Why is it so hard to create my dream 1996 gaming PC?
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- Опубликовано: 23 сен 2020
- Nvidia or AMD - That's pretty much what your video card choice comes down to now, safe in the knowledge that your choice will be supported by all games and restricted only by your budget. Things weren't always so clear cut however as I discover when I fall into a trap of marketing promises in '96 when trying to create my dream 1996 PC.
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Let the great 'that's not how you say Matrox' debate begin!
Thank you everyone for watching, I'd love to hear your memories of PC ownership in this period and the bad decisions you may have made along the way!
Neil - RMC
Getting a PC with an ATI Rage 2, the world's only 3d-decelerator! Software rendering on my K6-2 300 was normally a better option.
Eventually I upgraded to a 16MB Voodoo Banshee from Powercolor that I have very fond memories of - HL, Quakeworld, Q3A, UT, NFS2SE, THPS2 they all ran like a charm on that box.
I live about 90 minutes from the Matrox head offices in Laval, Quebec and can say definitively, it is May-trox. Or even the support staff mispronounce it, which is possible.
Man, I remember when they were killer GPUs. Now they're a company that mostly makes equipment for professional video production, though they do still sell G500 cards for things like digital signage and servers. I just installed a brand new Dell PowerEdge server at a client recently and on Windows Server 2019, it still had a Matrox G500 chip powering the VGA! Couldn't believe it. Must cost dell like a quarter for those now. :)
@@PXAbstraction I had a g200, my friend eventually got a g400 with dual monitor, it was a great time for 3d accelerators, it's a shame the parhelia sort of fizzled out, the FAA they bought from ?Bitboys? was great... when it worked.. but that's the case for Nvidia's dlss too. I don't think we'll see a 3rd player in the pc video card market... except maybe intel, who knows where intel is going. oh and I've always said MAH-trox
Both a Maxtor (don't remember which one) and an ATI Rage (ATI 3D Xpression + PC2TV). What a disappointment then hahaha... And yeah, I got a Monster 3D later and a Voodoo 3 3000 eventually with later machines.
The jump from 2D or "wannabe 3D" to 3Dfx was beyond impressive. It was the birth of a new era.
I remember that. I was wow when I bought the Orchid Righteous 3D addon card. It could not produce 2D on it’s own
Yes, indeed! It was totally worth the wait to stick with 2D gaming until the 3Dfx cards came out.
Wasn’t software 3d real 3d? Games like quake, nfs, daggerfall, descent, and tomb Raider?
@@Caleb-fv5fp Technically, software 3D was proper in some games (e.g. Quake, unlike Doom or even Duke Nukem 3D, for instance). But hardware 3D brought an entirely new level of immersion.
At the same time keeping up was frustrating and expensive. 2 years old PC (like this one in say year 1998) was a garbage.
Today everything is way more cheap and stable - I can do most of my tasks and even play old games (in fact anything that appeared before 2012 at high settings) with my secondary 10 years old PC (Xeon e3-1230v2 + 16GB RAM + 512 SSD + GT1030), where newest component is GT1030 from 2017. It runs latest Win10, drives 1440p display and plays any YT video smoothly. No way I could effectively use 10 years old PC with current software in 1995, 2005 or even 2015 no matter how it was upgraded.
Italian here, I wasn't expecting an Italian magazine at all. My brain was on English mode and I couldn't read until Neil said it was Italian.
Hahaha nice !
ahahah me too
Lol. I would like to see if it would happen to me, when he is showing german magazines.
this is the tech that i started to learn pc hardware on. my uncle just gave me like 10 broken pcs and a heap of parts and told me to "have at it, make one of them work." took me about 2 days of fuss but it cemented my love of Computer tech.
Pretty cool uncle. I wish I could have had a mentor like that when I started learning about computers
I had a Pentium 90 a little later (it already had Windows 98 on it when I got it) but really got my hands dirty with 286es that were essentially free at the time. 486es were still reasonably expensive for kids, that took a few more years until they were 1 Euro or free, I'd say early 2000s. I did muck around quite a bit with the IBM PS/VP 486 DX/2 66 we had at school from 1997 to 2003. Downgraded from Windows 98 to 3.1 and later 3.11, from 8 to 16 and later 64 MB of RAM, a bunch of software (initally Winword 2.1 copied straight from a 286 running Windows 3, later a pirated copy of Word 6.0 from the school's PC admin, also a bunch of DOS games) and two discarded dot matrix printers, first a fairly annoying Citizen Swift D120, which caused at least one hand injury thanks to sharp bits on the tractor feed, then a lovely Epson LQ-100 that produced amazing prints for a dot matrix printer. I had an acquaintance of my parents, a police officer by day and PC expert by night, help me out answering some of my questions and supplying me with software like DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 and a stack of late-80s PC magazines from a neighbour that answered any questions about MFM hard drives and dot matrix printers I might ever have had. A friend's mom, who worked in a university computer lab, also supplied me with loaned floppies of everything. In the early 2000s I finally got my hands on a genuine set of DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 floppies from a classmate's mom, along with two Pentium towers and a bunch of loose hardware.
Last year I went through some nostalgia trying to fix up a discarded Pentium II with Windows 98 but either every single CD-Rom drive I tried had the same fault (the tray didn't quite close far enough to raise the laser assembly) or the power supply is buggered, which seems more likely because all the drives worked fine before.
I got goosebumps looking at that 3DFX splash screen... man what a time that was! The impact it had on gaming was incredible. one of my friends was the first to buy one.. and we all followed :).. doing all kinds of chores, to earn enough money to buy one.
At least back then video cards were in stock
No cypto currency then
I guess that wasn't the case with the Geforce 256 DDR. They were hard to find apparently.
No they were not in stock, i wanted a 3Dfx Monster for Christmas and my Dad put a S3 Trio 64 UV+ (2MB ...2D card, practically the same as the Chip in this video, but as graphics card) under the Tree, because "the Monster was SOLD OUT EVERYWHERE ...said the PC shop guy and this is just as good he said".
