A high-end PC from 1999 vs the sixth gen consoles

[Anonymous No.10888357]

>Pentium III 800MHz
>GeForce 256 DDR
>512MB SDR RAM
>20GB HDD
In terms of theoretical specs(eg. no OS overhead, games are optimised for the hardware) how good would this setup be compared to Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube/Xbox?

[Anonymous No.10888362]

It wouldn't play a single ps2 port as most of them required shader support.

[Anonymous No.10888363]

>>10888357
Fuckin sick mate.

[Anonymous No.10888364]

>>10888362
I thought that was GC and xbox

[Anonymous No.10888390]

>>10888364
PS2 dosen't have shaders but they were needed to partially re-create different effects made on it's unique architecture. Games like Silent Hill 3 required pixel shaders to run.

[Anonymous No.10888395]

That GPU is two and a half generations behind Xbox.

[Anonymous No.10888408]

>>10888357
I think 512 MB RAM was a bit too high for 1999. Unless I'm mistaken, a higher-end PC of the time would have 256.

[Anonymous No.10888427]

>>10888408
Yeah seems too high. In 1999 I had a Pentium 2 system with 128 MB then built a Athlon system with 256 MB in 2001.

[Anonymous No.10888429]

>>10888408
average would have been around 128, 512 was there but only for ultra-highend

[Anonymous No.10888446]

>>10888427
>>10888429
Yes, that's what I vaguely remember as well. At the time I had a series of unremarkable shitheaps bought on the cheap, each of whom died after about 2 years due to a combo of dodgy house wiring and mega-garbage PSUs. Can't really remember their specs exactly, but I partly recall the one I had in 2000 came with 128 MB RAM, and the one I replaced it with in 2002 had 256.

[Anonymous No.10888487]

>>10888357
The GPU is easily the weak spot on that PC, or hell, any PC made with only parts from any given year before the 9700 Pro came around. That amount of RAM would've been absolutely obscene for the time, and the CPU most likely still holds its own for a lot of games at least up to 2002 or so, but graphics during this period were advancing so goddamn quickly that they would render GPUs obsolete not even two years later. Even a super top-end PC from 2001 (the retro cutoff for hardware according to this board's rules) illustrates this. The very best GPUs at that time were the GeForce 3 Ti500 and the Radeon 8500, both of which are technically slightly inferior to the Xbox's GPU. Those cards would just barely be able to handle the AAA titles from 2004 at lower settings, whereas the best CPU at that time (the Athlon XP 1900+) would've lasted you quite a bit longer. Again, it wasn't until cards like the 9700 or 9800 Pro came around that you could get away with holding onto a GPU for 3 or 4 years and still be able to handle most games relatively well.

[Anonymous No.10888687]

>>10888408
>>10888427
>>10888429
>>10888446
picrel is from 1998

[Anonymous No.10888784]

>>10888357
That computer mouse doesn't look like it has a rubber ball. And it has a scrolling wheel.

You kids...

[Anonymous No.10888802]

>>10888784
optical mice first came out in the 80s, and scroll wheels in 1995

[Anonymous No.10888813]

>>10888802
>>10888784
April 19th, 1999

[Anonymous No.10888815]

>>10888784
1996

[Anonymous No.10888935]

>>10888357
I have a system with similar specs. Early-gen games up through 2003 or so like GTAIII, Max Payne, and Red Faction are fine but later-gen games like Halo 1 and GTA San Andreas were optimized for Pentium IV's and don't run well on a high-end system from 1999.

[Anonymous No.10888941]

>>10888935
It'll technically run Half-Life 2 but it runs like dogshit lol

[Anonymous No.10888967]

>numeric generation nonsense
kys

[Anonymous No.10888991]

>>10888967
Yeah it's really nonsensical to recognise blatant market trends and technological progress. You are absolutely correct that, there clearly was no market trend around 2000 for a new type of game console.

[Anonymous No.10889054]

>>10888357
>Pentium III 800MHz
a high end had a pentium 3 of 1.1 Ghz,the clock was unlocked as always so in the end you could get more speed by simply modifying the PC to cool it more (i miss using those altered radiators and huge fans on the PC to achieve 1.8 Ghz)

[Anonymous No.10889059]

>>10888427
by 1999 most boards had 3 slots for ram dim,ram was expensive so most people got what it could but the top ammount of ram was 768 MB back then,then came the hybrid boards that came with 4 slots 2 dimm and 2 ddr and the came the regular 2 slots normalization (leaving the 4 ram slots to high end PC)

[Anonymous No.10889268]

>>10888408
For an average machine... yes. For some systems with bank? No. I had two machines in 1999. I had two machines, one with 384MB ram and ABIT BP6 from 1999 that supported two processors and 768MB of RAM which I maxed - it cost about 800 bucks for the RAM alone at the time because they were price-gouging ram in the 90s. I loaded mine up with dual 500Mhz Celerons that costed like 30 bucks a piece.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6

So they definitely existed at the time.

[Anonymous No.10889274]

>>10889268
Sure you could buy a machine with loads of ram and dual CPUs but you wouldn't game on it since neither was supported by Windows 98
Windows 9x starts having issues at well under half a gigabyte of memory and doesn't support dual CPUs at all. Windows 2000 wasn't released until the very end of '99. And the vast majority of games don't support Windows NT4 at all, they just refuse to run on it because they're hardcoded to check if you've got 95/98.

[Anonymous No.10889275]

>>10889268
Also, I still have that board around - but I heard it was a notorious board for cap issues. Tech Tangents actually got his hands on one and recapped his on a video. It was super dupes with Win2K, especially for any apps that would lock up a processor - since it had two processors, you could actually recover from anything barring a bluescreen using task manager. And since most programs expected 1 CPU, most of one CPU went to maintaining the OS and the other mostly went to a main program.

