parallel ports and I/O addresses, DMA channels, IRQ conflicts, etc. And everything talks WiFi today. It's amazing. I have 64GB on my main machine. I can run (virtual) machines within machines! That's a goddamn miracle if you ask me. I bought some cheap HDMI capture stick for $10! I plug it in to USB and the thing just works. And in Linux. How?! I had Hauppauge WinTV PCI capture card in the late '90s and that thing barely worked (with their awful proprietary drivers and software) in Windows, never mind Linux support.
> The board was huge in comparison to a modern board.
The ATX form factor is still the most popular. Mini ITX is around today, but based on the fact that vendors only make a few models compared to their ATX selection tells me most builders still use ATX. I guess the AT form factor was larger, but ATX has been around since '95 or so.
After a year or two, I overclocked it to 80 MHz
to run Duke Nukem 3D or Quake or whatever for a
_very precious_ +5 fps or so because your framerate
was often in the 20 fps range. Made a huge difference
Yeah! I think it's often lost to history how "vital" overclocking was. (Obviously, games aren't actually vital, but you know what I mean)
Overclocking was often the difference between "unplayable" and "playable." Or "playable" and "actually nice."
Following this I went to Pentium 133 MHz, and it
feels like the world of computing changed less and less
following that.
For me there have only been two seismic hardware shifts since those days. One was LCD/LED screens. While I love CRTs for gaming, I do not miss staring at them all day for coding.
The other seismic shift for me was SSDs. After the 386/486/Pentium days the gap between CPU performance and HDD performance reached utterly absurd levels. You'd have these absolute beast CPUs just sitting around and waiting for ancient spinning rust. Ridiculous. SSDs rebalanced the equation a bit.
Things got more convenient as the x86 architecture
won rather than having a smorgasbord of viable home
computing options, but also a little bit more boring.
I got into PCs around same time as you, but imho the best overclock came years later: the Intel Celeron 300A would happily run at 450mhz for a whopping 50% increase.
I was right into FPS games at the time, and for a while it seemed every second person was running the overclocked 300A.
> It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-end system basically obsoleted in two generations. And, the DOS to Windows transition didn't help matters. It seems really odd in a time where you could still be using a 10 year old i7 and be just fine.
Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think. I remember being annoyed that my decently high end system, purchased at the beginning of 2000, could no longer run many of the latest games (in some cases not even coming close to minimum specs) by early- to mid-2002.
I really stretched myself to buy that system in the first place and couldn't afford to replace it for years. I bought a new system in 2004 and then didn't buy another until 2011 when I moved to laptops and bought a 17" Macbook Pro (by which time it too felt very obsolete, whereas that 2011 MBP would still be fine if its GPU hadn't desoldered itself in 2017).
Nowadays I run a 7 year old MBP that's still more than capable of handling everything I need. Biggest issue is the battery life is really starting to suffer.
> Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think. I remember being annoyed that my decently high end system, purchased at the beginning of 2000, could no longer run many of the latest games
I remember this period of very rapid advancement, too. It was such a trope in the computer market at the time, Weird Al even made fun of it in his lyrics:
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!
Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
(It's All About the Pentiums, 1999, "Running with Scissors")
I just gifted a 2013 MBP to my father after replacing the battery. It's a pain in the neck to replace, but fairly doable if you're even slightly inclined to hardware repair and can read instructions. Worst part was dissolving all the glue. Not sure why Apple felt the need to use seemingly aviation grade VHB tape to keep the batteries in, but it's a lot of acetone and a lot of scraping to get it all off. All it took was $90 for the kit and a couple hours.
> Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think.
Many more. An Apple II+ from 1979 was approaching obsolete in 1984. An IBM PC from 1985 was obsolete by 1990. A 386 machine from 1990 was obsolete by 1995. A Pentium machine from 1995 was obsolete in 2000. A Pentium III from 2000 was nearly obsolete in 2005. This cycle started in the late 70s, and I guess continued until computers were "fast enough" for all the typical software they might run. Video was the last big one. Even very cheap computers are now fast enough to render complex documents and display video, more or less instantly (at least with the right software). So, for most users they subjectively seem "fast enough".
Things do seem more stable these days, in terms of general compatibility. A Pentium III machine can still boot a current Linux distro, if rather slowly. And 20+ year old USB peripherals will still work on a modern machine. That's quite a change from the era when a new, incompatible architecture or peripheral bus came out every five years.