Christmas was fucking ruined for me and i grinned and played along for the afternoon to not ruin the afternoon for my parrents too...
...so don't tell me they were in stock! They were NOT!
I had my Dad return and change it to a Diamond Viper V330 (4MB, Direct3D, nVidia Riva128 chip).
Jedi Knight 1 with texture filtering was something else, even my dad understood after seeing it in action, with and without Direct3D enabled.
Amen to that
You can get an RTX 20 series card for rather cheap don't see why you are worried about stock
The hardware was evolving sooo fast back then. Your PC was pretty much outdated by the time you build the thing.
I feel like this era turned a lot of folks towards consoles. Not only did 3D acceleration overpromise and underdeliver, but it was also confusing for buyers. Just a shitshow all round.
The effort to make to run low resolution movies and clips on a PC, while movies nowadays run on every hardware.
@@PJBonoVox: I wouldn't say it underdelivered,. It was a very confusing and fast moving market though. You could end up spending way too much on a PC that would be pretty much obsolete a year later. But the PC was miles ahead of anything the consoles could deliver. It was only around the time of the PS3 and XBOX 360 that that gap would shrink significantly.
"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 paper weight." - Weird Al (1999)
Same as now really for the cutting edge stuff. Although I’m glad it’s slowed down a bit
Uhh 1996 I remember well, I had a Matrox Millennium card and a Voodoo card and felt like top of the world for like 6 months...
Something something, being on the bleeding edge and you will get cut and bleed... :D Still to have the BDE of the best at the time was what pumped up the ego among friends. Just like all hobbies at the time, there were no limit crazies would not spend and no limit of the number of places happy to remove you from your hard-earned cash for not much of a noticeable difference.
I actually had that exact combination at some point, not when it came out due to cost but I had the diamond monster voodoo 1 along with the ati rage 2 and a k6-200 and an awe32, absolutely loved that combo!
Sunaku kingu!!!!
Hah fancy finding you commenting here Winston! I’m really enjoying Worthless Whips and just wanted to say thanks!
Watching your old videos cruising around Taiwan with Laowhy86 brings back amazing memories I have of exploring the east coast of Taiwan on a motorcycle/scooter in 2010/2011! I Still have fond memories of hiking across collapsing bridges in the Toroko Gorge area and finding a lone farmer living deep in the mountains cut off by earthquake damage. A real amazing experience! Can’t wait to go back! Do you happen to have any recommendations next time I visit?
Woah! Did not expect to find you here!
I had the Compaq Presario with the JBL speakers on the side - absolutely beautiful machine that clocked a LOT of Photoshop5 hours & a bit of Quake - Back in Johannesburg around 2000
its Winston haha
Ah yes those beefy Compaq thumbscrews. About 15 years ago when I was working in IT I was retiring a fleet of old office PCs that were all high end Compaqs. Those knurled thumb screws were the most impressive part of the case by far. I liberated as many as I could find to use in my own cases. They had some substantial heft to them and could be used to fend off a robber if you chucked a few of them hard enough. They were nice and wide making them a joy to use compared to the cheap tiny thumb screws just coming available at the time. I still use a set of them on my current tower and suspect I will pass them down to my grandchildren. Heirloom thumbscrews. They don't make em like that anymore.
Hah love that, Heirloom thumbscrews! Makes me think what'll happen to my stuff when I kick the bucket lol, crazy how devices so powerful are tossed on the scrapheap whilst simple things such as watches and vases keep rising in price.
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 That's the price of the artisans touch.
@Blackstone You never really leave it.
*"...could be used to fend off a robber if you chucked a few of them hard enough."*
Haaa! That made me chuckle loudly!
Oh yes as much as I loathe these PC's those thumbscrews were badass! I need to go check and see if I can find the ones I've been saving all these years.
Minor nitpicky correction: ESS AudioDrive was made by ESS Technologies (who are still around today.) Ensoniq was a different company, bought by Creative Labs and killed EA style like most things Creative bought.
I had an ESS audiodrive back then - TSR for soundblaster support if I remember correctly but I didn't have any issues with it
Ensoniq made amazing hardware. Love my SQ80 and ASR10.
Yeah and ESS audio cards are some of the best non soundblaster kit out there IMO. Good SB compatibility on most of them and for the later chips great windows support as well. Not had an issue one hardly out of mine on my 98SE machine, which is good it being a laptop and me not being able to find the dock that would allow me to use a different sound card.
@@JohnnyWednesday ESS chipsets appear to emulate Sound Blaster Pro just fine without any TSR. At least on anything I've tested on.
@@Arc.hitectureMusic It is a good SQ80
Carmageddon with the 3dfx Glide drivers and running in hires was my summer of 96. Even got the real blood patch too 😁
I remember back in the late 90's each video card literally had different kind of render look. My friend's PC had that softer look of OpenGL while mine was rocking the Glide API with Voodoo Banshee with sharper look to the texture. It was such a special time in PC gaming which we completely lost in time.
The Presario line was Compaq's home line, so someone would have purchased that for the home. The Deskpro was the business line. All in all, not a bad stock machine with the ESS sound and Trio64 video. The Matrox Millennium was NOT a full blown 3D accelerator. The reality is nobody was buying 3D accelerators before the 3dfx voodoo came out and GLide accelerated games showed up. Most all the pre-D3D cards showed up late 1996 or in 1997.
In hindsight, buying a machine in early 96 was pretty lousy timing. You had 3D accelerators and the Intel MMX chips showing up later that year. 1997 would bring more great things like AGP, the Pentium II, SDRAM, and USB ports that might actually work.
I missed out on all the fun at the time. Went from my 486 DX2 (ultimately upgrade to DX 4) in 93 to Pentium II in 98 (with Voodoo 3 of course.. maybe it was Voodoo 2? man that was a long time ago).
Ya the PreSorryYo was just just a blue screen of deaths disaster. But that Deskpro with 50 pin scsi onboard was pretty good and fast.
