Building a Quake PC
29 points by roskelld 4 days ago | 13 comments
  • markus_zhang 4 days ago |
    This is a fascinating read.

    Back in 1997 my father had a Pentium box with maybe 16MB of RAM. I was able to play Duke 3D and I stuck in E1M3 too and didn’t figure that out until much later.

    I wonder how well Fabien’s build runs Unreal. It was the pinnacle of classic FPS IMO. I used to drool over a voodoo card but I immersed myself playing in software rendering mode in a netbar.

    Good time.

    • pengaru 4 days ago |
      I had pentiums with voodoos back then, when Unreal came out it did not perform particularly well on that hardware compared to nvidia and didn't have the same graphics quality. Unreal with the nvidia TNT2/GeForce 256 marked the beginning of the end for the voodoo era, if memory serves.

      3dfx hay day was really quite quake-centric, you'd be remiss to not use their hardware in a vintage quake pc build.

      • markus_zhang 3 days ago |
        Thanks, I do recall Unreal has a 3d fx video mode that is pretty good? Or was it bad memory.
      • pjmlp 3 days ago |
        Indeed, in 1998 I wanted a Voodoo for some 3D work I was going to do, and naturally wanted the best and also play with Glide.

        However it had a problem with my PCI version, and the shop guy was nice to trade it back for a TNT, which not only had no issues with my motherboard, made me an early NVidia customer.

    • fabiensanglard 3 days ago |
      What a timing you have :) ! Digital Foundry did a piece just 12 days ago (https://youtu.be/npMujOQsjGQ?si=4c8fmYDTMrRzFNhl&t=503).

      "When Unreal came out, it supported three renderer. Software, Glide, and PowerVR."

      My MMX Pentium MMX 233MHz (512x384 with Creative Voodoo 2, patch patch 223 from https://oldunreal.com/downloads/unreal/oldunreal-patches/) benchmark, the intro goes from 60fps down to 10 fps when the whole castle is seen in the intro. When I start the game, in the cell, I can see 20fps.

      I think the CPU is too light for this game. Definitely a title that requires a Pentium II.

      Note that all fps gathered with "stat fps". There is a timedemo (https://www.gweb.me.uk/gweb/unrealsetup.htm) that I shall give a try someday.

    • ahartmetz 2 days ago |
      >16MB of RAM

      Speaking of which, pretty sure that none but the earliest Pentium PCs had a chance of having less than 16 MB of RAM. The article says 8 MB were typical.

      I got a 486 with 4 MB in mid 1994, which was shortly (months, I think) before 8 MB became the norm. Pentiums became the norm maybe in mid 1995. That was in Germany, but PC part prices have always been global and I suspect that all high income countries spent similar amounts on computers.

  • racked 3 days ago |
    > As I ranted against the '90s and "how hard it was back then to have access to information", my wife came over the workbench, looked at the HDD, and then calmly informed me the J50 was the pins on the left. Hein, mais comment tu sais ca? Then she flipped the HDD to show me the PCB pins were labeled!

    Mr. Sanglard is a lucky man :-)

    • markus_zhang 3 days ago |
      God tier wife. Maybe Mrs.Sanglard (if she has changed the name) should start a blog too.
  • apelapan 3 days ago |
    That Linksys card feels out of place in an over-the-top late 90s build.

    As I recall it, the local LAN scene had an almost religious cult around 3com 10mbit ISA cards, that eventually morphed into a similar thing for Intel 100mbit cards.

    Drivers and hardware were even more shit back in those days than today. Cards known to have worked in multiple motherboards and across multiple operating systems were held in high regard.

    • toast0 3 days ago |
      A 3rd party NE2000 is a pretty reasonable choice. Certainly, some circles would have a following for specific makers and boards, but the NE2000 was everywhere... There's a reason it's so common in virtual machines; the open design helps too.
    • nineteen999 3 days ago |
      At the cheap end we relied on NE2000 ISA card clones, we couldn't afford fancy gear like 3com and they worked under Windows/Linux just well enough to play LAN games.
    • roskelld 3 days ago |
      You've just brought back an old memory there. We used to do LAN parties at the weekend, and none of us has network cards, but one of our friends worked in the IT department of the local university. So he would bring a stack of cards with him and we'd spend hours setting them up and getting each PC on the network, often with great failure if he couldn't bring a batch of same branded cards.

      We did learn over time which cards hated connecting with each other, and if he could bag a full batch of 3com we knew we'd likely be in for some early gaming.

  • jasonb05 3 days ago |
    Outstanding!

    I cannot wait for a quake engine book. I'm sure a few hundred of us would be happy to pre-pay so you can take some time off work and write it all up :)