Koopatech: 2013

Last Christmas my brother got me a PC game from 1995, The Journeyman Project II: Buried in Time. I played the first game as a kid, and was excited to play the sequel. Unfortunately it wouldn't run on my Windows 7 PC, it ran in a virtual machine but I still couldn't get the sound working, so I decided to buy an old computer off Craigslist. I found one that had Windows XP and got the game working great.

Most older games will work on a modern PC using an emulator like DosBox, ScumvVM,; but I suppose hardware junkies like me prefer owning the real thing. I'm particularly nostalgic about this era of computing from around 1999/2000 because that was when I started building my first PCs.

Here's the specs of this retro PC versus the first computer I built in 2000.

Retro PC bought on Craigslist

Intel Pentium III Coppermine 650 mhz

384 mb ram PC 100 mhz

(Upgraded from the crappy nvidia tnt2 m64 it came with) it came with) 3DFX Voodoo 3 3500 16 mb AGP graphics card

10 GB hard drive
Windows XP home

First PC I built

Intel Pentium III Coppermine 800 mhz
256 mb ram PC 133 mhz
NVidia Geforce 2 GTS 64 mb
30 GB hard drive

Windows 2000 professional

So the first computer I built was faster (especially in the graphics department), the hardware was about a year newer.

Having the 3DFX Voodoo 3 3500 is awesome because I really wanted it back in the day (It was $250 back then)

dosbox
http://www.dosbox.com

scummvm
http://scummvm.org

nglide (to emulate 3DFX Glide games)
http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide

Friday, October 4, 2013

My PC (As of January 2015)

Retro PC and computer memories