• Tag Archives 486

  • PC Player (December 1993)

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Source: PC Player – Issue Number 1 – December 1993

    PC Player is a PC gaming magazine that was published in the U.K. starting at the end of 1993. The premiere issue from December 1993 includes the following:

    Features

    • Is Your 386 Enough? – I had gotten my first “PC” about four months before this issue would have hit the stands and it was a 486 DX2/66. By Christmas, the vast majority of games could still run on a 386 but if you wanted the best experience…being able to use the best resolution and highest details with good frame rates…you needed a 486. It wasn’t just the faster processor that mattered but features like local bus video. Several developers give their opinions on the subject here, including Chris Roberts (Origin), Peter Molyneux (Bullfrog), Dave Wilson (Electronic Arts) and others. With Pentium on the way and processors very quickly to double, triple, quadruple and more in a relatively short time period (not to mention the advances in 3D video cards), the upgrade cycle was brutal in the mid 1990s to mid 2000s but the 486 had several really good years.
    • Air Combat Simulations – A look at some of the flight simulators on the market, including ATAC, AV8B Harrier Assault, Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat, F-117A, F-15 Strike Eagle III, Falcon 3.0, Harrier Jump Jet, Jetfighter II, Strike Commander, and Tornado.
    • The Old Flying Machine Company – A look at a company that owns the largest collection of flying antiques in the world. These are used in air shows and in movies among other things.

    Regulars

    • News – News of upcoming games, including Dungeon Master II, Rebel Assault (the first CD game I ever owned), Archon Ultra, Fantasy Empires, The Elder Scrolls (and what a franchise that would start), Delta V, Evasive Action, Star Trek 25th Anniversary, Star Trek 2: Judgement Rights, Starfleet Academy, Microcosm, Hired Guns, Innocent, Lawnmower Man, B-Wing (X-Wing expansion), Lords of Power, Dracula Unleashed, Police Quest, Shadow of Darkness, Aces Over Europe, Aces of the Deep, Outpost, Ultima VIII, Jagged Alliance, Starlord, Subwar 2050, Eye of the Beholder, and more. It was a great era for PC games.
    • Games Round-Up – Short reviews of games and game updates including Classic Golf (Konami), Battle Chess (Interplay), Lord of the Rings (Interplay), Blue Force, Pinball Dreams, Street Fighter II, and Goal.
    • Competition – Answer a couple of questions for your chance to win a collection of V For Victory games.

    Reviews

    • TFX – Tactical Fighter Experiment – A flight simulator from Ocean featuring next generation fighters such as the F-22, F117A and EFA. Minimum requirements include a 386, 4MB of RAM, a VGA card and 17MB of hard drive space.
    • Return to Zork – The next generation of Zork games from Infocom. While still having a text interface, it also has 256 color graphics and cinematics. Requirements include a 25 MHz 386, 4MB RAM, VGA card and a CD-ROM drive.
    • Privateer – In some respects, the Wing Commander series of games could be though of as competitors to X-Wing. Privateer was one of the best. Minimum requirements include a 25 MHz 386, 4MB RAM, a VGA card and 20MB hard drive space.
    • Flight Simulator 5.0 – The latest version of Microsoft’s classic flight simulator. Minimum requirements include a 386, about 1MB of RAM and 10MB of hard drive space.
    • Lost in Time – An adventure game from French software maker Coktel Vision. It requires a 16 MHz 286, 640K of RAM, a VGA card and 9MB of hard drive space.
    • Cyberrace – A futuristic combat racing game from Cyberdreams. For this one you need a 25 MHz 386, 4MB of RAM, a VGA card and 20MB of hard drive space.
    • Battles of the South Pacific – This detailed strategy game from Mirage recreates the naval battles of World War II. It requires at least a 12 MHz 386, 1MB of RAM, a VGA card and 6.5MB of hard drive space.
    • V For Victory – The latest in this World War II strategy game series. This one recreates the invasion of Normandy. It requires 2MB of RAM and a VGA card.
    • Darksun – The latest AD&D game from SSI. Why don’t they make computer D&D games anymore? This one requires a 25 MHz 386, 2MB of RAM, a VGA card and 17MB of hard drive space.
    • Front Page Sports Football Pro – A football game from Dynamix requiring a 25 MHz 386, 2MB of RAM and 11MB hard drive space.
    • NFL Coaches Club Football – Another football game (not that anybody remembers any of these other than Madden), this one from Microprose. It requires a 386 and 2MB of RAM along with up to 7MB of hard drive space.
    • Kasparov’s Gambit – A chess game from Electronic Arts. It requires a 386SX, 2MB of RAM, the ever present generic VGA card and 11MB of hard drive space.

