This is a nostalgia piece.
I worked at a pizza shop in high-school.
I used the money to buy my first PC in 1996. I was 15, in year 9, I was obsessed with Quake (quake 1) and the PC was a Intel 133mhz.
We had “family” PCs before this, but this one was mine alone. Purchased with money I earned through hard labor.
I also purchased a dial-up 33.6 modem and used me brand new PC to get on the internet with an ISP named Alphalink.
My first “serious” PC was about a year later. I was 16, still working in the pizza shop and in year 10 at high school.
I saved my money and purchased the an Intel Pentium 266mhz MMX.
I hand picked every aspect of the machine, such as:
- The amount and brand of RAM.
- The specific motherboard.
- The specific speed and brand of CD ROM.
And on.
Most importantly, the video cards.
The reason for the upgrade one year later was because the 3d-accelerated revolution had begin and Quake 2 (with colored lighting!) was about to be released.
From Wikipedia:
Unlike Quake, where hardware acceleration was only implemented through later patches, Quake II was released with native OpenGL support.
The primary video card was Matrox Mystique.
It could do some basic 3D by itself and was perhaps the king of primary video cards at the time.
Here’s a pic of the box:
The shining light of this new box was my 3dfx accelerator card.
I got the Diamond Monster 3D 3dfx Voodoo1 4 MB PCI, with the external pass-through cable.
Here’s the box:
Here’s the card itself:
Before Quake II came out in late 1997, there were only a handful of 3dfx supported games to play.
When I got the rig up and running I played GLQuake with glowing rockets. I never went back to software rendered quake.
I purchased shadows of the empire because it had 3dfx support and an amazing opening set piece of tripping AT-ATs with a tow cable from the battle of hoth.
I played other 3d-accelerated games around this time, but I don’t really recall what they were.
(searching…)
Okay, I recall playing titles with 3dfx/glide support like:
- MechWarrior 2
- Descent 2
- Blood
- MDK
- Need for Speed II SE
- Tomb Raider
I specifically recall Turok had great graphics (fog! bow and arrow!) and I played it a lot because of that - the gameplay itself was so so.
Eventually, Quake II game out in December 1997.
I played it in 3dfx mode (glide) with colored lighting, smooth pixels, see-through water, and all was good with the world.
I think my next PC after this was an Intel Celeron 300A, overclocked to 450Mhz.
Good times.