@Anonymous Coward 86 did you have the proprietary keyboard with speaker on it?
Made my day just rocking out with Joe Satriani's Surfing with the Alien cool track to test with.
The Satch rocks as always
Here to make the same comment.
I died at "While despite this thing looks like it's made to create spreadsheets and me looking like your dads accountant"
I had a mate who bought the Matrox Millennium new. And yes, he felt very ripped off, especially when he saw what another friend's 3DFx card was doing.
The sound difference was night and day. That Soundblaster sounds amazing.
There’s always something about the classic SB16 midi sound that I just love. The AWE sounds pretty nice and is generally an improvement but the classic sound blaster sound invokes a specific bit of nostalgia in me
I’ve never really been a fan of OPL2. OPL3 can sound pretty good, but I’ve never really tried ESS’s FM engine before. It’s actually kinda nice! That patch set has a nice smooth sound that reminds me a little of the Roland LA synth platform.
@@nickwallette6201 The ESS FM Synth ("ESFM") is widely considered one of the best OPL3 clones out there. :) And I gotta say, some ESFM cards can definitely give true OPL3-based solutions a run for their money.
Oh, if only MT-32s/LAPC-I hadn't cost an arm and a leg though...
At the time AWE 32 (or64?) was too expensive for me. And I did not like the advertising. They used a small crying baby for illustrate what other brands can do and a big crying baby what they can do. However I would hate my PC to sound like crying babies...
AWE just sounds wrong. I think you need one of the Roland external boxes to experience general MIDI. But I'm happy with my original SB Pro 2. SB16 is also OK but you need to put some real research to get one that sounds authentic in FM.
@@vladimirrodionov5391 Just swap the sound fonts with a file called Scc1t2.sf2 which is online. The later SBpro, SB16, SB32, and SB64 all had a single OPL3 Yamaha on them you could use. The problem is finding music actually made for FM synth and not some cheap midi preset imitation like windows did. In that regard Japan did better with their PC98 line, and of course the 8 bit consoles that use it. Some dos games like Dune had proper fm synth music. As for Roland, yes the isa mpu-401 and an SC-55 module, OR the Scc1 which was the same thing in ISA form factor (like the lapc-1 was for the mt32).
That Compaq was really built at the high point of their quality. It was downhill after the mid 90's and off a cliff after HP bought them. I'd love to have that machine!
I dunno, late 90s they still had some really nice cases. I have a deskpro 6000 series case that looks really nice, is built like a tank and has that nifty tool-less drivebay assembly in it.
@@GreatGodSajuuk HP bought Compaq in 2002, and for all intents and purposes after that, they were extremely poorly built commodity PC.
The late 90's machines weren't terrible, but you could certainly tell that they did not have the same build quality as the early 90's machines.
Compaq had moved it chassis production to Shenzhen in 1996 and it really shows in their build similarity to commodity white box PC's.
That being said, I have one of those Deskpro machines. The switchable Drive bay is neat, but the case is flimsier and far more likely to cut you than the heavier machines of the then not so recent past
@@GreatGodSajuuk "Tool-less drivebay"
*_Hard Pass._* If I can't screw the drive into place, I don't trust the bay.
Cool video!!! I still remember my 486 CPU then after some time I was trying to save up 200+ dollars to buy a 3DFX Diamond monster card with a sound blaster 16. Playing Doom on a sound blaster 16 and not on a PC speaker? GODLY :D Sweet memories. Thank you!
Not accelerated: 3-5 fps
Accelerated: 5-10 fps
Nvidia: Twice the performance! ;-)
Stock pc left: micro stutter
@@retroftw there was no nvidia back in 96. or at least not in the gaming business :)
@@NexXxus86 it was more a reference to the Nvidia RTX 3080 launch where they claimed 2x performance....but after reviews came clarified it was only on a couple of games like Quake2 RTX version :-)
maybe should have used an appropriate resolution ...
I remember, Christmas time, i had my first PC, i did my homework and read all the magazines and the 3Dfx Monster was the card to get.
My Dad put a S3 Trio 64UV+ under the tree instead... "the guy at the shop said the 3Dfx cards were all sold out everywhere, he said this is just as good" .... it ran exactly as shit as whatever i had in my PC before.
I grinned and pretended it was fine for the afternoon, at least he tried, no reason to ruin the afternoon over it for him and my mom, but for me it sucked of course.
After testing it with F22 Lightning II and not seeing a difference i went back to the magazines, looked for alternatives and ended up deciding on the Diamond Viper V330... unlike the 3D monster it did not need a 2D card but it didn't support 3Dfx Glide it was still a very good Direct3D card.
It was 400 DM at the time (~200€) and my dad complained about how expensive it was but he got it anyway...
The Viper V330 came with a Demo version of Star Wars Jedi Knight (1). When i showed him the better framerate, resolution and most of all texture filtering on Jedi Knight he understood why i wanted it so badly, it was a night and day difference. ...i also ended up buying Jedi Knight of course.
I still to this day CRINGE every time i see a S3 Trio chip or card. I soooo hate these things.
I eventually got a Voodoo 3 2000 so i still managed to get my 3Dfx Glide gaming in while i was growing up... but i don't think it was the next year already.
I bought the Aldi PII 350 with a Riva 128 ZX on board in '98. And Unreal looked so much worse than on a friends Voodoo Banshee, that I ended up getting a Voodoo 2. But the Viper totally looked like a great card in '97.
The 486 I had before that never got a 3D accelerator. It probably would have been a waste of money anyway for a 486.
And the same Voodoo 2 is currently working in my Pentium 166 machine, next to an S3 Trio, by the way. ;) They are not bad cards.
I feel your pain. I built and sold many S3 equipped PCs then and the performance was so lackluster. The Voodoo 3 2000 was the first low cost high performance all in one card and it was a game changer.