    Previews

    • Frontier – Elite II – A sequel to the classic Elite finally comes along.
    • Gabriel Knight – The latest adventure game from Sierra.
    • Beneath a Steel Sky – Presented as the first computer-based animated comic book adventure.
    • Stonekeep – A role-playing game from Interplay.
    • Hand of Fate – The sequel to The Legend of Kyrandia.
    • Alone in the Dark 2 – Though the term had not been invented yet. the Alone in the Dark series are really survival horror games.
    • Dreamweb – A cyberpunk themed game inspired by Akira and Bladerunner.

    Players’ Guides

    • X-Wing – Sims often don’t hold up well over time but X-Wing is still one of my favorites. Here’s a guide to get you going.
    • Tornado – A guide to getting the most out of this flight combat sim.

    …and more!


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  • Digital Archaeology – Expedition #3 – Gateway 486 DX2-66

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    This expedition is a search through the boneyard of my very first PC. And by PC, I really mean DOS/Windows/X86 compatible computer since my first computer was a Commodore 64. This was the first computer I ever bought myself and I spent most of my summer earnings on this thing the summer before I went to college. It was a whopping $3000 (really more like $2995 plus somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 for shipping). But for this massive sum you got what was a massively powerful computer for the day (we are talking Summer 1993 here).

    4dx2-66v

    As you can see, the highlights include a 66MHz 486DX2 processor, a whopping 16MB of RAM plus 256k of cache, a CD-ROM drive (single speed) and a VESA Local Bus video card. It looked just like this except the CD-ROM drive in mine (a Philips model) had a manually operated tray:

    4dx2-66v2

     

     

    By comparison, in my dorm area my first year of college, three out of five people came with a computer including myself. One person came with a 386DX-40 with 2 or 4 MB of RAM and my roomate came with a 486DX-33 with 4 MB of RAM (later upgraded to 8 MB I think). I had bragging rights for a couple of years until someone I knew bought a 133 MHz Pentium.

    This computer was used to call a lot of BBSes, play a lot of DOOM, DOOM 2 and the first couple of X-Wing games. It was also used to play Hexen, NASCAR, Rebel Assault (one of the first CD-ROM based games for PCs) and no doubt many others that I am forgetting. This was the first computer I used to access the Internet (via a local freenet and a university shell account with a SLIP emulator). At first it was largely usenet and text based web browsing but later graphical web browsing. This computer was also responsible for me meeting my first serious girlfriend (a blessing and a curse) via Talk on my university account. I even did a little school work with it.

    Paradoxically, at the time BBSes were probably near their peak but also on their way out as the Internet was just becoming popular. It’s a shame because they were a lot of fun  and while the Internet certainly has more of everything it has never managed to recreate that type of environment. I played tons of Legend of the Red Dragon, downloaded tons of stuff much of which I never used, and participated in FIDONET and local message discussions galore. One BBS even hosted a DOOM or DOOM 2 ladder tournament (basically you would challenge anybody you wanted and if you beat them you took over their position on the ladder).

    This machine did not come with either a modem or a sound card but by Christmas I had both a Sound Blaster 16 ASP and a second hand 2400 bps modem. The modem was upgraded on a regular basis from 2400 to 14400 to 28800 to 33600 and finally to 56K (USR X2 and then the final standard). Sometimes an upgrade meant a new modem, sometimes a ROM chip swap and sometimes a ROM flash. For a time when USR and Hayes had competing standards dial-up could be frustratingly buggy or incompatible depending on what you were connecting to but that’s another story. Other than those things, I never really upgraded anything on this machine. I contemplated upgrading to 32 MB RAM but that meant I had to disable the motherboard cache (which was important for speed at that time) or getting one of those fancy Pentium Overdrive chips but it was never really cost effective. This was my primary machine from August 1993 until December 1997 when I got a brand new Pentium II-300 (also from gateway) and this one was given to my parents (sans the original monitor which had recently died). I got it back several years later but it was stored in the garage for a while and eventually tossed except for a few parts I held on to:

    486 DX2 66

     

    This, of course, is the brain of the machine. Not sure why I kept it but here it is. Maybe I’ll put together another 486 machine for nostalgia’s sake one day. It only ran at 66 MHz and that was a clock doubling of the system bus which ran at 33 MHz. But it was the fastest thing available at the time.

    486 DX2 66 (bottom)

     

    While the package size of desktop CPUs has not changed too much over the years, the size of the core, the number of transistors packed into it, and the number of pins have all changed drastically.

    The one other piece I kept was the Sound Blaster 16 ASP card. The Sound Blaster 16 was THE sound card of the day. The Pro Audio Spectrum 16 was arguably better but not as well supported. The ASP version of the card added hardware compression among other things. I don’t think ASP features were ever really used in games but it did allow you to do nifty things like record and playback lossless compressed .wav files. One other thing to note was that the CD-ROM interface was often on the sound card in the early days so I had to have the particular Sound Blaster card that had the appropriate interface for my Philips CD-ROM drive. Later CD-ROM drives were SCSI or IDE based like hard drives.

    rkuk7bk8x


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