That's awesome, my first PC was a K6-2 400, and Half-Life was one of the first games I played on it. What motherboard was it if I may ask? I can't remember my first motherboard or graphics card, only that it wasn't a Voodoo.

My first Half-Life playtrough was with a Pentium 133 with Voodoo, so NO!

The minimum rrqiurements were Pentium 166 if my memory serves me correct. It was playable. Interlevel waiting times were atrocious. Played in easy mode so no overwhelming monsters.

If you can support AGP, TNT2 cards are the best period-correct value for money for playing Half-Life.

I played it again a few years ago, took 16 hours and by the end I was just sprinting through it. Huge leap forward from Quake 1 in terms of design, sound, experience....

Tried playing it back in the day on my Pentium 133 with TNT2M64 but was too slow to finish it.

I ended up finishing it once I upgrade to a Duron 800 (with the same TNT2M64), was great then!

My friend had a Pentium II 350 w/TNT2 and it ran pretty well on it.

I'm currently playing They Hunger Mod (https://www.moddb.com/mods/they-hunger) on my DeskPro EN, P3 1GHz, Voodoo 4 4500 PCI (zxc64 64mb version) and Windows 2000, and it is very nice!

asdf53 wrote on 2023-12-08, 18:57:

What motherboard was it if I may ask?

Yeah it's a Gigabyte GA-5AA, a baby AT SS7 board. The one I have now is one I bought a few weeks ago. New old stock in box, rev. 3.2. Absolutely pristine board, even smelled new. I really love the system. It's not especially fast but I think it's a nice all rounder for that era, and of course the spec is very sentimental to me. According to old invoices and emails from that time I had a GA-5AA in '99, then a replacement GA-5AA in 2000 which was a warrenty replacement, then an ASUS P5A also in 2000 before moving on to an Athlon platform at the end of the year.

mwdmeyer wrote on 2023-12-09, 07:53:

I'm currently playing They Hunger Mod (https://www.moddb.com/mods/they-hunger) on my DeskPro EN, P3 1GHz, Voodoo 4 4500 PCI (zxc64 64mb version) and Windows 2000, and it is very nice!

Oh wow, that's a blast from the past! I don't remember how much of that mod I played but it's set some bells ringing. My friends and I were in secondary school at that time (high school) and one friend in particular had a few PCs at his house. Many an afternoon after school were spent doing LAN games of HLDM and whatever crazy new mod was on the latest PC Gamer cover disc (or any other magazine). I remember we started CS that way. Science and Industry was another one we liked, and Sven Co-op too. Happy memories. We're all pushing 40 now 🥲

Great to hear your stories of what you played the game on. All those low-end systems, we just had to make the best of what we had.

Shadzilla wrote on 2023-12-09, 10:48:

asdf53 wrote on 2023-12-08, 18:57:

What motherboard was it if I may ask?

Yeah it's a Gigabyte GA-5AA, a baby AT SS7 board. The one I have now is one I bought a few weeks ago. New old stock in box, rev. 3.2. Absolutely pristine board, even smelled new. I really love the system.

Nice, that's one with the ALi chipset, they are supposed to be the fastest. The only SS 7 board I have (DFI K6BV3+/66) is sadly on its last legs and crashing all the time, I'm looking for a new one for quite some time now. I get why these boards are so sought after, they just feel so right for the games from that era. I never got that nostalgia feeling out of later boards, yes they run everything faster but it feels like cheating.