486DLC/SLC were not really "crippled versions", they were completely different CPU designs that used the 486 name as Intel wasn't able to stop other companies from using a number (one of the reasons for naming the next cpu family "pentium" which they could trademark/copyright). The crippled versions were the 486SXs, which disabled the FPU.
> The crippled versions were the 486SXs, which disabled the FPU.
Though for many use cases at the time, that wasn't a massive issue. Many games didn't take advantage of the FPU until far into the 486 era, they were only starting to when the Pentium and its competitors came out (a killer for Cyrix's P5-era chips which despite a very strong integer performance had terrible floating-point umph).
There were 487 FPU co-processors, to upgrade 486SXs, though unlike the 287 and 387 before them they weren't really co-processors, they were actually full 486 chips and the main CPU was disabled when they were present.
The name caused confusion because SX in 386 meant something completely different (there was no built-in FPU to disable): a 16-bit data bus instead of 32-bit and 24-bit address bus, along with more minor changes, so it would work on cheaper motherboards originally designed with 286's in mind.
The 486SLC kept the 16-bit bus, but I don't remember what it was about the DLC but it was much slower than an Intel 486 of the same clockspeed even thought it was a full 32-bit chip. I want to say it was something like it still used 386 motherboard designs (in both cases).
ISTR the SLC introduced SMM that allowed laptops to use the main CPU to do things that otherwise would've required an elaborate embedded controller.
And thus began the trend of having entire layers of functionality in the CPU that were outside the view of the OS which thought it was running at ring 0....
> It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-end system basically obsoleted in two generations.
I remember this all too well. And PCs were expensive. $2,000-3,000 rigs in 1990 money. Today you can pick up a loaded Ryzen laptop for less than half that in 2023 money. Crazy.
In the early '90s I was still on an IBM XT clone from around 1986 with CGA graphics and monitor. Few of the new games I wanted to play would work on it. It was worse when the 386 came out. Today, with a machine built around 2017 and a GTX 1080 I can still play most new games just fine.
I do kinda miss when AMD and Intel shared the CPU socket. I had a AMD 386dx40, which IIRC Intel never made a 386 that fast.
During that time the tech moved so fast it was worthless to try to upgrade existing hardware. By the time you wanted to upgrade almost everything had changed. New CPU socket, new memory, new/faster peripheral bus, etc.
About all you could keep between builds was the case, the monitor, the keyboard/mouse and maybe the power supply and soundcard.
It was almost always more cost effective to buy a new, much larger drive…
Man ball mice sucked, it seemed like I was always cleaning the rollers. I generally am an early adopter of nothing but I rushed out to buy that first Microsoft Optical mouse. I was still using it on a secondary machine until a couple years ago when it finally died.
I remember seeing one of the first Pentium's, it was either a 60 or 66mhz, but it was STUPIDLY fast. Way faster than any 486 we had at the time. We were just watching someone play Windows 3.11 solitaire on it and laughing when they won because the card "waterfall" animation took what felt like 1 second to complete. It was probably longer, maybe 3-4 seconds, but on our 486's it was probably 10-15 seconds.
Nope, the original Pentiums at 60/66 MHz were sometimes slower than 486 DX/4 at 100 MHz, but I don't remember the specifics. Pentium at 90 MHz was already faster at all times, the 100 MHz one had no competition from that DX/4.
> As far as i remember Pentium at 100 MHz was slower than a 486 DX/4 at 100 MHz
No... the Pentium had advantages in both IPC (two pipes vs one) and bus speed (66MHz/64 bit vs at most 50MHz/32 bit).
I'd be interested to see a more info on this this, but I suspect you'd be hard pressed to write anything at all on the DX4 that ran faster than on the Pentium.
(The jump from Pentium to Pentium Pro would've been different, due to the way the Pentium Pro deliberately sacrificed 16-bit performance for gains on the 32-bit workloads Intel thought would dominate by then.)
The biggest problem with the DX/50 was the bus. AMD was already struggling to run the VLB at 40MHz with their DX-40 parts. A lot of video cards couldn't handle it and running certain hard drives controllers on that speed sometimes ran the risk of corrupting disks. I can imagine that the DX/50 was a hellscape of I/O trying to find cards that could run at the 50MHz bus clock or being stuck at EISA's 33MB/sec.
I had one of those AMD 486DX40's and it was a screamer.
Yes, very picky about VLB card choice and even placement; we had a big multi-IO card (possibly made by DFI?) and a Trident SVGA card, and it took a few days of shuffling and benchmarking and stability testing to find the optimum arrangement. ISTR that if the IO card was closest to the CPU, it simply wouldn't boot about half the time, and it was unstable if it did. Putting the IO in the third VLB slot and the video card in the second, leaving the first empty, seemed to be the best arrangement. And it left the IDE cables reasonably close to the drives, so that was a win.