Also, worth noting that Win2k basically had the smallest bang for buck memory footprint that was smaller than XPs and ran 99% of everything barring software that started rolling out maybe '08. I had to use Windows 2000 - OldCigarettes Windows 2000 XP API wrapper pack, to get Fallout 3 to run on Win2K back in 08. And... it ran, and actually with less problems than people were having with XP once you got the thing running, I even got better framerate than some people listed.

[Anonymous No.10889280]

>>10889274
>Sure you could buy a machine with loads of ram and dual CPUs but you wouldn't game on it since neither was supported by Windows 98
I 100% would and did. It was my main gaming box. You didn't need it to be supported by windows 98. 2K ran everything 98 did and then some (you could also load up NTVDM for older games etc...) And as I mentioned as well, there was also a wrapper for a small set of XP only shit (really mostly a few late 2000s installs were a bother.

>And the vast majority of games don't support Windows NT4 at all

Which is fine, since NT4 wasn't 2K. It's still a 1999 machine and a config I owned and used. I did not however bother to use r_smp in quake 3 though even though it technically supported it because that function was mostly shit. And yeah, technically Quake 3 came out with multiprocessor support in 1999.

[Anonymous No.10889304]

>>10889274
That being said - my first box with 384 originally ran Win98, until I swapped it over 2K because 2K was just a fucking rock and better better for that era of gaming. That being said - NTVDM wasn't a perfect option for DOS games and even when DOSBOX did come out - it was kinda shit for a long time (it still has issues today even including various forks, but it's way better than it used to be).

Honestly, if you want to play shit from windows 95-98, any modern machine will generally do you better for it. DOSBOX can load up dos games and supports ipx tunneling, there's software to literally run 16-bit shit directly (I can for example load up windows 3.1 games in their own window as if they were a native app) and anything 98 and above gets support from modern machines having crazy anti-aliasing and shit.

You do however lose out on audio mostly - since you lose all that turtle beach and creative EAX shit mostly. Though you can try to finagle some OpenAL or drivers for later creative cards and sort of pull shit off if you have that hardware still. Otherwise, modern shit kinda has poor support for old audio, and arguably somewhat jank support for modern audio for anything like HRTF which you'd want if you had stereo or especially headphones. Not having HRTF on headphones is fucking garbage as fuck and binaural audio should be a fucking standard alongside stereo and whatever the fuck "headphones" was trying to do, ain't that.

[Anonymous No.10889312]

>>10889268
Daym, that was some heavy-duty shit. Though you'd still have to buy a new video card once every 1.5 years, since they went out of fashion faster than the Harlem Shake.

As a tangent, I had an Abit mobo as well at some point. I had the AN7, one of the best mobos of the 32-bit era, with a Barton-core XP. That nVidia Soundstorm was amazing, possibly the best integrated soundchip in the world, until Asus poked and prodded Realtek to add hardware features to the ALC back in the late-10s.

[Anonymous No.10889317]

>>10889304
>HRTF
Fuck 'Creative', now and forever.

[Anonymous No.10889320]

>>10888941
>sidewinder
Fucking sidewinder

[Anonymous No.10889325]

>>10889312
Eh, I did run through some video cards, but they were also cheaper. I think I was replacing them every 2-3 years. Fuck I traded up a Rage Fury 128 for a GeForce 256 right quick for the framerate. I also had a TNT2... all three of those were from the same year even... so... but what I did do is buy more parts and more computers so I ended up having four boxes on a LAN with a switch going to the router and shit and I'd pick friends up from school and bring them over and play Quake and shit.

>>10889317
Yes, but noting HRTF is generalized and good - CMSS-3D is creatives... and that's still good to have over nothing, it's actually kind of good sounding. But also, yes fuck Creative with a stick. They're a scummy ass company - and probably one of the major reasons why PC Audio has been kind of dick.

Also, all that being said - actually nevermind about that too since modern hardware can pull that with PCEm and that shit is only gonna get better to run. So, yeah - modern hardware is really the way to go for playing every generation of PC game at this point really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQpXH6sDv6g

[Anonymous No.10889526]

>>10888813
i want the old microsoft back

[Anonymous No.10889561]

>>10888395
>>10888487
PCs back then had worse graphics than consoles, but the framerate was much higher thanks to the powerful CPU, and the cards had more VRAM which meant higher resolutions were possible.

GPUs were the cheapest part of the whole PC, unlike they are today. Sub $100 GPUs were considered powerful enough.

[Anonymous No.10889628]

>>10889561
Today you can get a lot 1080 for $100 and it's good enough. Fuck, I still have a 1050 and I played CP2077, BG3, etc.

[Anonymous No.10889634]

>>10889561
PC CPU/GPUs of the time did everything via brute-force computing. While this was inefficient, it allowed to create expansive (if primitive) visuals. Even pure software-mode 3D games looked (and often ran) better on PC compared to consoles. Ex. Descent 1 on PC versus Playstation. Terminal Velocity on Playstation would've been headache-inducing with the amount of texture pop/wobble.

[Anonymous No.10889640]

>>10889628
>1080
>8 year old card with dead warranty and probably ex mining on top of it
Fuck that shit. The only $100 AAA gaming capable card with no dead warranty today is Intel A380 6GB and it's only that cheap because it has a shit driver.

[Anonymous No.10889741]

>>10889640
Whatever, point is you can easily get away with a $100 card for gaming nowadays, which if you take into account inflation, is actually cheaper than back in the day.

[Anonymous No.10890263]

>>10889741
Of course e-waste is cheap.

[Anonymous No.10890282]

>>10889640
For $100 I don't give a shit about ex-mining.

