Hmm. It's been a long time. I think I had an AMD K6-2 350 at that time. And I even played via software (Yucks!) at first until I got a Leatek TNT2 card.

it was either a amd 486/133 or a celeron 300, 32mb of ram and as for graphics i have no idea, i was only 10 or 11 at the time. It must have been something somewhat capable because it played blood2 ok and i dont think blood had a software mode.

I played the game on a Pentium 133 with an S3 Virge and 64mb RAM, my first PC, but I must have been around 6 then and I couldn't play it for more than 10 minutes it scared the crap out of me. That was in 2000. Actually it was a demo of Opposing Force not really Half-Life.
After a year and a half I upgraded to a Celeron 900 with a SIS 630 , which is similar to a i740 but integrated and with very bad drivers, and played Half Life 1 which some friend had given me.

I wasn't more than 8 years old at the time so I really don't think I used to tweak any graphics options (other than using 3danalyse to emulate TNL so that I could play Spider-man the Movie 😜). I started playing with graphics options when I got a pentium 4 and a geforce FX 5600 XT. Man all these upgrades and I never got a GOOD video card, it was only when I started buying computers myself that I did myself a real favour and bought better graphics cards to better processors.

heh. Blood 2 definetly has a software mode.

Simon wrote:

it was either a amd 486/133 or a celeron 300, 32mb of ram and as for graphics i have no idea, i was only 10 or 11 at the time. It must have been something somewhat capable because it played blood2 ok and i dont think blood had a software mode.

Considering Blood 2 takes a monster to run compared to Half-Life at the time, it's your celeron. Blood 2 indeed has a software mode.

Half-Life totally sucks on AM5x86, been there done that 😀 the floating point usage literally force grips the cpu to death. Figuratively it runs like molasses, even in plain deathmatch with NO PLAYERS it runs 4fps, and this is with a 3d card!

Software Half-Life doesn't look too bad actually considering it only supported that during its production until sometime mid-97 when they adopted OpenGL support from the Quakeworld base.

My 486-120 wouldn't even run Dink Smallwood, let alone Half-Life. It did run Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II in software mode (at maybe 5 FPS) and Quake 1 at around 15 FPS.

Forget 486s. I've been playing this the last 2 nights on my 233mmx and it runs so slow it's painful 😵 Guess the real requirements are double what the official ones are...hmphh

sgt76 wrote:

Forget 486s. I've been playing this the last 2 nights on my 233mmx and it runs so slow it's painful 😵 Guess the real requirements are double what the official ones are...hmphh

That makes sense if you're running it on software mode with and at 640x480.
Try it at 320x240.

It was either a Pentium 233Mhz MMX or a Celeron 266Mhz. The video card was a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 1 addon card to a Matrox Mystique. Good times. I remember playing Counter-Strike Beta 5 at 7 FPS. I remember clearly having to lower the screen resolution AND shrink the actual playing screen (not windowed. that card wouldn't allow windowed 3D graphics). It was also around this time that I learned all those console commands to lower the graphics quality further.

I had a 486 DX2 66Mhz once with PCI slots. That was my computer for a while. Onboard video to boot. I tried installing Jedi Knight on it and I got to the menu and that's as far as it would go. Mysteries of the Sith wouldn't even run.

F2bnp wrote:

sgt76 wrote:

Forget 486s. I've been playing this the last 2 nights on my 233mmx and it runs so slow it's painful 😵 Guess the real requirements are double what the official ones are...hmphh

That makes sense if you're running it on software mode with and at 640x480.
Try it at 320x240.

Nopes, running voodoo2 mini-gl. 640x480. It's fine and dandy if you're just runnin' around doing nothin, but the minute you got some action happening on the screen, it just laaaaggs.

Sorry, can't play it like this. Wouldnt have had a choice in 98 but I think I'll just reserve this one for my PIII.

sgt76 wrote:

Nopes, running voodoo2 mini-gl. 640x480. It's fine and dandy if you're just runnin' around doing nothin, but the minute you got some action happening on the screen, it just laaaaggs.

Sorry, can't play it like this. Wouldnt have had a choice in 98 but I think I'll just reserve this one for my PIII.

I ran HL1 with a 16mb Voodoo Banshee and it ran fine... i'm sure the Banshee is weaker than the Voodoo2 at 3D. All my mates were a bit jealous at the time 😁

Maybe your processor made it lag? I was using a PII 350mhz at the time with 128mb RAM 😀

HL only needs 64MB RAM to get the stock game going smoothly. Mods tend to be more unrealistic in demands so it's still not enough for that.

It's also sort of playable in 32MB too, providing you turn on Low sound quality (the DSP is a chewer)

What the hell guys, I used to run the game on a Pentium II 233 with Voodoo 2 SLI at 1024x768 and 96mb of ram. I'm sure it was running at more than 30 fps at all times.
What have you done to your PC 😜?

PowerPie5000 wrote:

I ran HL1 with a 16mb Voodoo Banshee and it ran fine... i'm sure the Banshee is weaker than the Voodoo2 at 3D. All my mates were a bit jealous at the time 😁

Maybe your processor made it lag? I was using a PII 350mhz at the time with 128mb RAM 😀

Yeah, the Voodoo2 is supposed to be better but I'm having a bad case of bottlenecking with the mmx.

HL1 is really a quantum leap forward in system requirements (more comparable to '99 titles) but maybe Sierra/ Valve downplayed this at launch to attract as many buyers as possible. I reckon the real requirements are closer to what Kingpin/ SS2 need than Quake 2.

I first played this on my original computer:
A P166MMX with 196mb RAM and a 12mb Voodoo 2.
Half life ran perfectly but the load times between sections were just long enough to be annoying!

I still have this computer and still play old games on it on an almost daily basis!

I first played hl1 on 2.8 ghz dual core with an x1650 pro ati, guess i was little late on that one.

I played the game shortly after it was released on my brand new AMD K6-2 333MHz with a 3DFX Voodoo card. I got a Voodoo2 12MB card later, which was a huge improvement for the game.

The game was really nice, but it didn't "wow" me as much as DOOM did when I first played it 😉

The awe-inspiring power of a Cyrix 6x86 PR200+ with 64 MB EDO RAM and a 4 MB Monster3D/4 MB Matrox Mystique got me through the game well enough. Software rendering was more or less out of the question, but the Mystique's 2D really did make the best of a bad situation on the rare occasion that I tried. Even with the Monster3D engaged the framerate dipped and weaved like Sugar Ray Leonard in demanding scenes. Deathmatches were very... touch and go. 😀 As I recall I enabled gl_flashblend 1 to cut back on the dynamic lighting, and that helped pretty significantly.

That said, Half-Life's narrative was so compelling and beyond anything else on the scene at that point that I can't say intermittent stuttering bothered me all that much. Unreal was a different and far more traumatic story. My brain caught fire after I built an Athlon 500 with 256 MB PC100 SDRAM and a Voodoo3 2000 to replace that box, though the Cyrix system remained on-hand as a dedicated server and adorable ancient computer until the motherboard finally died a few years ago.