How many times would you be forced to upgrade your PC in the retro era to keep up with new releases? Seems like every few years you’d be forced to start from scratch up until Windows XP where shit finally slowed down and got optimized
In the 90s: every 2 years
>>11518570Never. My emachine still runs all the hottest games.
You will never know zoomer fag. Now fuck off back to /v/
Nah, you rarely had to upgrade your PC unless you cared about having everything on highest settings, which very few people did.And even in the late 90s there was big backlog of games available that you could play until you upgrade. Cheap re-releases, compilations (no, Steam did not invent this stuff), and of course piracy meant there were always a lot to play even on your aging computer.Zoomer historians seem to think that whenever a new console or PC upgrade came out, everyone immediately trashed their old hardware and bought the shiny new thing on launch day but that was simply not the reality.
>>11518586It doesn’t help that even contemporary media of the time wanted consumers to think that upgrades needed to happen fast. Microsoft loved doing this with Windows releases. Pressuring people to upgrade even harder then today
If you got a high-end 286 in 1985 with 640k RAM and an EGA card, it was already outclassed the same year as the 386 brought RAM management over the 640k line.If you got yourself one of the mid-range 386's in 1987 with a VGA card and 1-2MB of RAM, you were pretty much set until the Pentium released. If you got one of the last 386's in 1989's, your system was outclassed by 1990. If you got yourself a decent Pentium in 1993 with 4MBs of RAM and a 2MB VGA card, you were set up until about the P2 in 1997. If you got a Pentium MMX in 1996, you were wishing you waited another year. If you got a 2ghz P4 in 2001 with a GeForce3 Ti500 or Radeon 8500 and 4GBs of RAM, you were pretty much set until games started demanding dual-core CPU's, or a 64-bit OS.If you got a 1.13GHz P3 with a VooDoo4 in 2000 instead, you had to overclock and still struggled to play the games of the 2000's.It varied a lot, but occasionally there would be a time when you could get a specific setup that would last for years. Other times, anything you bought would be obsolete in no time.
> 566MHz Intel celeron> 64MB RAM>15GB HDD> CDRW rewritable CD-ROM drive> ntel AGP Graphics card (intel made discrete graphics cards back then, you know)> 56K modem> USB and Game ports (no mention of the audio card)> Windows 98> America OnlineThe 'never obsolete' sticker is there, because E-machines were part of a upgrade deal, where you could upgrade to a newer E-machine as some sort of paid subscription service.
>>11518570i didn't upgrade. i played what i could on what my parents had. i assume it was the same for most kids at the time into 6th gen.
>>11518686The e-machine was designed to help destroy the music industry. Napster was a hot button topic for pirating music. The e-machine came with a CD-ROM burner. The good old days.
>>11518670most users weren't that bleeding edge. A good 386 setup in 1992 cost $2,000 in 1992 dollars. That's ~$4,400 today, enough to get a decent fursuit made, not that i would because i'm attractive and cybergoth is more my style
I remember less of an emphasis on how good your rig is than how fast your internet was but I didn't play competitive shit because I sucked at them. I mostly played shitty 2d mmos or low-demand 3d games, not that fast but not unbearingly slow either. I think the longest old PC we stuck with was the VAIO, almost a decade before it started making horrible noises.I don't think I'll ever understand people needing to upgrade every 2 years for a mere 3 fps improvement.
>>11518691It's purpose was to never go obsolete as to put the entire PC industry including themselves out of business once 8 billion units sold.
>>11518709>A good 386 setup in 1992 cost $2,000 in 1992 dollars.My first computer was a 486DX2 in 33/66MHz with the turbo button, 4MBs of RAM, 270MB Conner HDD, both sizes of floppy disk drives, a 4X CD-ROM drive, 2MB VGA card(probably a Cirrus Logic), SoundBlaster 2.0, and ReelMagic MPEG decoder card(bundled with Dragon's Lair and Return to Zork) and a 15 inch VGA monitor. That cost $2,000 in 1992.
>>11518745Maybe this is straying from Vidya discussion but internet was a big upgrade factor. Internet went mainstream in 1995 and Web 2.0 started as soon as 2001. Even if you had the best hardware you needed at least Windows 95 and Windows XP
>>11518764Playing with high-latency against a low-latency player feels fucking awful, it's why LAN centers and internet cafes got so popular. Internet speed is the only thing I didn't miss from the 90s.
>>11518761maybe my mom exaggerated the price or Compaq overcharged. or maybe that was with the Sound Blaster + modem ISA card and dot matrix printerthe PC itself was a xmas gift from dad who is now double divorced and married to a fatty who was a virgin until then
>>11518853>Compaq overchargedThis plus the printer. Those things were not cheap back then. $500+ in 1992 dollars. I got my system at a local no-name PC shop that built, configured all jumpers, BIOS settings, and installed DOS and drivers themselves. Name brand pre-builts like Compaq, Hewlett Packard, or IBM would have cost a lot more.
>>11518570growing up i had one of these running windows Me. it ran the games at the time perfectly fine, except for bluescreening at least once a day.
Up until 1995 it wasn't such a big issue. Most new games (apart from cool "multimedia" stuff) still could be played on 386 processors.The real rash started in 1997. I mean, in 1997 you could have P166, 16Mb with V1 and enjoy al new releases with no troubles. And then the very next year your PC turns into a pumpkin.
>>11518670For me it was Pentium 4 @ 3ghz, 1gb RAM and an Nvidia 6600GT. Got 3 years of solid gaming out of that home computer before going to Uni. Felt like longer though cause 3 years between ages 15-18 is like 6 years as an adult in your 30s lol
>>11518965hardware released after 2001 is not retro, zoomie
>>11518571It really depends how you upgraded. A 133mhz Pentium in 1996ish from our old 486 lasted us probably 2-3 years, with a RAM and 3D accelerator upgrade in between. If we'd had a higher powered processor it may have lasted longer. Essentially it's a relatively flat graph that rises steeply through the years once you get to the 00s, and it also depends if you were happy playing everything on 800x600 max with some lag. I was, but also we were too poor for a major upgrade until about 2002-3.
>>11518973Everything up to 7th Gen is considered retro here retard, so up until 2005/6. I am talking about PC hardware from 2003/4.
>>11518973Mods dictate that PC is a platform, and the PC platform came out in 1981. That's why you can make Crysis threads here, because they don't count the age of the components inside the platform it's running on, just the age of the platform itself and the software for it.It's a messy rule and causes nothing but problems.
>>11518670>4megs of RAM enough until '97>4GB of RAM in 2001retard
>never obsoleteHow did they do it, and why has nobody else been able to replicate it? Greed?
>>11518853Are you the same guy who has made like 5 posts in the last few days talking about his "cuck dad"
