Something like this? Heck, we are talking P3 here!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwU1tQD-Was

I just found uxwbill's channel a few weeks ago and really got into it.

I do sigh when surfing around seeing all the ignorant comments but I've accepted most people think they are experts just cause they own the latest and greatest and anything else is wrong/worthless.
Its why I hang out here, I guess the fact we're focusing on old means we escape the mainstream thinking and most likely trying to recreate/relive something from our own past not compete against each other as the most knowledgeable, with the fastest system, etc.

sliderider wrote:

I recently made the mistake of asking in the EQEmu forums if anyone plays EQ on the emulated servers using vintage hardware and you should have seen the sheer ignorance and rank stupidity on display. It was like every troll with an internet connection suddenly showed up all at once. Not a single person had a kind word to say about running the game on vintage hardware and most were flat out dicks about it.

That's awesome, I thought I was the only one who did that 😉

When playing old MMORPGs like Ultima Online or Meridian 59, I like to use vintage hardware that's close to the hardware I used when I originally played those games.
I've been meaning to get into EQ, but couldn't find a lot of resources on the original hardware requirements and if those changed with the client updates over the years. Right now I'm building a high end '99 system for that. It's a couple of months newer than EQ was released, but I'm not -that- picky.

I remember EQ being playable on a Voodoo2 12mb with 64mb PC100 ...that was 1999 however.

Yea one of my friends initially played EQ on a K6-2 with Voodoo2. It wasn't exactly smooth but my friend enjoyed it.

Original EQ system requirements were P166MMX, 32 MB RAM and some 3D accelerator like Voodoo Rush, later music support was added that worked on AWE32 exclusivly first. (Even later they added the Miles Softsynth)
In the last beta phase I used a K6-233 with 64 MB RAM and a Voodoo2 and it was playable. The bottleneck was the CPU.

The current Project 1999 is based on EQ Titanium that is much newer than the original EQ. If you configure it to use the old DirectX7 renderer it might run with a GF2. The DX7 engine was introduced with the Luclin expansion. With this aspect you can not run the game as in 1999.
Just to give one example, in the original EQ for certain races the night was really black and it made sense to buy a lantern. They removed the dark nights since players complained that it is not senseful to play as such a race at night. So all the stuff like "Infravision", "Ultravision" and 8light sources like Lanterns and Light Stones are just decoration now, while it was part of the game originally.
here just two examples with screens from beta4 with a Infravision* capable race:

Edited by Qbix: Images were giving warning

*) Infravision was implemented like heat vision where other players and opponents showed in a red shade, while environment graphics stayed very dark at night.

I see, so there aren't any private servers that use the original client? That's unfortunate, I was hoping for something like UOSecondage for EQ.

Very interesting information about the exclusive AWE32 support 😀

elianda wrote:

The DX7 engine was introduced with the Luclin expansion.

Wrong. When Luclin was released, the graphical requirement was raised to DX 8.1, it was already DX 7 prior to that. At launch in 1999, the graphical requirement was DX 6. Originally,the Luclin requirement was going to be DX 8.0 but I suspect pressure or a bribe from Microsoft to use 8.1 because a lot of EQ players were still using Windows 95 and DX 8.1 requires Windows 98 or higher so Microsoft would have made a lot of money from players forced to upgrade. I had to stop playing for several weeks before I could afford to buy Windows 98.

Ok maybe my memory was wrong, at least a DX7 graphics card with TnL was sufficient.

And it didn't strictly require a DX8.1 card with pixel shaders. A TNT2 could still run it IIRC

an update to a later DirectX API doesn't necessarily mean support for older hardware is immediately shed. PowerVR PCX2 has no DX6 or 7 support and can still run AVP2 ( a DX7 game) somehow...

leileilol wrote:

And it didn't strictly require a DX8.1 card with pixel shaders. A TNT2 could still run it IIRC

Yes a lot of older cards would still work, but many became glitchy and the higher resolution textures and character models that were used in the Luclin zones would bring most of the older cards that had previously been merely adequate to a crawl so a lot of people not only had to upgrade Windows versions but also their video cards. Cards with 32mb or less were affected the most. My cousin upgraded to a 64mb FX5200 as soon as they came out and his EQ experience was a lot faster with the extra RAM. I'm pretty sure the CPU usage also went up a lot with Luclin, if not then then definitely by the time Planes of Power was released so having a system that was near the trailing edge of the minimum requirements meant you were in for another big upgrade expense.

I tend to run into the same results when I discuss computers with people in person.
I know I'm not very well learned in many vintage hardware catagories, but it gets frusterating when I ask for advice about something and people reply with proud ignorance.

Some time ago, I was talking to an old friend about the Cyrix CPUs of the Socket 3 era. He had actually been one of the ones that introduced the Cyrix CPUs to me. Yet when I started to discuss what I and several members on this forum had found, he immediatly argued that the AMD 5x86 CPU at 133 MHz was vastly superiour to anything that Cyrix "could bring to the table" and that any benchmarks that I could produce weren't "real world numbers". I quickly realized that I was wasting my breath and it would be better to just leave the topic behind.

The best thing to do when they won't accept your advice, is to leave them to their folly. At least in my experience. 😖