But once we got all the drivers loaded for that IO card and stuff, it absolutely flew. Ran rings around a lot of Pentium/90 systems because their 33MHz bus just couldn't keep up, and in the days before GPUs, pushing pixels into video RAM was a contest of raw bus bandwidth and very little else. We eventually had quite a lot of drives on that machine, so UDMA/33 moved a lot of bytes while still leaving spare bus cycles for overhead.
I tried overclocking it to 50MHz a few times, and the IO and VGA cards were both capable, it was the RAM that shat itself. The upper 3MB of RAM would just vanish, leaving only 1MB, which was honestly a fair tradeoff for some things -- I'd boot in that config if I had a lot of PKZIP to do, or for rendering fractal graphics, which didn't use a lot of RAM but really appreciated the extra clock speed. Then clock it back down and reboot to use the results of those operations.
Underclocking was also nice, and something I did frequently, so I could unplug the CPU fan and enjoy some quietude during a long BBS file transfer, which certainly didn't need much CPU grunt. The mobo clock generator didn't mind being re-jumpered while the system was on, and going from 40MHz to 16MHz (I think) was a simple matter of adding or removing one jumper cap, as I recall. I could reach through the floppy-drive opening in the front of the case and do this after a download started. Then switch off the monitor, and listen to the quiet tick-hiss of interference on my FM radio, which picked up just enough of WHYT 96.3 in the basement that I could listen to some alt-rock while also being aware of the UART ISR being hit. When the ticking stopped, the modem was idle, turn the monitor back on, jumper the CPU back up to speed and plug the CPU fan back in while the CRT warmed up, and get on with unpacking the file.
My first PC was an AMD 386DX40 with a OAK SVGA 1MiB , a SB 2 clone card, a 200MiB hd and X2 Sony CDROM drive... I remember that worked very nice and stable. And that I could play Doom 2 and Sim City 2000 without issues.
I remember having a 486DX4/100 (a clock-tripled 33 MHz bus and 99 MHz core). I downloaded the reference manuals from Intel and found the pins I could jumper to change the clock multipler from x3 to x2, and then I increased the bus speed to 50 MHz to effectively have a 486 DX2/100.
I don't remember all the hardware details anymore, but I think I tested system stability by recompiling XFree86 on Linux. This was something I already knew how to do as a beta tester for 2D accelerator drivers, and it took many hours and so seemed like a good test...
My first PC was a 486DX/50 and until today I was totally unaware of the potential bus timing issues but I can not remember ever having had issues. But this might finally explain why it came with a turbo button - even though it should probably be called an anti-turbo button - that allowed changing the clock to 10 MHz. But now I wonder why they would have made it that slow instead of say 25 MHz or 33 MHz? I vaguely remember using the slower clock to make games playable that were running way to fast, so maybe that also factored into it.
The Turbo button did exist on processors that ran over 4.77 MHz of the original 8086. I had a Turbo button on the 9.54 MHz 8088, also on the 386 DX/40 (lowering the frequency to 8 MHz IIRC), it was not specific to 486. Actually the 486 was the last CPU that had that button, I think.
It was a very interesting time in computing history. The changes from the i80286 to the i80386 were extreme - the i386 gave us a fundamentally different instruction set that common 32 bit systems still use in 2023.
On the other hand, the changes in the i80486 were purely about speed: relatively large built-in caches, integrated FPU, significantly better pipelining and so on.
It was the last time Motorola really competed with Intel. The m68040 was all about performance, too, and Motorola's chip was faster in integer, floating point, synthetic and real world uses, clock for clock. (The m68060 was somewhat competitive with the Pentium, but people weren't choosing between x86 and m68k by then.) The x86 world really owes some thanks to Motorola for the competition.
However, the fact that Intel was selling '486s like hotcakes meant they spent the time and money to continue to improve the '486, so the clocks went way up. The m68040 never had any clock improvements over 40 MHz.
An i80486 system can still run NetBSD decently in 2023, which is a testament to the generally good performance of the CPU :)
> The changes from the i80286 to the i80386 were extreme
It was the 386 that really put the platform's strategy squarely in the realm of general purpose computing.
The 8088 and 8086 were intended as short term backfills for the gap left by the dismal performance and high cost of i432. The 8018x chips were targeted at the embedded space and the 80286 was targeted at phone switches. It was really something of an accident that the 286 worked in the PC AT class machines as well as it did.
