SET FOR LIFE! By... Jason Cross of "Computer Games Magazine"
When our family got rid of its original Apple II, with its 80 column card, and replaced it with an Apple IIe, it was all the computer I ever needed. I could play anything out there, except for all those cool Commodore 64 games, but I went over to my friends house for that.
Then when we bought an Apple IIgs, and it was so incredibly advanced-(you should have heard the music in Kings Quest IV)-that it was clear that it would gain broad industry-wide support. It had a cool GUI and the best graphics and sound, and a slick off-white color, and a huge 12 inch monitor. Up to 16 colors in high-res 320x200 mode and dithered down to four in 640x200 mode, all from a huge palette of 4,096. Wow!
Then we couldn't run some of the newer IIgs software, so we bought a clear plastic tube of upgrade Ram chips, which I rolled ever so gently on the table to make the pins straight and carefully pushed one-by-one into the motherboard until I had a whopping one megabyte. An astounding amount of memory! what on earth do people need those $2,000 hard drives for when they only hold like only 20 megabytes?
Then I went into the software store one day and the Apple section was about 4 feet wide, while the PC section was closer to 40. It was clear that I had to get a PC, so I sold the Apple to my school (Suckers),and bought one off the most advanced PC's out there, a 286. It could display 256 colors at once, and even had a cool "Turbo" button on the front that made it go faster. I missed the digital sound from my cool Apple but at least this computer was cheaper and I could run all the new software out there.
It wasn't long before I had to get a 386SX, with a top speed of 20MHz. I'm not sure if I ever really knew at the time what the speed of my amazing IIg's CPU was, but it turns out 2.8 MHz in the faster of its two modes. This was over seven times faster! It had twice the Ram! It had a 40mg harddrive. It ran Wing Commander like a charm and that Sound Blaster plus the digital voice pack......man, how did I ever think the sound was cool on my Apple?
Then I bought Ultima VII. It literally used up half of my hard drive space plus one megabyte for every saved game. I spent the whole first day after purchasing it editing my autoexec.bat and config.sys files, trying to find a way to load both my mouse and my Sound Blaster drivers without using expanded memory. And if you think system requirements are steep today-imagine a game that eats up half your 40 gig HD, plus 1gigabyte per save!
Doom finally broke me. I tolerated the speed of Ultima Underworld because I was a poor college student and could not do better, but when I saw ID's game on my friends PC, I had to upgrade. I took a big risk and went for a 60MHz pentium over a 66MHz 486, even though it was more expensive. I started playing all those games I wasn't able to run well before- Underworld II, System Shock, Privateer, it ran everything just great.....
Until Quake made it choke. Actually, Quake was tolerable- the first expansion pack brought it to its knees. Even that cool new Rendition 3D video card and the custom made "vQuake" couldn't save it. It was time for a Pentium II. Or, hey wait.....for hundreds less I could get one of those K6 processors from AMD! And look at the performance numbers-the salesman showed me a graph where the K6's bar was clearly much longer than the bar for the Pentium II! Too bad it didn't run games worth a damn!
Then there was that celeron that I bought, the 300 "A" version, which was supposed to run with a 66MHz front-side bus but could easily run with the 100MHz front-side bus that that Pentium III chips did. I essentially bought a 450MHZ chip for the price of a 300. With that kind of speed boost, surely the machine would last 4-5 years.
Or at least until I bought a 1GHz athlon 2 years later. That was the system that would take me to my grave. Every game just flew on it. Nobody will ever need more than a Geforce 3, and theres not a game around that will eat up my 256mgs Ram!
I just bought an Athlon XP 3000+ and put it in an N-Force 2 motherboard, complete with a whole Gigabyte of low-latency DDR400 Ram. I have a Radeon 9700 Pro, and I even got one of those snazzy new 80GB HD's with the 8Mg of cache, to go along with my twice as slow 60GB drive. I...AM....SET...FOR....LIFE!!!!!
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