You would have been equally or even more disappointed if you were expecting any visual difference to F-22 Lightning II if you _had_ got the 3Dfx card. The flight sim didn't make use of any 3D API until F-22 Lightning III (Glide). The biggest differences to F-22 L2 were in the audio. I'd played the game for 5 months solid on an SB-16 OPL3 then received a PC upgrade to an AWE 64. Unbeknownst to me, I was expecting the same sound quality but then couldn't believe what I was hearing on that first startup of the main menu title track using the AWE 32 Native configuration. I still remember it to this day and from this learned about MIDI.
Cool stories! I had a Gateway 2000 Pentium 2 PC with an STB Velocity 128 and a Voodoo2 back in January 2000. I had no idea what those cards were; only that the 3dfx was a big deal and just for games, while the other one for everything else. I got the PC used from a friend, since he got a new Gateway with a Voodoo3. In December 2000 I got a GeForce2 MX after finding out about Nvidia. That thing made Rayman 2 look so nice!
That first story up there reminds me of what Laptop brands are doing these days, there are products being put into the market that barely classify as "laptops" anymore, with their crappy Celeron processors and such, these things will barely allow you to watch a RUclips video or opening the Facebook page without crapping itself all over. Some stores charge for these the same value as some others charge for a proper beefy 5-core laptop with a proper graphics card, much more than just usable. I can only imagine how many kids out there or even adults are being tricked into getting these things only to find out at home that they can't do anything, pretty much just a piece of plastic that costed you 400 bucks at some stores. That should be illegal.
I was in the same boat with exactly the same Matrox Millennium, but i was quick and the shop accepted to change it for a Mystique 220, and... i was in about the same boat again till i bought the Voodoo.
For what I remember from that time the Matrox cards were excellent for graphical image quality but NOT for games. I had a 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee.
I still miss my SoundBlaster AWE64.
I really like the Soundblaster AWE 64 too. I have quite a few of those cards in several vintage PC's.
I have one Soundblaster AWE 64 Gold card as well in one of them. However they were released in November 1996 so they are valid as end of that year.
My choice for graphics cards for 1996 authenticity is either a Orchid Righteous 3D (3Dfx Voodoo 1) with the clicking relays or the Diamond Monster 3D (3Dfx Voodoo 1) 3D accelerator cards paired with either Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (Virge 325) or Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro(Virge DX) graphics cards.
Preferably 4MB versions of the Stealth. The Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 had pins on them for a Diamond MVP1100 S3 Scenic MX/2 MPEG decoder board which was great for playing MPEG videos on pre MMX Pentium and 486 PCI slot systems.The Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro lacked these pins but had the faster DX Virge chip which was capable of 3D accelerating a couple of early titles better than the 325 chip version.
The 3Dfx Voodoo 1 cards are also valid for end of the 1996 year 3D accelerator cards as the Orchid Righteous was also released in November 1996.
The reason why I choose the S3 Virge cards is their high compatibility with DOS games regardless of their lackluster performance with 3D accelerated games and this is crucial with the S3 vbe driver s3vbe318.zip
which gives absolutely outstandingly high frame rates for build engine games like Duke Nukem 3D (big game for 1996),Shadow Warrior,Blood (perhaps the best series of the build games),redneck rampage etc.
To note the S3 Virge cards with that 3K TSR have fluid game play in Build Engine type games even outperforming the high end expensive Tseng Labs ET6000 series 128 bit graphics cards.
The 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee was a good 1998 2D/3D card which evolved into the Voodoo 3 graphics card.
It had good DOS compatibility.
Yes, the SoundBlaster cards were and still are fantastic. My current build is the first one that doesn't feature a card from them ever since they came out. Today's mid-range motherboards actually have very good built-in sound cards finally. I was tempted to put a good ole SB card in anyway for old time's sake, but decided not to crowd my video card (oops, showing my age there, I mean graphics card :) ).
Gigabyte boards with built in Realtek chip are a shambles, you should hear the noise i get coming through my jacks on a Aurus B450 elite...
I remember always being yelled at by family members when I removed the side panel of my pc...."you are not supposed to take that off!" ..."you will break something!"
There used to be a tear/tamper sticker on some machines that would void the warranty as soon as you opened it!
@@TheNiktron Like the C64, execept they put it under the split in the case for some stupid reason
I sure wish my dad's accountant was as entertaining and professional as you.
My dad's accountant was definitely entertaining! A very proper elderly gentleman who'd occasionally surprise everyone by making comments like "If Bill Gates ever comes to Vienna, I'll buy the largest and most rancid cake I can find in the entire city and slam it into his face!". His office had features like a mechanical door opener (some 20 metres or so of steel rope on pulleys that let you open the door without getting up), stairs into nowhere (weird late-1800s architecture, probably just for symmetry), inlaid parquet floors in shocking disrepair and a display case of vintage computer equipment, including 8" floppy discs. The place looked like that in the mid-90s and it hadn't changed much the last time I was there in 2017 or early 2018. I suspect as long as the founder's son runs it, it won't change a whole lot, which could be another 40 years or so.
So much nostalgia. My first PC was some Dell 486/25 in 1992. It was quite a step up from my C64 that I was still using. I think everyone who had a computer before 1996 knew how big of a change 3Dfx would bring to not only PC gaming, but even consoles too.
Great cosy video. This was like seeing my own PC experience from 96. Awe64 (Gold), Matrox Millennium and Diamond Monster 3Dfx. Great times, but you needed a new card every 12 months to keep up! :D
Well i get My first game PC november 1996. And i pick just right components. Intel Pentium 133mhz @200mhz, S3Trio64v + Diamond monster 3dfx voodoo. Happy days 😊
I still had My Amiga 1200 up to 2001, forget Pc Amiga is the master race
I'd guess playing Doom wasn't part of that "master race" gaming experience.