The 80386 was Intel's realization that they were successful in general purpose desktop computing and needed a product targeted specifically at that space, and with backward compatibility in mind.
Intel pushed the 486 up to 100 MHz via the iDX4 chip (which lost the i486 branding, but it's still what it is). Initially intended for embedded systems, it was sold directly also to consumers with the "OverDrive" brand attached. (Maybe it was unsold stock from the embedded attempt?)
AMD would further push its own 486 chips to 150 MHz, and I recall the raw clockspeed allowed it to stay competitive against the lower-end Pentiums (60-75 MHz), but architectural changes in the Pentium (branch prediction and out of order execution) really let the Pentium fly away from the 486 at fewer necessary cycles.
> Initially intended for embedded systems, it was sold directly also to consumers with the "OverDrive" brand attached.
They also spent some effort marketing the DX4 as a low end alternative to the Pentium. It was possible to buy/build DX4 machines. Trouble there is the same as any other low end offering of the time - it got steamrolled by better technology coming down in price as quickly as it did. The window of opportunity for anything low end was not that large.
My first PC was a 486DX50 from the bargain bin (with no box or accessories) at Best Buy. I never had a fully new system again, as each newer configuration still had many parts of the old ones. Very Ship of Theseus.
Had an AST 486DX2/50 as my first PC in ~93 or so--I have a lot of good memories poking around DOS, playing Doom, tons of shareware, dialing BBSes (on a 2400 baud modem!) and more. It was a great machine.
I worked in a computer store while attending college during this time. We were the only "Computer store" in town, but the local BigBox "furniture store" also sold computers too. None of the staff there knew anything about computers.
We would often have people come into our shop asking questions and then going to the BigChain to buy the PC's.
Well, one day a couple came into the store carrying the flyer for the other place. The couple then asked several questions about the computers, "What does this mean, What does that do, Is this part important... etc" I tried several times during the discussion to steer them towards the products that we sold. It was obvious that they were only using my time to educate themselves so they could 'smartly shop' at the other location. So we get to the part of the listing where the choice was DX vs DX2 (33Mhz vs 66MHz IIRC).
Them: "What does the 2 mean?"
Me: "That's needed if you want to use two floppy drives, both a 5.25" and a 3.5" or just one."
fun times..... =)
*Edit/Note: the 2 in DX2 means that it was clock-doubled. I lied to the customer because they were wasting my time.
Those PackardBell CD-ROM games and encyclopedias were very innovative. I have several of those PCs and still have all their CDs. Check out 3D Body Adventure predicting the pandemic:
Heck yeah, I went from a C64 to a 386SX (which youngin me eventually broke by trying to upgrade memory), to a 486DX2/66 which allowed me to FINALLY play doom.
Then followed a Cyrix 5x86 100GP in somewhere around 1996, which was a bit of an upgrade, since I could not afford Pentiums just yet with my own money. In 1997, I bought a Diamond Stealth II S220 as an alternative to a Voodoo, for the same "poverty" reasons. You have to know my parents were ... very much against computers.
As we started to get access to the internet in high school, I learned about overclocking, and oh my! was my system the best candidate for it! I could push the CPU to 120Mhz without additional cooling! The graphics cards, which bore a rendition verite v2100 chip, could also be overclocked quite heavily, but since the chips where bare, without any form of cooling, it became too hot, so I had to "MacGyver" my way around the problem.
I also have very fond memories of the socket 3 era... for me it started with the classics from id software, to Warcraft 2, Duke3D, LAN matches, Carmageddon, Quake, etc.. and all the early mods such as paintball, skin modding, what fun!
> I bought a Diamond Stealth II S220 as an alternative to a Voodoo
I did the same thing, it was a great budget card. vquake was awesome, plus you were able to use Direct3D inside of Windows which the first 3Dfx cards didn't do. It also came with a Descent clone called Forsaken on the demo CD, which was the first colored lighting I had ever seen in a game, and was pretty amazing.
Ironically, the Verite chips didn't handle certain VGA modes that well, so DOS games like Doom were pretty choppy.
Oh yeah, tomb raider was fun, but vquake was the bomb.
Although, eventually, when the miniGL port was released, it was clear that the V2x00s were sub-par, even with 24 bit support and hardware z-buffer. Eventually the voodoo2 just put the nail in the coffin. But for a time, little geek me had fun pushing the hardware limits, even though I knew nothing of thermal management at the time.