[Anonymous No.10891170]

>>10889561
not really since the old OS worked different as they work today.
before
>start game
>game starts,OS instruction to turn off everything off from the OS and secondary stuff,raw access to hardware
>start game
>game has access to all the power of the PC
now
>Start game
>Game runs
>Send instruction to the OS to give priority to game
>Game start
>Game starts api calls to different OS related services.
>Game doesn't have full access to raw hardware.
for example any GPU from 1998 was more powerfull then ps2 due to that,sadly most ps2 fans claim is more powerfull because they try to hide the emotion engine under a mistery black box when in reality it was a simple GPU of 8MB quite underpowered compared to even the dreamcast one,add to that they have only used emulators so they don't know the reality of ps2 shitty emulation code.
Seeing the consoles from that generation alone in specs it would be
>1st Gamecube
>2nd Xbox
>3rd Dreamcast
>Last ps2 with shitty similar architecture to the saturn which made it harder to crack for emulation.

[Anonymous No.10891204]

>>10888687
Very much doubt that was in 1999. The setup we got for 98 Christmas had 32MB RAM, a Riva 128, 3GB HDD, 52x CD drive (no dvd), and SBAWE64. We upgraded it to 64MB in a year tho.

granted this was a budget machine, but even if you were splurging you'd at most have a TNT or TNT2.

[Anonymous No.10891230]

>>10891170
>for example any GPU from 1998 was more powerfull then ps2

nah. ps2 had something like xbox360 tier memory bandwidth. it just had almost no features, so it had to brute force every special effect in software. but if you could hack it, it could do geforce 3 tier effects (at least one game did normal mapping). No 1998 PC could do that at playable framerates.

>Seeing the consoles from that generation alone in specs it would be
it was xbox > gamecube > ps2 > dreamcast. xbox had programmable pixel pipeline, it could run fucking doom 3. gamecube had a dumbed down pixel pipeline with support only for a bunch of effects, granted it did those very fast, but xbox was more flexible and had more RAM. ps2 sucked if you used it as a traditional cpu+gpu, but it could outdo all other consoles in some regards if you programmed the vector units to do custom gpu effects (memory limitations and lack of AA screwed it up). Dreamcast had a feature set somewhere between ps1 and n64, but it was so efficient that it could trade blows with PS2 titles for a few years.

[Anonymous No.10891252]

>>10891204
the dvd drive i put in after i got it to replace its old loud-as-fuck 48x cd drive, before i got it it was last used in 2005 and had windows 98 on it, along with all dates on its parts being in 1997-1998

[Anonymous No.10891608]

>>10891230
if it was like that why xbox games looked like sega saturn games or dreamcast games?.
Take as an example the last official dreamcast games,they have nothing to envy to the ps2.
Equally the same applies to gamecube,the games are far superior in graphic quality there (taking into account the only way to get some ports of gamecube was on the ps4) compared to the others tell you a lot.
As was said by sakurai "drreamcast was a good console and the only one we cared about,sony ps2 wasn't in our worries seeing that the ps2 was a similar mess in arquitecture to the sega saturn" and he wasn't wrong in that point.
Also in 1998 you needed different gpu for stuff
>1 gpu for 2D graphics
>1 GPU for 3D graphics.
it was the only way to get something good.
>Emotion engine 8MB gpu
>Dreacast DGvoodoo 16 MB gpu.
Also doom isn't a standard,and several games ported from dreamcast to ps2 had to be butchered in lot of ways to be playable at all.

[Anonymous No.10891916]

>>10891608
>if it was like that why xbox games looked like sega saturn games or dreamcast games?.
Because it had too little RAM, so it had to cut the shit out of resolution.
It really needed at least 128 MB RAM. Which is a familiar refrain, given that the later 360 also had too little memory, namely it needed 16 MB of eDRAM, rather than the 10 it got.

[Anonymous No.10891983]

>>10888357
In 2004 your "6th gen PC" would be a 2GHz Athlon 64 with a 6800/X800 and 1GB of RAM, wasn't even that expensive in comparison to modern high end but fuck RAM prices. It's why comparing console generation to PCs doesn't work, especially in the late 90s-late 2000s when PC specs just rocketed up. Console gens are arbitray at times as is, but trying to fit handhelds and especially PCs in there is a fool's errand. Either way, all I cared about was if the games were fun and they definitely were.

[Anonymous No.10892039]

>>10891983
>In 2004 your "6th gen PC" would be a 2GHz Athlon 64 with a 6800/X800 and 1GB of RAM
That config was ultra-high-end for the time, since Socket 939 had just been released in June 2004 (Socket 754 from the previous year was a rather crappy intermediate step which didn't feature dual-channel RAM). Also support for 64-bit code was extremely lacking (in no small part due to Intel faggots fucking shit up).
Most people still ran 32-bit CPUs like Northwood (and occasionally LOLPrescott) Pentiums, or various flavors of AthlonXP.

[Anonymous No.10892047]

>>10891983
>Cont. because I'm a retard, and can't string along a coherent long-form thought
Also, I remember Geforce 6800s to be really expensive at the time; most people went for the 6600GT.

[Anonymous No.10892060]

>>10892039
I could afford it and had money to spare and I'm not a rich man even now. Guess that is a bit hard to imagine with how the economy works these days though.

[Anonymous No.10892070]

>>10892060
Well, in fairness: a) "enthusiast" level PC stuff at the time was merely "pricy" (RAM excluded, fuck cartels), compared to "ass-bleedingly-expensive" like today; b) my recollection of the past is clouded by the fact that I was a teenaged eastern yuropoorfag at the time, so no moola for high-end stuff.

[Anonymous No.10894102]

>>10892047
>most people went for the 6600GT.
Yep, that was my first real graphics card.

