Sounds right, work doesn't need sound card hell.

I think the US generally have been a bit behind parts of Europe in getting into the new trends. I remember lots of people in the US still running analogue modems when most people here had moved on to ADSL. In Norway, I think CD-ROM pretty much became mainstream around '92-'93. I remember getting a demo of "Windows Chicago" on a CD that came with a computer magazine, and I'd had my Quad-speed CD-ROM drive for a good while by then.

Oops, edited a typo.

It is probably the opposite here in post-communist parts of Europe, because of the economy. The positive side effect was that much great 8-bit and 16-bit software was programmed here, especially in Poland, that kept many of these machines going long after Atari/Commodore abandoned them. Also, some "zomg expensive" hardware has became much cheaper later when it was abandoned by Western gaming fans, resulting in for example 3DO and Jaguar becoming quite popular gaming machines by 1996 or so in the Czech Republic if old gaming magazine scans are any indication.

m1so wrote:

It is probably the opposite here in post-communist parts of Europe, because of the economy. The positive side effect was that much great 8-bit and 16-bit software was programmed here, especially in Poland, that kept many of these machines going long after Atari/Commodore abandoned them. Also, some "zomg expensive" hardware has became much cheaper later when it was abandoned by Western gaming fans, resulting in for example 3DO and Jaguar becoming quite popular gaming machines by 1996 or so in the Czech Republic if old gaming magazine scans are any indication.

It also seems to be quite a goodish stock of old computer bits to be found there as well. I've bought a motherboard + cpu for a 486 build from Ukraine. Here in Norway, most people threw that stuff away ages ago. It makes me really sad that people don't see the value in these lovely old bits.

I do know Europe had the upper hand on early DVD drive adoption... 😀

I was wondering about this regarding sound cards recently when I realized that when I was 11 I was playing Sierra games using the pc speaker, but at 14 I was playing Crusader: No Remorse with digital sound effects.... so I guess the 486-DX4/100 my Dad bought in the meantime must have had a sound card. Otherwise, Crusader would have had no sound, right?

LunarG wrote:

It also seems to be quite a goodish stock of old computer bits to be found there as well. I've bought a motherboard + cpu for a 486 build from Ukraine. Here in Norway, most people threw that stuff away ages ago. It makes me really sad that people don't see the value in these lovely old bits.

Yeah. Hell, I have a 14 year old friend (I am freshly 20 by the way) who still has an old 1.1 Ghz Athlon with 256 MB RAM. Not as a retro machine, but his main machine. He also had a Pentium I with Quake, Doom etc. as a child, in fact he still has it in the attic. He knows about my interest in computers and he'd gladly give me the old Pentium for free, but I declined seeing as my parents already see me as a computer freak (even through I probably spend less time on the computer than the average MMORPG player).

Sometimes, those people on certain gaming forums who think a GTX 670 is "low end" and who say stuff like "anyone who does not have blue LEDs on his rig is gay" or "anything below 5780x1050 and 120 fps hurts my eyes" seem like from a different planet to me. I have a modern i7 rig that runs most modern games on Ultra and I'd STILL slap those spoiled fuckers in the face. Sometimes, it seems that the mainstream "PC gamer" club is composed exclusively by ridiculously rich jerks.