Indeed, I remember some DOS games having some... stutters? For lack of a better term. But at that point I was hooked on 3D and Windows 9x, so it didn't matter too too much.
The Rendition Verite chips also had antialiasing, which was awesome. Was a while before anybody else had that.
AA was an underappreciated feature at the time. You didn't really notice it unless you had quite a sharp monitor! Everybody else just got antialiasing "for free" thanks to their blurry screens. =)
Acclaim, publisher of forsaken, was scrutinized for a rather risqué marketing campaign for the game. Never played the game myself so I don't know if the ads had anything to do with the content.
I think at that point (Socket 7 motherboards) they were starting to do integrated sound cards, but they weren't standard. I may have had some kind of SoundBlaster clone.
I think I used a discrete sound card even later on into the Pentium III days because of either driver issues or quality of the on-board ones.
The 386SX transition was nice, because it also brought Windows (with its standard printer drivers) and enough memory and video capability to start to do interesting work with graphics. It brought most of what I'd call the baseline capabilities of a modern computer, with the subsequent generations mainly just adding capacity.
It was interesting at the time, though, that the 486 I had was mainly heavily constrained by expansion bandwidth. It had an accelerator for the video, but the connection from the CPU into the video card was just 16-bit ISA. Anything that had to transit the bus was glacial - so it couldn't really do more than 8bpp graphics. It was a great argument in support of local bus (and a source of some amount of envy when VLB DX2/66's started showing up... computationally only about double speed, but so much more capability to drive the screen).
One thing I recall from that time, which seems absurd nowadays, is how I was able to actually run photoshop 2.0 in a 486 after upgrading it from 4 to 8 MB. Jesus, 8MB nowadays probably is not even enough to start booting.
Our Family went straight from the 8088 + cga graphics to the pentium 100mhz (really an overclockerd 90mhz model) + sound blaster card + matrox something and a decent Sony screen .
> straight from the 8088 + cga graphics to the pentium 100mhz (really an overclockerd 90mhz model)
Now there's a jump... that must have been around two orders of magnitude more compute performance (not to mention all the rest of the new capabilities.)
> + matrox something and a decent Sony screen .
One of the things I did with that 486 machine was upgrade to a Sony-17SE1 monitor. This is when 14 or 15 inch CRT's were normal, so the 17 was special, expensive, and a very significant financial stretch. Still worth it for all the reasons you'd expect.
I carried the monitor over to the Pentium, which was its own learning experience. The Pentium machine was built to be a dedicated Linux machine, so I had to be fairly careful about the hardware I used. When I ordered it from Micron, I bought it with the cheapest possible video option the offered, and upgraded it myself to a Number Nine 771 (which had a discrete IBM RAMDAC and was much better supported on Linux.)
The reason I mention this is that I got to see the same monitor driven by two different outputs. Even at the same resolution/etc, the quality of the image was much, much better on the 771, for reasons that I am sure were related to the discrete RAMDAC and a better analog section. It's the sort of thing that's totally a non issue these days (digital link ftw), but mattered a lot back then.
It's the sort of thing that's totally a non
issue these days (digital link ftw), but mattered
a lot back then.
Yeah, that used to be really interesting!
Sometimes monitor cables themselves were the culprits. I remember seeing a very noticeable difference between various VGA cables. Unnoticeable in games, but very significant when working with text. Especially when coding on a cramped CRT monitor with the smallest font size my eyes could tolerate, so I could have the maximum amount of code and documentation onscreen at once.
Differences in analog video output were noticeable in the game console space as well.
For example NEC's PC Engine was known for having really sharp, vibrant composite output. Most models of the Genesis/Megadrive did not. Etc.
> Sometimes monitor cables themselves were the culprits.
The Sony 17SE1 I bought was positioned as a relatively high end display. (Maybe something you'd see on a workstation class machine.). The video cable for it had DB-15 at the video card, but the connection to the monitor itself was five separate BNC connectors. Presumably that allowed better performance with DB13W3 and the like, although I never used that.
> For example NEC's PC Engine was known for having really sharp, vibrant composite output. Most models of the Genesis/Megadrive did not. Etc.
Interesting... I only used a PC Engine once or twice, but I do remember it having better than average video quality. At the time, I attributed it to the better video processor, but it's easy to believe that the analog section was that much better also. (Particularly given that it was composite video, and all the weirdness associated with that.)
same here. We had an 8088 with AdLib, which only had FM synthesis. We stepped up to a Pentium 75Mhz with SoundBlaster AWE32 and 16-bit 44.1kHz audio. And CD-ROM drive! Those were amazing times. Shortly after that the internet hit mainstream and MP3s became a thing, and the world changed forever.