[Anonymous No.10894274]

>>10888362
PS2 couldn't play a single PC port.

Totally different architectures. "Ports" are ground-up rewrites perhaps using as many assets as possible.

[Anonymous No.10894529]

>>10888357
It would fare better and worse. The effects 6th gen consoles pulled off would require a Geforce 3 to replicate in full and something like a R9700 to display at a decent SVGA resolution like 1024x768 or 1280x1024. As far as sheer poly count (minus Xbox, which had a GPU that owned a GF256 in every regard) and RAM, it beats them all so you could have larger, more complex levels with more actors but they would look very drab compared to a 2000s console game. Part of the magic, and the pain in the ass, of those days was that all the machines ran on different archs and were capable of different experiences; often suffering when ported from one to another. Though games like Quake 3, Max Payne, Unreal Tournament, and Half Life weren't very impressive looking on their face compared to end-of-life 6th gen games, extensive cuts had to be made to run on their RAM from a disc.

[Anonymous No.10894537]

What really blew was that even when GPUs were available to replicate PS2 effects, a lot of devs didn't bother or half assed it when porting games from it. Silent Hill 3 was one of the few to really go the extra mile.

[Anonymous No.10894545]

>>10892047
Card was pretty great til 360 hit. Shit felt OLD when I ran Oblivion on it.

[Anonymous No.10894548]

>>10894545
>>10892047
6600GT I mean.

[Anonymous No.10894568]

>>10889320
>rear ventilation against the goddamn wall
nigga let that computer breef

[Anonymous No.10894606]

>>10888941
just noticed the "Low Radiation"

[Anonymous No.10894629]

>>10888357
PS2 couldn’t even run Half Life 1 properly.

[Anonymous No.10895671]

>>10894629
Isn't there a Half-Life 1 Dreamcast beta out in the wild? I remember reading about it 5 or so years ago. It had DC mouse + kb support, IIRC.

[Anonymous No.10895701]

>>10895671
It was pretty much complete and ready for release IIRC. They cancelled it basically at the last minute.

[Anonymous No.10895718]

>>10892070
An enthusiast level PC today is cheaper than a midrange PC in the early 2000s when you take into account inflation.

[Anonymous No.10897264]

>>10895718
I'm not sure. Midrange graphics cards are more expensive today (adjusting for inflation) compared to, say, 2002. Something like a Radeon 9000, or Geforce 4 MX440, was cheaper than its current-day counterpart. Admittedly, the performance difference was way larger between mid- and high-end at the time. Heck, the GF4 MX series were process-improved GF2s, with a couple extra features on top, they had no relation to GF4 Ti cores. Mid-end CPUs were a bit cheaper as well. OTOH, RAM was more expensive than today, even after the latest cartel was busted (late 2001, IIRC).

[Anonymous No.10897281]

>>10897264
CPUs were definitely not cheaper. The Northwood Pentium 4s were between $350 and $600 on release. The middle-of-the-road 2.4 GHz without hyper-threading was like $550. In today's money, that'd be over a thousand dollars just for the CPU. Even the gimped 2 GHz P4 would be in the ballpark of $800 in today's money.

[Anonymous No.10897292]

>>10888357
what is the blue glow thats coming out of your case?

[Anonymous No.10897295]

>>10888941
A Geforce 4 Ti 4200 was more than enough for HL2.

[Anonymous No.10897297]

>>10897281
Pentium 4s were considered mid-high to high-end. Intel's line of low- and mid-low end CPUs was the Celeron, which were way cheaper than Pentiums.

[Anonymous No.10897367]

>>10897292
Probably just some LED lights on the fans or something. Fuck, I had LED lit fans in one of my case solely because it was the same price for those fans as the non-LED lit ones so I said sure and for a time I had some nice pink/cyan/mint green color flying outta the grill of a plain box. If the LEDs died I wouldn't have cared, I wasn't really going for lighting my shit up like crazy.

[Anonymous No.10897475]

>>10897292
He pressed the Turbo button

[Anonymous No.10898151]

>>10897292
Cherenkov radiation. A side affect of the lethal doses of radiation being emitted by the CRT interacting with the liquid cooling system.

[Anonymous No.10898213]

6th gen consoles definitely. up until the Core 2, PCs ave been advancing at a very rapid rate. that 1999 PC was obsolete by 2001

[Anonymous No.10898216]

>>10895718
wages have not increased since the 70s
you CANNOT factor in inflation

[Anonymous No.10898415]

>>10888357
Soul Caliber would leave this pc in the dust, even the pc mags conceded that at the time. PC games were held back because they needed to work on a pentium 1 and many were just ps1 ports. There were some pc games that were well optimized that would struggle on console like railroad tycoon, some simulators and a few others that are pretty interesting to try today.

[Anonymous No.10898646]

>>10898213
Funny thing is, there was a specific point in the mid-'90s when you could, theoretically, temporarily dodge the horrific obsolescence cause by Moore's Law getting buttfucked with extreme prejudice.
If you had a Socket 7 motherboard, you could upgrade from your shitty Pentium 133 to an AMD K6 266, add some extra EDO RAM, a Voodoo 2, a larger HDD, while keeping stuff like your original EDO RAM (usualy a 16 MB SIMM), your SB16, and your S3 2D card.

[Anonymous No.10898650]

>>10898646
>Fake edit because I'm an incoherent retard
I meant that, if you got a very specific set of hardware in the mid-'90s, you could stretch some of the components to the late-'90s/early-'00s with upgrades.

[Anonymous No.10898672]

>>10898216
The only thing stuck in the 70's is your IQ kiddo. You have no idea what you're talking about. You will immediately cease and not continue to access the site if you are under the age of 18.