@@peshozmiata The amiga did get Doom and Quake and wipeout 2097 ? But you are right the PC was killing the amiga by then ( 1995 ) I only said amiga master race as a joke I know we have a love for amiga and retro games all the best m8
Funny thing is, I kept my accelerated Amiga (still have it in fact) and didn't actually buy a PC until about 2004 (I think). From '98 I did most of my playing of games on a Playstation... didn't honestly miss much at the time, but I admit I am rather fond of GOG now so I can go back and see what I DID miss...
@@ratspike8017 That seems to be a common thing i've noticed - people who were Amiga powerusers often stuck around with them for an unusually long time until the bitter end. They never sold them in my country so i find them interesting, but the hardware is so expensive that they've been hard to get into.
@@ratspike8017 I did exactly the same thing. Kept my loaded out A1200 until early 2000's, but had a playstation for gaming. :-)
Your thumbnail... That exact tower was in my living room as a kid. I also played NASCAR games. I had to use my keyboard or a joystick because my parents couldn't afford a sidewinder wheel. This video is such a throwback.
Amazing video, and took me back to 1996!
I spent my entire savings my grandparents had put in a bank account for me in 1998 and spent £2k on my first computer. A Pentium MMX 200, 14 inch CRT and Aiwa TS-C020 2.1 speakers, I still take those speakers to LAN parties with me today, they don't make them like they used to!
I remember playing with all those settings. I couldn't afford the AWE64 but did have the AWE32 and splashed out on an Orchid Righteous 3D FX card so we could play Mech Warrior 3D and Big Read Racing along with all the other typical games like, Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D etc.
Every LAN party we spent the first two hours trying to get the IPX network working with BNC network connectors, those were the days!
22 years on and my pals and I have family's etc but we still try and have a LAN party at least once a year, just because you can't beat that atmosphere of drinking, eating junk food and playing games until the wee hours in the same room together.
Thanks for the video, this took me back!
I owed that exact same card and was left wondering the same thing, "is this thing even on?" .. I loved the 2D image quality though.
The way that HDD sped up when the PC was first turned on, sounded like MOTHER from Alien.
That is why we love the janky retro SciFi tech in Aliens on the Nostromo and do not like the modern Touchscreens and Hologram BS in the Prometheus PREQUEL.
@@ZeroB4NG you make a good point...
What's the story, Mother?
I watched this 3 years ago- and again just now- the value of these videos is their quality! And yes, I had that *exact combo*- Matrox Millenium and Voodoo1 card. Ahhh the nostalgia.
This brings back so many memories... my how the years have flown by... great video, thanks for doing this!
I really miss my Aureal Vortex sound card from that era. It was a thing of beauty and the sound quality was unbelievably good for the time. The A3D bee demo was mind blowing.
Still haven't forgiven Creative for buying them and shutting it down.
I was always disappointed that they went out of business right around Windows 2000 time and got either no drivers or barely working drivers for it.
Hey amazing! I'm just ending my long quest to make my childhood beast (94-95') iDX4 100 w/write back, 850 mo Seagate hdd, ATI mach64 sbpro16 and other, all in nice and clean tower with speed digit, near pristine condition. Nice build and sweet memories, thanks a lot and take care
The sound upgrade is far and away the more impressive one here. Yes, it's nice to do away with dithering, but that Sound Blaster sound card makes a massive difference in sound quality. I could tell which one you were playing for us with my eyes closed.
I must say I do love the presentation of you're videos.
I had the Mystique around that time, and 3DFX Voodoo. I always felt the Matrox cards weren't as good as expected. The AWE32 is better for DOS support btw, but the AWE64 does a great job in 95% of cases. The plug and play works against some compatibility in that you need DOS drivers which you dont need with the AWE32 (meaning less conventional RAM avail). I keep meaning to replace my AWE64 with an AWE32.
Same setup as me, the marketing for matrox was amazing but the cards were underwhelming
Me also, as much as i loved AWE64 i hated it cause of the low quality build. It had noticeable background noise . I just remembered i still have that card in storage lol.
Really enjoyed this, I remember building PC's for Architects that wanted the Matrox cards for use with CAD work, and also the 1st gen 3D Cards that complimented the 2D cards, great stuff! I had the Matrox for 'testing' for gaming and was not impressed and moved to the Orchid Righteous...
One of the defining moments of my childhood: getting a free 3dfx card from the computer shop I did work experience at... probably 5 years after it was released... plugging it in and starting up Microsoft Hellbender and being absolutely floored by how smooth and beautiful it looked.
Brilliant, thank you for your hard work and the side by side comparison.
Around the turn of the millenium computers advanced so damn fast. I remember getting my first PC around.. 2001? It was worthless barely a year later!
This is the time of peak Moore law effects. At 2002-ish my dad got ECS i-buddie desknote with Pentium 4. Used till 2008/9 when it's dead. If that laptop still alive, it won't be able to run windows 10. In 2009, my dad built a PC with e7500 and 2gb of RAM, originally running Windows XP. This one might be able to run Windows 10 but with some hiccups
Nice avatar.
@@bitelaserkhalif 2 Gigs are going to be quite a pain in Win10. Especially if the pagefile isnt on an SSD.
@@DeadNoob451 it has been upgraded since, to 4gb q9400 and windows 7 32 bit. Another pc using that previous components got e7500 and 4gb of RAM with windows 10. The latter is OC to 3ghz and used for emulators
The first release of windows XP recommended 128gb of ram. By the third service pack you should have needed at least 1GB
The separate ISA slot on the motherboard side is a special throne for a Gravis ultrasound. Can't have that sitting among all the common cards now can we?
I had a compaq from 1997, played quake and chuck jeager on it, those times are long gone now. Well done, your thorough and well spoken.
My first card was a PowerVR. Ultim@te race was impressive on it. I got a 3DFX Voodoo card not long after for Quake
That's a beautiful NLX Form Factor system!
That was something that was designed to replace the LPX Form factor with the big Riser in the middle or so of the Board.
I think there might even have been some really rare NLX Retail Boards like the ASUS MES-N...
But its unlikely the Board can be relpaced though.