The AWE32 was amazing. I remember being so frustrated that essentially no games seemed to take advantage of it.
That's actually the time period when I started to fall in love with game music. I'd download MIDI files of songs from 16-bit games. On most setups, they sounded quite bad. But in MIDI software that supported the AWE32's soundfonts a lot of them sounded incredible.
> The AWE32 was amazing. I remember being so frustrated that essentially no games seemed to take advantage of it.
Gravis Ultrasound (?) falls into the same category for me. Really interesting and capable hardware that didn't penetrate the market enough to warrant significant investment by game developers.
And once 16-bit/44KHz audio and powerful enough CPU's became common, the need for hardware accelerated audio generation for games really diminished. It's all now logically pretty similar to the DAC section of a SB16 with a bunch of software driving it.
It's nice that the level of capability is as high as it is, but I do miss some of the unique hardware designs from that era.
Yeah... Demos and mod trackers made a lot of GUS use. From what I remember, the audio synthesis model was fairly similar. I bet there was a lot of overlap between mod tracker authors and GUS enthusiasts. (And from what I remember, the MOD format itself was strongly derived from the capabilities of the Amiga audio hardware.)
My first computer was an IBM EduQuest 486 SX/50 (https://www.ardent-tool.com/EduQuest/EduQuest_55.jpg) - great memories of taking that apart and learning about how things worked (glad my parents didn't know what was going on after spending $2000 on a computer for 'school work')
Are there any moderately priced 486 SBCs available these days? The ones I've encountered (forgotten the links) were in the $200-or-so range. Surprisingly expensive, or not?
I would love to have a dirt cheap fanless 486 minicomputer for FreeDOS (SvarDOS). Not for gaming, mostly for writing and some hobbyist coding. (I'm an ultra-slow thinker, so a single-tasking system is very probably plenty for most things. :)
Currently thinking about this one, with Vortex86 -- but it is still, well, fairly expensive as compared to something like a RasPi: https://icop-shop.com/product/ebox-3100/
Sure, there are emulators, but I was thinking of a native system. Emulators seem to work great, but I try to avoid several layers of abstractions. Also, feeling nostalgic about how a native FreeDOS system boots in literally 2 seconds (on a modest laptop), I guess.
It is interesting nonetheless that really-low-spec SBCs have not gone into the masses (thus resulting in dirt-cheap prices) the way the RPis have. It is still a nice dream to see this happening with the current rise of retrocomputing.
> It's possible that some operations, particularly those that involve memory- or disk-intensive access, may actually be slower with the DX2/66 than with the DX/33.
Some things never change. The mechanical translation of "not faster than" to "slower than" is ever prevalent.
I had a pentium 66 with just a huge heat sink. My pentium 133 had a fan but when I upgraded to a k6-2 I under clocked it so I could just use a heatsink. It was 2015 before I finally got another fanless computer.
This takes me back, although my first computer was a 486SX 25 MHz. At some point I inadvertently over locked it (long before I heard that word) because there was a jumper to change the bus from 25 to 33. I couldn’t believe it just… worked!
You could have upgraded to an Amiga 2000 and put a Bridgeboard in it or a third-party one with a 486 on it. You could even upgrade it to a Pentium Overdrive processor.
The Amiga was also able to run Mac OS as a task on it's own "screen" alongside Workbench and other Amiga apps, so you could run Amiga, Mac and IBM PC software all at the same time at full speed.
I'd also wish for a pentium pro article on the same vibe. Many people don't realize that it paved the way to even the current "core" series! In some ways, like the DX50, it was even better than its successors, although it was plagued by issues.
On side note, I've had Am486Dx4VT8 (8 kb internal cache in WT mode). I was able to run it in 2x50MHz mode with Trident VLB card - it was my first "overclock" to have somewhat playable Quake experience (but not really).
The 486 landscape was weird. You had crippled, 386-like versions such as the 486DLC/SLC, Intel's DX4's that hit 75 or 100MHz, and clones that went up to somewhere around 133MHz (by this time the Pentiums had hit the streets, so the 486's on steroids were for budget users). And they were often given similar sounding names to the 586, to further confuse buyers.
It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-end system basically obsoleted in two generations. And, the DOS to Windows transition didn't help matters. It seems really odd in a time where you could still be using a 10 year old i7 and be just fine.