[Anonymous No.10898746]

>>10898672
he is correct taking inflation into accountcurrently wages are lower then what you got in the 70s.

[Anonymous No.10898813]

>>10891204
I got an S3 Savage 2000 on release late 1999 (ikr but the original savage was a surprisingly good GPU) and immediately regretted not getting the tnt2.

>>10888429
I won 1 gb ddr ram in a comp in 2001 which was seen as a lot of ram at the time.

>>10888357
Xbox has twice the fill rate of the Geforce, triple the tnt2 and 15-30 times the n64 if that helps

[Anonymous No.10899408]

>>10898746
lmfao "he" literally say "you CANNOT factor in inflation"
When did kids get so retarded?

[Anonymous No.10899479]

>>10897281
The Athlon and Duron CPUs were as cheap as $60. Pentium and especially pentium 4 was overpriced as fuck.

[Anonymous No.10899809]

>>10889325
>>10889304
If you want to play a newer game that doesn't work well on pcem with EAX (say flatout from 2004) there is an cracked version of creative alchemy on pc gaming wiki called alchemy universal. You don't need a creative card to use it. After installing the program, you can just copy its dlls to your game folder and optionally make a config file (most games don't need it). I was just playing Flatout with EAX and 5.1 surround on my modern machine yesterday. I don't know of anything similar for A3D.

[Anonymous No.10899845]

>>10898646
I tried that and it didn't even work, spent $80 on a cpu put it in and nothing happened. I had no idea about voltage jumper settings and there wasn't really a way to find out.

[Anonymous No.10899894]

>>10899845
>I had no idea about voltage jumper settings and there wasn't really a way to find out.
True, information was quite difficult to come by, especially more technical details. If you missed the one issue of a computing magazine where they had mentioned Vcore, while discussing upgrading, you had nowhere else to look.

[Anonymous No.10899956]

>>10899809
Nice. I had creative alchemy for my old card. But it's nice to see there's a universal one. Also seems to be daniel_k, I'm pretty sure I once installed an ASIO sound driver replacement from him for creative stuff. I still have a creative card in my downed main box, but my new box I don't.

I still wish there was an easy universal HRTF for older OS/hardware though. CMSS-3D was handling my shit forever, but with basic sound support having no binaural/headphone output is a fucking drag and I don't think I recall built in virtual surround for proper headphones in anything but like windows 10/11.

It's actually kind of disgusting that so many MP3 players, tablets/phones (android/apple), and whatnot all have headphone output - almost as a primary function and yet actual proper headphone output is nearly non-existent in products, just stereo out over headphones, which is not correct.
Audio is so often just screwed over and no one cares because it's not flashy like graphics and the big money maker.

[Anonymous No.10900119]

>>10894274
>rewrites
You have no fucking clue what you're talking about

[Anonymous No.10900212]

>>10894274
>"Ports" are ground-up rewrites perhaps using as many assets as possible.
No they aren't. Ports are playable binaries for different system. They don't have to be from the ground up, that's not a requirement.
See Open GOAL for Jack and Daxter which basically is a native engine wrapper for the GOAL language and mostly keeps the code for the game unchanged and recompiled under windows.
By using abstraction layers some games are fully capable of being ported to new systems with minimal work if they aren't heavily architecture feature locked. Even that can be emulated/simulated so that the game can be ported as well.
Rewriting a whole ass game for a port is rarer these days than in the micro-computing days where they literally did just do that.

I'm going to assume you meant "re-using as many assets as possible" rather than implying that a port has to include more assets. Because the latter would be dumb and as much as this place loves saying dumb shit, I really don't want you to be that dumb.

[Anonymous No.10900213]

>>10894545
I had a 6600GT. I believe I ran Oblivion okay with it after a few tweaks and such, not a super high res. Still ran better than Morrowind. Fuck, everything does, even Crysis.

[Anonymous No.10900259]

>>10894529
>weren't very impressive looking on their face compared to end-of-life 6th gen games
UT and Q3 look pretty fucking good when decked out with AA at full HD and custom resolutions and such which they supported. UT had "high res graphics pack", modern graphic packs make it look decent. Q3's textures got a bit dated in comparison. There are texture packs but a lot of them are fairly roughshod and not as vanilla compliant from what I've seen.

With support for modded textures built in - playing UT99 right now looks way better than Xbox games even though it lacks the better lighting modes.

Even Quake 3 on user maps with FSSSAA at full HD or 4K even as a custom resolution supported by the original game executable.... looks great.

If XBox emulation comes around and jumps up the res, then these games will continue to compete with the best of the OG XBox graphics wise. The issue being some of the old games had a few tricks up their sleeves for longevity that consoles couldn't do - at least not without help of PCs or perhaps one days consoles emulating the newer consoles too.

These games definitely didn't look like this out of the box though, lower resolutions etc... fuck, some of us played Q3 at 640x480 with vertex lighting 16-bit initially and no AA and pulling 30-60FPS... Doesn't mean the game itself didn't support full HD, full AA, at 32-bit at 125hz or texture bumps. Hell you can even up the allocated memory in the configs themselves as well. I remember as promo there was even a Quake 4 high poly gladiator model ported to Quake 3 that could be used in gameplay. It's hard to find even screenshots or info on it though since search engines have long since been effectively fucked over and that goes quadruplicate for old web. It's probably kicking around on wayback, but until there's an effective search engine for that too, it's probably unlikely to be seen again.

[Anonymous No.10900283]

>>10900259
Delusion, games like Forza are comparable to early 7th gen titles visually.

[Anonymous No.10900297]

>>10895718
CPUs are cheaper but GPUs have blown the doors off the pricing model. In the 2000s a decent CPU+mobo was 80% of the cost, with a graphics card being a lesser chunk of change to drop. But over the years each successive generation of GPUs has got more and more expensive until nVidia just took a dump on the whole market and decided that gamers should just pay for the AI inferencing run off rather than them manufacture cheaper cards that were actually good at rasterisation and RT.