Thanks. I have one of those LPX boards with riser. It's a 486DX2 with PCI, ISA and VLB, but you can only use VLB OR ISA due to the riser. I have seen many similar boards, but I never knew how that standard was called.
I loved the Diamond accelerator card from back in the day, which plugged into a PCI slot and had a piggy-back cable that ran the VGA connection to it and then had another VGA port for the monitor to connect to. The performance increase was great, and made a world of a difference, but the best video upgrade in my opinion from that general era was the Voodoo AGP video card. I have very fond memories of both of these!
Is that the Diamond monster 3D you're talking of here? :)
Great experience watching this video, thanks, sure brings back memories from the early 3D video card selection. Went for the Matrox Mystique 2MB for my first PC (a Pentium 166) in January '97. Upgraded to a Voodoo Banshee in May of '99. Later around 2001 I purchased two second hand Voodoo2s for SLI (still got them). I think the decision to savor the Voodoo2s and also pick up an AWE64 might of been the moment I started on the road to retro appreciation.
Another great video Neil, brought back a lot of mid-nineties memories... Really enjoy all your content on here and on the podcast too.
Wow, seeing NASCAR racing took me back! I remember blowing up my soundcard's game port whilst trying to homebrew a steering wheel and pedals for that game! Also I think the AWE 32 (I didn't have a 64) made the most difference over OPL3 on the TIE figher intro music. Thanks for the video, took me back!
96... I was still using my AWE32, I upgraded several times my Pentium 90 to various flavors of Cyrix 6x86. 3d acceleration wasn't a thing until I got my Verite 1000, later I purchased a VooDoo 1. These 2 accompanied me and my shiny Pentium Pro 200 until PII 300 with TNT2 and Voodoo2 days. I'm not sure how I managed these expenses... Zero social life maybe. 😂
That case is extremely ahead of its time. Throw in places for two 420 or 360 rads and a bottom rad and tempered glass panels on both sides with a distroplate as the divider and you’d have the perfect watercooling case. Mesh on front, bottom and back.
trip down memory lane... so much "i remember those" :-)
I just remember those times when the 3DFX logo would appear on starting a game and you knew your 3D pride and joy was being utilised, super cool times! I then remember hating the new 3DFX logo that came in with the Voodoo 3 cards and me wanting the games to start with the original logo lol
3dfx was a good (open) brand, it was sad to see it go. I remember some arcade games also showed their logo. In Linux you could use a voodoo2 standalone, i guess someone was too lazy to make a driver for 2d use in windows or some other marketing reason.
I remember putting in an ISA soundblaster to a pentium at the time and there was a definate performance boost as the onboard sound was leaching system resources and processing while the ISA soundblaster was doing everything itself on the card
Yes, most on board audio is software driven so it just offloads the work to the CPU where as dedicated cards do all the work. This is still true to this day and why I still use my SB Live 5.1 Gold cards. This is also true for onboard ethernet, add on Ethernet cards perform better and take less system resources, that is of course if you get cards that have a on board controller. Some cheap cards will be controller-less and they make the CPU do all the work.
27:25 I still have to smile when I see that 3dfx Logo popup. It was always a bit of luck back then, if the game would start with 3dfx acceleration or not. But when you saw that logo, you knew you were about to see a completely different game. I remember my first game with 3dfx, I know it was FIFA, I don't know which year though, must be 98 or 99. But the game started with that logo for the first time and suddenly there were little snowflakes flying on the pitch. It looked so amazing. I've never seen such a difference in graphics. It was a Voodoo 1 with a loop cable connected to my S3 Virge. It still have those cards on my shelf, reminding me of the good old days of gaming.
I got my first PC in January 1996 (with a 2MB "Cirrus Logic" SVGA card). I went directly to a Diamond Monster 3D in January 1997. An absolute classic.
Regarding the early 3D cards - I remember when I was working on A-10 2: Silent Thunder at Dynamix, several of the early 3D graphics card developers were really keen to get us to support their hardware. They gave us demos, they would show us benchmarks, etc. Every single time we would look at their tech and come to the conclusion that our software renderer actually out performed their hardware in any kind of real world game. It wasn't until some bright bulb at Sierra did a deal to have Sierra branded Rendition (I think it was Rendition) cards that we even considered supporting any of the hardware options. And then there was Obsidian...
Good old Quantum3D, the only maker I know that did SLI on a single board. I used to use their professional cards, the AALChemy series that had 8, 16, or 32 VSA100 chips on them.
Thank you so much I played hours and hours of Silent Thunder when I was a kid! I still have a copy in my retro games collection and I still fire up the game every so often.
@@TheRetarp That is awesome! Glad to hear it.
Wonderful video Neil! :) really enjoying it so far. I had an S3 Verge back in the day - the only game I had that supported it was Jedi Knight but I remember comparing it to software mode - and wishing I had a 3DFX :P
We had a Compaq Presario CDS924 growing up as a kid, I would love to have one again.... Tabworks was great back in the day
Thanks for the great vid 👍 my 1st pc was a Olivetti Xana MT-166X p2 with win95plus,
I maxed it with a voodoo 5 and 512mb ram, upgraded to win98, still got it in the attic 😀
Mine was an Olivetti M24 with an 8086 and 256k RAM. Maxed out today with a NEC V30, 8087, 640k RAM and XT-IDE flash card. :)
Excellent nostalgic video , really enjoyed that and I'm glad you touched on the tough choice dilemma we all had at the time , I did indeed go with a 3D Blaster Pci and I was very happy with it , it was brilliant in VQuake and Tombraider (both with AA support as well) and did support Direct3D properly which the Mystique , Virge etc did not but it was a little on the slow side , I did give in and bought a Orchid Righteous 3D in early 97 and left the Verite in there along side it , so the best of both worlds , I had a Pentium 100 and overclocked it to 133 via an onboard jumper on the (S)Packard Bell PC I'd bought from PC World. Great memories , thanks for the trip back.
