Oh sweet child, you’ll never understand the pleasure of cutting motherboard PCB traces and replacing resistors to overclock a DX2 to 90MHz to play freely distributed CD-ROM cereal box AoE.
My first ‘good’ computer was a Compaq (from Radio Shack!) 512MB RAM and a 10GB hard drive! It could run Windows 98 and Starcraft!
Previously I had a 486dx with 64MB RAM and 512MB hard drive. We played qbasic games, like Snake and Gorilla, I shared a copy of Wing Commander with a friend (and hand copied the instruction booklet because the DRM at the time was that the game wouldn’t launch unless you could tell it what was the 5th word on the 3rd page or whatever).
Later, I found a modem and was able to dial into BBSs to play MUDs. MajorMUD was the first I found, but they only let you do about 100 commands/day unless you paid ($15/month!).
On the new PC we had dial-up from a local ISP and I could play MUDs via Telnet (or zMUD 5.55, the version who’s DRM broke and didn’t count down the 30 day free trial clock).
We also used to have to fight off the dinosaurs on the way to school (which we walked to, barefoot, uphill in the snow) of course.
Oh sweet child, you’ll never understand the pleasure of cutting motherboard PCB traces and replacing resistors to overclock a DX2 to 90MHz to play freely distributed CD-ROM cereal box AoE.
Back in my day we used to have to draw on the processor with a graphite pencil in order to unlock overclocking.
Kids these days with their UEFI and Windows-based overclocking utilities…
I already had a 233 MHz PII when AoE came out, so no.
I was poor as fuck back in AoE times, my computer was already oolllllld.
My first ‘good’ computer was a Compaq (from Radio Shack!) 512MB RAM and a 10GB hard drive! It could run Windows 98 and Starcraft!
Previously I had a 486dx with 64MB RAM and 512MB hard drive. We played qbasic games, like Snake and Gorilla, I shared a copy of Wing Commander with a friend (and hand copied the instruction booklet because the DRM at the time was that the game wouldn’t launch unless you could tell it what was the 5th word on the 3rd page or whatever).
Later, I found a modem and was able to dial into BBSs to play MUDs. MajorMUD was the first I found, but they only let you do about 100 commands/day unless you paid ($15/month!).
On the new PC we had dial-up from a local ISP and I could play MUDs via Telnet (or zMUD 5.55, the version who’s DRM broke and didn’t count down the 30 day free trial clock).
We also used to have to fight off the dinosaurs on the way to school (which we walked to, barefoot, uphill in the snow) of course.
I still have my cereal box AoE CD somewhere…