[Anonymous No.10900306]

>>>10900283
HHHHmmmmm.... you sure about that?

I mean I suppose for a racing game it shines up your car nicely with shaders but... you seriously think pop in with low res textures, and plain geometry is that hot? MMmmmm.... I dunno.

Mind you I'm not arguing that the 1999 specs would beat the Xbox. I'm saying the PC Games themselves, extended beyond the 1999 hardware and look better than the Xbox did...

But yer right. That forza screenshot is the bees knees compared to this busted junk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9gZ0s3v4ec

[Anonymous No.10900308]

How the fuck did you get UT to look so good?

[Anonymous No.10900372]

>>10900308

Step 1: Download and install UT99.

Step 2: Download and install updated semi-official patch with new renderer... it doesn't actually change much visually, it just lets it be more compatible basically using shit like DX11/12 isntead of 8/9 and shit for modern hardware, but it can break some things they haven't fixed for some older drivers etc... like transparency for crosshair on older intel stuff.
https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches/releases/tag/v469d

At this point - it should look... like UT99 that you can play easily and maybe show higher resolutions without fuggin with the ini or anything.

Step 3. Download HD texture pack.https://www.moddb.com/mods/ut99hd

It now looks better than the official S3TC pack. I forget if you need to install it first for detail maps on walls or that's a settings you need change. If the walls don't look bumpy up close, there's a setting for that. Might be something like detaillevel or something in the ini I forget.

You can now get your ass kicked online by the five dweebs who never stopped playing and can translocate up your ass like fucking wizards and regret trying to play. Or pass it around to friends and play with scrubs who are also bad.

Fun fact, this shit will still also mostly run on a potato more or less. I have more or less this on a 2010 laptop with igpu equivalent to a 2002/3-ish video card with jacked out vram in comparison.

Also there's a network rate setting you probably want to boost as well for smoother play. A couple settings I personally use are
FrameRateLimit=300.000000
MinDesiredFrameRate=300.000000
MaxClientRate=200000
NetServerMaxTickRate=200
LanServerMaxTickRate=200
MaxClientRate=100000
AllowDownloads=True

Those should basically speed up your downloads assuming they were on. And also make it much smoother of an experience. Servers will cap where necessary and local will run shit fine afaik. Don't recall if the patch fixes ticrate changing damage though.

[Anonymous No.10900380]

>>10900372
Also, if I recall, I think the semi-official patch can also bug SP campaign tournament. May vary on hardware etc... It may be fucky for you it may not be. If it is, there's still way to progress - but it's annoying.

[Anonymous No.10900540]

>>10897295
Yeah but try running it with a GeForce 4 MX 4000.

Doesn't help that the Pentium III 1ghz is also below the minimum system requirements. Not by much and you could probably get by with overclocking but I don't have the necessary PSU and cooling hardware to make that happen right now.

[Anonymous No.10900561]

>>10900213
Funny how today zoomers are crying about Starfield's framerate when it's in fact the most optimized and stable game bethesda has ever made. Try playing Morrowind at launch.

[Anonymous No.10900783]

So how important is country of origin for older cpus? There’s tons of Pentium 3s on eBay that were manufactured in Costa Rica, The Philippines, and Malaysia. What’s the best country out of the three?

[Anonymous No.10900950]

>>10900561
>Try playing Morrowind at launch
Or now.... Even modern machines struggle with it. Best you can do is use OpenMW with a beefy system. OpenMW won't do much for taters.
Morrowind is perhaps one of if not THE worst optimized games in history.

[Anonymous No.10901182]

>>10900783
My bad it’s the packaging site not manufacturing site. Now it’s a question of whose third world hands do I want to have touched my chip

[Anonymous No.10901192]

>>10900561
I did. Worked fine on my Pentium III 667 and Geforce DDR.

[Anonymous No.10901212]

>>10901192
lol

[Anonymous No.10901214]

>>10901212
Pretty sure I didn't have my Radeon 9800 and Athlon XP system yet.

[Anonymous No.10901223]

>>10901212
It wasn't so bad if you dropped the detail level, but IIRC you got hit with memory leak around the 2-hour mark, and it slowed down to a crawl until you restarted the game.

[Anonymous No.10901293]

If I wanted to build a Windows 98se PC with the intent of playing DOS games like Might and Magic, Mechwarrior, any of the SSI Dungeons and Dragons games, while also wanting to play PC games up to Mechwarrior 4, where should I look for a build?

I just want to be able to play DOS games and Mechwarrior 4, senpai

[Anonymous No.10901328]

>>10901293
You can get a lot of stuff running under current Windows, however be advised that some of the early stuff is lostech. You have wrappers for Glide, and something similar for EAX, but A3D cannot be currently emulated via wrappers, and requires a physical Aureal Vortex/Vortex 2 and appropriate drivers.

[Anonymous No.10901470]

>>10901328
>early stuff is lostech
I see you, anon. I see you.

[Anonymous No.10901530]

>>10901293
Go for cheap shit tier components in low demand like PIII-era Celeron CPU's (somewhere in the ballpark of 400-700mhz) and GeForce 2 MX cards alongside a cheaper sound card with DOS compatibility like the Soundblaster Live and you'll get a good experience with the majority of DOS games and most Win98 games up until 2001 or so. You'd do much better with later Win98 games on a Pentium III but I found out the hard way when I upgraded to a 1ghz CPU that it breaks things in older DOS games and even certain Win95 games.