Oh and I also say Matrox as "Maytrox" so you're not on your own , then again I did say Verite and Verwrite so that's not saying alot , lol ;)
What a great trip down gaming memory lane...thanks for this :)
Thank you for the video! You reminded me of the Creative Awe64 that I saved for and bought and really loved and enjoyed way back in the day. What is really cool is that around early 1993 or so, I drove from Topeka Kansas to Kansas City to visit Telectronics to buy the parts to build my very first PC. I saved up around $700 which I knew would be needed to get a CPU, Motherboard and Memory. It was raining that morning and I was all smiles for the entire 1 hour drive east toward Kansas City. To this day I still remember how overwhelmed I was with excitement and happiness. I bought a Pentium-66, a Motherboard I cannot remember and I think 8MB's of ram. It might have been 4MB's of ram. It's been 27 years so my memory is fuzzy. Even more exciting was that in Dec of 93, the same year, I logged into the internet for the very first time. This would have been using Windows 3.11, Trumpet Winsock and a Zoom modem, maybe 9600 baud? I don't remember exactly. The ISP was Databank out of Lawrence KS. Sorry, this story is all over the place but I just remembered that how I funded the purchase for the parts for my first PC was that I sold my Amiga 1200. And trust me, Amiga 1200 and Amiga software was VERY HARD to come by in Kansas. However, I did amass a very larger collection of legit non-pirated software that I ended up selling to a retired Topeka Police Officer, first name Frank, an older gentleman for around $2300 or $2700 dollars. Again, fuzzy on the details. Oh man, I have so many great stories I could share. BTW, I am 52 years old. In 93, I would have been 24 years old.
My first graphics card was a Matrox Mystique that came with an 'enhanced' version of Mech Warrior 2, Destruction Derby 2 and Scorched Earth. Unless it was already discounted for being a bit useless, I suppose my parents got ripped off.😭 It was indeed still used for the 3D accellerator card we got a year or so later though, with the worrying magnetic click every time it activated.
I loved the sound of that switch to the 3DFX card! I can't remember, did it have some sort of relay on board?
I had the same package! I think mine was only 2mb, but I remember having a TV tuner also (might have been a daughterboard). The improvement wasn't really perceptible, but the games were fun at least.
I had the Matrox Mystique with the Rainbow Runner capture add-on. It captured analogue video in MJPEG format, 320x256@25FPS. It dropped frames like crazy though.
Mine was an OEM card though, the games bundle wasn't available separately so I was stuck playing Destruction Derby 2 with software rendering, there was no patch!
Aaah Matrox, S3, Diamond and
their 3D 'decelerators' until 3dfx obliterated them all with the Voodoo 1 at the end of 1996 when I purchased one and was amazed by glquake and tomb raider
The Rendition Verite V1000 wasn't too far behind... It was the Voodoo2 the one that was leaps and bounds ahead more so if you could fork out for an SLI setup.
@@RetroTinkerer The Voodoo2 was a monster but the Voodoo1 was significantly faster than the Vérité.
Trident
I started playing with PCs in 1996. I started with a 286, then to a 386, and then to 486. Started on dos, then to Win95, through every version of windows to today. Feels like a long journey to this point, but mostly fun times. Great vid :)
Damn, what a trip down memory lane! I was working in EA tech support and had to troubleshoot all these components. Incompatible hardware drivers were such a headache! Thanks for this video.
4MB of video memory? That's insane! Who needs more anyways?
Today video cards have more cache than that :)
I had a P200 MMX, Matrox Millenium, 3Dfx and Descent II. AWE32 for ages and that had an IDE. Which I used.
That was the computer we had when i was a kid!
Loved the nostalgia. I never had money or time for a gaming rig, since I was raising a family of three teens in the 90s, but I did experience the sense of disappointment of upgrading the hardware and not seeing the kind of improvements that I expected. For example, the Soundblaster sound fonts never quite met my expectations - the idea was good, but the tech hadn't quite got there, yet.
Amazing video! So many memories with my first pentium 75 playing NASCAR
I thought I had a Millenium, up until you mentioned the Mystique, and that was the one I had (wouldn't have been able to afford two cards that close together). I got a Voodoo 1 when they came out though and my PC gaming world changed. It's all rather hazy now and I wish I could remember more about that time. I do remember watching the Unreal intro loop over and over, and playing Screamer2 to death. I just can't stop saying MAYtrox though.
It's crazy to see the resolutions we had to deal with back then.
320x240 (or 200) was very common up until the days of 3d acceleration. Even the famous Quake cpu 3d renderer uses it, up until about Half Life i think. To deal with twice that in 3d was unthinkable, because the cpu was taxed to do thinks it simply wasn't well suited for. Duke3d not being "true 3d" had a bit of a leeway in 640x480, but remember vga in that mode only had 16 colors, so you had to own some expensive thing like the Matrox... Back then they called "svga" just about anything beyond vga, and the (dos) games had to explicitly support the brand and model, until the early VESA modes became available, or the windows infestation.
On the other hand low res didn't look so bad on blurry crts as they do now with pixel perfect (but big) leds.
We were used to it, so it seemed impressive at the time. Just having full color VGA images was a massive upgrade from monochrome monitors showing us DOS or BASIC code.
I had a Matrox card back in the mid nineties and did exactly what you did, got a monster 3D! That setup served me well into the late nineties, frustrating, but fun times!
Oh yes, I did P1 166, Matrox Millenium, Turtle Beach Audio card (which I promtly returned) -Got SB AWE 32 ISA instead... 32 was probably the lenght of the card in cm. Got Voodoo1.. Then Voodoo 2.
"this is not a cleaning episode" *proceeds to show cleaning footage*
You would be sad if I didn't right?
That's exactly what we are here for! :D
@@RMCRetro you got me there
@@RMCRetro we would be sad. 1 is always sad, but also retrospective - 1t is the joy of the 5D cones
Dude knows his audience.