[Anonymous No.10901640]

>>10888941
>runs like dogshit lol
ahh that's how i remember it

[Anonymous No.10901849]

>>10901328
pcem can emulate the audiopci 128, which supports a3d to at least some degree. Whether you get good performance from your game there is a different story, but at least it's possible.
AFAIK there is nothing Alchemy-like that actually works well for A3D. Hopefully someday there will be.
One more option other than building a whole retro PC is to get one or two pci cards you want and pass those through to a virtual machine to get hardware audio and video if you need it.

[Anonymous No.10901852]

>>10901849
What modern motherboard even has a PCI slot? At that point aren't you just building a 'retro' windows 7 rig?

[Anonymous No.10901860]

>>10901852
You can run quite old operating systems, even older than win98, in a virtual machine. Actually, with a combination of drivers, patches, and expansion cards, you can run win98 bare metal on the latest platforms.
There are business and industrial motherboards that still have pci slots, however, you don't nee done. You can use the cheap pci express to pci adapters and they work fine for most devices, both in vm pass-through and bare metal. pci express was designed for software compatibility during the transition period. it works a lot better than isa to anything else adapters. like if you plug in a pci graphics card to these adapters it will even work in the uefi/bios.
There are also pci express cards that work on win98. sata, ethernet, and usb are easy to find. even a few graphics cards. I'm not aware of any pci express cards that have a3d.
the advantage of using virtual machine with passthrough is that you just need less hardware. your storage, usb, network etc will all be emulated and it will perform fine.

[Anonymous No.10901862]

>>10891170
This anon is a complete fucking retard and/or too young to be here.

[Anonymous No.10902000]

>>10891170
who's going to tell this retard APIs have both almost always existed and were/are also on consoles

[Anonymous No.10902023]

>>10888357
This was my PC except I had the PIII 1GHz. It was pretty good until about ~2003 when newer games were forcing me to play on a mix of low/med settings. It ran ME, which was a truly awful experience. When I got a newer XP machine in 2004 it was such a better experience. In retrospect I should have upgraded a lot sooner or at least ditched ME.

[Anonymous No.10902205]

>>10901293
Go browse egay and fecesbook marketplace. They have got a bunch of cheap really old shit nobody buys. I think intel dual core and core 2 duo are still good for those games, but old pentium 4s and athlons should be better.

[Anonymous No.10902423]

>>10901293
Just use DOSBOX or it's forks, or PCem for DOS. Then... play windows 98 game like normal. Grats and all you had to buy was... whatever the fuck you have now.

[Anonymous No.10902589]

>>10902423
You wouldn't get it

[Anonymous No.10902621]

>>10901293
Just use DOSBOX or it's forks, or PCem for DOS. Then... play windows 98 game like normal. Grats and all you had to buy was... whatever the fuck you have now.

[Anonymous No.10902662]

>>10902589
>I just want to be able to play DOS games and Mechwarrior 4, senpai

>I just

>want

>to play

looks like I got it. I told them how to JUST play that shit. You're welcome.

[Radiochan !!8R5IcuH3PgQ No.10902670]

>>10894274
There were a buttload of PC ports on the PS2 and DC dude. DC was cheaper and more fun. I knew some people who were using DCs as their Internet machines until 2008 and they could finally get a smartphone.
>>10888357
Anyway that exact setup, MINUS THE GRAPHICS CARD, cost my parents like $1000 in 2002. Still a lot of great PC games and any DOS game you'd find at a garage sale or whatever would play on it. Emulators too for some systems; ZSNES and KEGA worked swimmingly.

[Anonymous No.10902695]

>>10888357
I was rolling a CeleronII 433, Voodoo3 2000, 128MB RAM 13GB HDD in 99. It was pretty good for Quake3,UT it ran Debian Linux.

[Anonymous No.10902701]

>>10901293
You can run those games on Linux with WINE and they will work better than on Windows.

[Anonymous No.10902864]

>>10902701
They won't, win9x stuff works better on windows 10 if you want to run it on a modern machine.

[Anonymous No.10902895]

>>10902864
I doubt it.

[Anonymous No.10902904]

>>10902895
It's as hit and miss as wine always was. Valve's fixes have focused on modern games and don't seem to have benefitted anything made for early directx/3d. Some stuff works but I've run into enough issues that I just gave up and built a cheap PC that could run everything natively.

[Anonymous No.10903070]

>>10902670
>cost my parents like $1000 in 2002
Jesus christ they sucked at PC building.

Here's how you build a PC in 2002. $764, every single component and peripheral included even the fucking $190 unpirated windows. So this is technically a $574 build.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1000

[Anonymous No.10903097]

>>10903070
Not going to read this but I'm going to assume it recommends an athlon xp and completely ignore it.

[Anonymous No.10903250]

>>10903097
>and completely ignore it.
Based retard. Palominos could outperform Willamettes (outside of programs specifically designed for Pentiums), for less money. Even Thoroughbred Bs were a good budget choice compared to Northwoods. Only by the time of Bartons did Intel manage to get away (at the cost of power draw and heat on the Prescotts).

[Anonymous No.10903628]

>>10902662
If you had any level of reading comp, you'd know that I obviously want to play on authentic hardware.

Playing old games on modern hardware is a ghetto experience through and through. Absolutely no interest in introducing bugs that didn't exist on original hardware.

[Anonymous No.10903671]

>ask question about authentic hardware
>get answers involving avoiding authentic hardware

It's like I'm dealing with kids on gamefaqs circa 2004

[Anonymous No.10903676]

>>10901293
LGA775 + celeron + geforce fx + sb live is cheap and will do what you want. Just get a motherboard with an AGP slot and Via chipset.