The Matrox Mistique was the first gfx card I had, spent a long time playing the enhanced version of MechWarrior 2 it came with :D
I had one of those with the video editing addon, it was great but so incompatible with games
Really loved this video! Definitely subscribing for more :D Reminds me so much of my very first computer which was a desktop Compaq running Windows Me
Awe must mean awesome! I loved making music with the sb cackewalk and fast tracker
"Let's listen to something more familiar" Niel says, after playing one of the most well-known jazz pieces ever recorded.
Let's Roooock!
@@RMCRetro the Duke Nukem 3D soundtrack is far more familiar on this channel I will admit!
I never actually played it. I had the first two games, but 3D was an aspiration at the time and I never got it. Star Wars: Dark Forces though 😀
Jazz.....nice.
Sod the 3090, this is the type of benchmarking i want to see.
You get a spatula
I still have the 3D accelerator card Matrox (MAY-trox) put out, the M3d. It worked with Jedi Knight 2, which was plenty for me at the time. I also still have a Millenium, a Mystique, and the AGP version of their Parhelia board.
I was still happy with my A4000 and got the CV64/3D for it in -96. Didn't get my first windows machine until 2002, I'm quite happy waiting that long, things were easier by then.
I just remember me on my first D3D Card. Matrox Mystique...ordered 2MB Version and get the 4MB Version. because an order error. i was the happiest 15 year old child in the world. :) edit: and my first game was moto racer! WOOHOOO... high fps in 640x480! ;D stunning
and like you, i used later the same card with my first voodoo1. get the glide update for screamer2 (in german bleifuss2) and the stunning begins from new. :)
The 90's were such a hodge podge (do people still say that) mess of different software, hardware, standards, companies and users that it's almost amazing to me that anyone would want to build a 'that era' pc. I worked in a PC store from 93-96, right when win95 hit the stage, and ati was starting to realize they could frustrate people by releasing non stop buggy drivers (which they still do to this day). Nothing worked with anything else, every driver broke something that worked previously, and every company wanted to 'pull a sony' and make new standards that they hoped they could license and sell. It honestly was a horrific time in the PC life cycle, one that really didn't improve until win98se came on scene. I would gather that's why it's hard to put together a legit 90's PC....because it's just hard to do! Cheers! :)
93 to 98 for me and yeah it was tough but very enjoyable
I remember the 90's PC upgrade bafoodle :) soundblaster cards, mpeg video acceleerators, radio and TV capture cards, x4 cdrom recorders, cpu overdrive, edo ram..don't think I ever screwed the side panel onto my PC case as there was a good chance something was gonna get swapped out soon. I think when DirectX and OpenGL became the standard things improved very much for gaming.
That's a really neat case design! It does look really clean and the easy access to both the motherboard and the slots/ide is a pretty cool idea. I would have been really happy with such a pc in 96.
Still have some old PC'c in my garage from 1994-1997 :)
I remember a story that an old buddy of mine told me of those days. He repaired computers. A customer of his called him very worried about having "broken the computer's cup holder". My friend was understandably puzzled and went down there, only to realize the customer had broken the CD ROM tray... because he thought it was a cup holder.
Yeah, that's how new those computers were back in the day.
Wow, that computer - even in its unexpanded form - would have cost an absolute fortune i 1996!
He mentioned the retail price from an Italian magazine. It was roundabouts 3000usd. And that's 3000 in 1996, so substantially more if adjusted for inflation.
@@granolatimes7185 it would be about $5000 today.
@@reffyfikserting thats why back in the day I came from an electronics background, I used to do repairs on the pc's power supply or MB repair such as caps swelling on the MB , and also worked on pc configs and network installs and cabling , I was paid a lot back then..
I still remember my add on Orchid Righteous 3D card and it's jumper cable to link it tto the VGA board.
when one thinks about design layout it's really clean and simple 10/10 your videos reviews and tutorials are excellent.
"wafers of silicon joy" these fine words warmed my heart.
Sounds like a 60's biscuit advert lol
I remember growing up "Trying" to make my aunts PC faster and deleted a bunch of files that bricked the system and we had to reinstall the OS. What files I deleted? I have no idea..but I did that a few different times..guess I never learned haha.
We've all been there 😊
My friends mom did the same. The HDD was so full that she couldn't save her WordPerfect file. Frustrated she fired up a file manager, can't remember which one but it was a TSR (terminate and stay resident) one so she didn't need to exit WP to use it. While swearing about her son and all the games he kept installing she went after everything she didn't recognize. One of the larger directories filled with unreadable crap was called DOS...
And so I was called in to reinstall the OS files, clean out all the old games and teach her what she shouldn't delete if the drive stared to fill up again. That last part had my friend a bit miffed when the next time she deleted not an old game but the one he'd just installed. (read: pirated)
Then there was another friend who's little brother needed diskettes for his save game files. Luckily there was an entire box of floppies that he could format and use. This was fine until someone deleted the wrong file or directory and they discovered that they no longer had the diskettes for DOS or Windows. Or rather they had the diskettes, but there were only game save files on them. His defense? Both the OS and windows was already installed so they didn't need those floppies anymore...
Having recently tried to set up Windows 98 on a VM, it's shocking how fragile that OS is. You install the wrong driver, or even the wrong app, or breathe wrong, and the system locks up and refuses to boot properly.
@@Nukle0n Windows prior to XP really didn't have much in the way of a safety net for the unwary.
@@blahorgaslisk7763 and the OS doesn't prevent you or an application from rendering the machine unusable.
the poin t where I went screaming around "OOOOH YEAHHH, THIOS!!!!!!".... was as you came up with the word 'MATROX' :-) :-) Well done, thanks for that nostalgia video!!!
My first ever PC which I built back in 97 was similar to this. IBM Cyrix PR200, 32MB RAM, Cyrus Logic VGA card and a SoundBlaster AWE32. I quickly added a Dimond Monster 3DFX after seeing screenshots in PC magazines at the time. Remember spending many happy days playing games such as Carmageddon and Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2 :)