[Radiochan !!8R5IcuH3PgQ No.10903735]

>>10903070
we didn't know anything about pc building
we went to best buy and bought a computer
"pc building" was for enthusiasts, we didn't have that option open to us

[Anonymous No.10903757]

>>10903676
The high-end path would be an nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboard with a Soundstorm audio chip, obviating the need for a sound card. Plus a 200 MHz FSB Barton as CPU, and 1 GB DDR-400 for RAM. As for video card, the chad option would be a Radeon 9800 Pro with 256 MB GDDR2 VRAM.
Admittedly, such a system is pretty expensive, since you'd be paying the "rEtrO KoMPeWtiNg" tax.

[Anonymous No.10903758]

>>10903676
Thank you!

[Anonymous No.10903790]

>>10903757
I recommended LGA775 because some of those boards will take a core 2 and btfo anything 'period correct' while still being compatible. Athlon XP is cool but then you have the PSU issue with the higher powered ones unless you get one of those MSI boards with the 4 pin CPU connector.

[Anonymous No.10903809]

>>10903790
>btfo anything 'period correct'
Im fine with that. I also dont mind (Would prefer) absolutely avoiding IDE drives as well, maybe for that setup that uses an SD card.

[Anonymous No.10903825]

>>10903809
I use this https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/ide2sat2 With a SATA SSD

[Anonymous No.10903831]

>>10903790
Fair, those Wolfdale-based dual core Celerons would absolutely ravage anything pre-2006, while still being cheap, since full-fat Core 2 Duos are the more desirable CPUs.

[Anonymous No.10903958]

>>10903757
Nforce2 and dos games are not great

[Anonymous No.10904058]

>>10894274
Explain Tribes Aerial Assault for the PS2

[Anonymous No.10904490]

>>10903250
Even Northwood P4s mog the Athlon XP, AMD's performance ratings were complete BS.

[Anonymous No.10904598]

>>10903671
to be fair, if your main or only motivation is "just to play some old games", you're really better off emulating/virtualizing

you really should be interested in fiddling with the old hardware on its own, as well as being fine with solving software compatibility problems on your own. if not, you'll only get annoyed at the setup

[Anonymous No.10904609]

>>10901293
Go on archive.org, look up Pcem + MechWarrior. You will find a dude who has literally packaged Pcem installers that work on Windows 10 and 11 that will install isolated versions of games like this.

Add eXoDOS on top of this, and you're set.

[Anonymous No.10904721]

>>10904609
illiterate

[Anonymous No.10905087]

>>10902904
Works for me.

[Anonymous No.10905370]

>>10904598
>you really should be interested in fiddling with the old hardware on its own
Or if you *really* want to play the handful old porn games that want a native Win95/Win98 environment.

[Anonymous No.10906818]

>>10904598
>you really should be interested in fiddling with the old hardware on its own
I can do that to an extent. Ive been tinkering with an open source FDM 3D printer for like 5 years now, always improving it. That, and internet digging for drivers and patches is fun. Ive recently been digging up total conversion mods for xbox GTA games. Its fun.

[Anonymous No.10906963]

>>10905087
doesn't always work for me, that was the point of the post

[Anonymous No.10907181]

>>10888687
But the first version of Windows XP wasn't released until October 2001. And it was unlikely that you'd have an LCD monitor back then as they were still outrageously expensive compared to a CRT, they could be more expensive than the actual PC itself.

[Anonymous No.10909367]

>>10888357
I always thought that was the specs of the Xbox. P3 with a GeForce3 with a shared 512MB of RAM. A lot of good games did squeeze that hardware to the fullest.

[Anonymous No.10910665]

>>10888357
Pitting it against an Xbox, I don't think the extra RAM and MHz would make up for a lack of shader support on the GPU.

[Anonymous No.10910669]

>>10909367
Wasn't the Xbox's GPU something in between a Geforce 3 and 4 rather than a vanilla GF3?

[Anonymous No.10910680]

>>10902670
>There were a buttload of PC ports on the PS2 and DC dude. DC was cheaper and more fun. I knew some people who were using DCs as their Internet machines until 2008 and they could finally get a smartphone.
What alternate timeline did you stumble in from? PCs were ubiquitous in my area in 2008 and I didn't know anyone who was still using their DC to go online.

[Anonymous No.10910731]

>>10910665
>muh shaders
Just turn them off.

[Anonymous No.10910742]

>>10910731
nice b8 m8 i r8 8/8

[Anonymous No.10910758]

>>10910731
I chuckled, hoping of course that this comment is b8.

[Anonymous No.10910769]

>>10888687
the monitor obviously isn't from 1998 retard

[Anonymous No.10910792]

>>10907181
>And it was unlikely that you'd have an LCD monitor back then as they were still outrageously expensive compared to a CRT, they could be more expensive than the actual PC itself.
This. When I bought my 17'' SyncMaster in 2005, it still was a very large chunk of money. It was more expensive than a 19'' CRT (but weighed less than half, and didn't take almost 1.5 sq. ft of space on my desk).

[Anonymous No.10910818]

>>10910792
Does the SyncMaster still work?

[Anonymous No.10910821]

>>10910818
I use it as a second display for my laptop, with an HDMI to DVI cable.

[Anonymous No.10911003]

>>10909367
XBox had 64MB, the x360 had 512.

[Anonymous No.10911025]

>>10911003
Apparently they were originally gonna go with 256, but Epic pleaded with them to increase it to 512 because Gears of Wars would look like absolute shit otherwise, and they actually relented.

[Anonymous No.10911052]

>>10911025
Should've also bumped up DRAM on the GPU daughter die from 10 to at least 12 MB, if not outright 16 MB. It became a bottleneck in the later years.

[Anonymous No.10911061]

Sixth gen consoles were so shitty they made me swap to PC gaming permanently. Consoles died with the Dreamcast. RIP.