386SX wrote:

cause the Oak vga was too slow.

Yea exactly, it was not just about the CPU and the amount of memory. 'Bargain basement' clones didn't quite cut it, because they'd save money by using cheap Oak/Realtek/Trident VGA etc. You needed a pretty decent VGA card for proper gaming, and those were expensive (Paradise, ET3000/4000 etc).
Not to mention that the Sound Blaster Pro cost about the same as an entire Amiga 500 did at the time... and sounded worse.
Gaming on PC was stupid expensive, and the results were sub-par to boot, in those days.

Scali wrote:

Yea exactly, it was not just about the CPU and the amount of memory. 'Bargain basement' clones didn't quite cut it, because they […]
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386SX wrote:

cause the Oak vga was too slow.

Yea exactly, it was not just about the CPU and the amount of memory. 'Bargain basement' clones didn't quite cut it, because they'd save money by using cheap Oak/Realtek/Trident VGA etc. You needed a pretty decent VGA card for proper gaming, and those were expensive (Paradise, ET3000/4000 etc).
Not to mention that the Sound Blaster Pro cost about the same as an entire Amiga 500 did at the time... and sounded worse.
Gaming on PC was stupid expensive, and the results were sub-par to boot, in those days.

Right, back in those time I didn't even understand the possibility to improve games by switching to another graphic card. You could only hear about cpu and ram that's why I didn't understand why a friend's 486SX (25 or 33mhz) crashed my 386 anywhere (only later to know it had a Cirrus or S3 805 VLB connected card). If only I knew back then I'd have bought a Cirrus card instead of 4MB of simm that were really expensive even when 386 were already obsolete.
Not to mention sound cards, 🤣. Never had one until the K62 ESS cheap isa. I did hate the sound of games like Stunts or Test Drive 3 with it, I was the only one that always liked the internal pc speaker sound. 😁

Being that I have just really gotten back into the nuts of bolts of retro computing (aside from collecting parts for a few years here and there and reading / watching various things) I am going the Period Correct route within reason. I am not going as far as getting it down to the months things were released, but at least trying to keep it all within the same year / generation for each build. There is some overlap with things that came out late in one year and others that came out earlier in the following year, but you get the idea.

If anything else, it keeps me on the hunt for new stuff as well as continues to allow me to build a machine for a time period while also starting to look into the next period machine I want to do, seeing what I have for it and what I need for it. Then I can build it off what I have at first, then as time and money do their thing, upgrade parts of it until its where I want it to be.

Allows the hobby to keep being fun and hands-on for a longer period of time.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

If there are no speed or compatibility issues, I like to use something that is somewhat faster and lets me enjoy it maxed out. Sometimes this isn't possible, like with Splinter Cell, and you are constraint by the hardware and software requirements.

But I don't like to use something that is too far ahead of its time. So yea, something that runs the game maxed out and without slow-downs and I'm happy.

That's me too

It's nice to start from a low-end time correct config to see how games run and step by step upgrade hardware still time correct but high end and look at the differences. 😈
Usually for me a good way to enjoy retro machines is to slowly improve them as much as I could not in their time for costs reasons.

Scali wrote:

It seems that the younger generations aren't even aware of the fact that non-x86 systems used to exist, let alone that the PC wasn't always the best or even very good at gaming.
Which is why ideally I'd like to have some sort of 'museum', where you could see the actual arcade machine, and then ports of that arcade game on various platforms of the time, including the PC.

The closest you'll probably get to this 'museum' is emulating these games across all released platforms, and putting into perspective the times of each release. Usually, these ports were released significantly later than the original Arcade version, and one loses the sense of awe from this.

Scali wrote:

I don't see what's nebulous about it. "Period correct" means you can't use expansion cards/CPUs/memory etc that weren't available on the market at the time. You could still use the most 'kitted out' PC humanly possible in that period (which is pretty much what PC gamers had to have anyway, given the limitations of the platform).
Expansions are quite irrelevant in this respect, because if you could get a CPU or memory upgrade-kit, then you could also get a new computer with that CPU and that amount of memory directly. Which was always the better option, because you'd get a better/newer motherboard with less bottlenecks.

This is what's nebulous: Where do you draw the line for market availability?

I could've gone to my local PC vendor and bought a relatively old piece of hardware, and at the same time picked up the latest and greatest piece to add to my PC. What if this vendor kept very old stock at appropriate prices?

What if I travelled and took advantage of the global market? Or I had no access to the global market?

What if I bought on the used market because I was a cheap-ass and ignored the latest and greatest?

What if I refused to buy discontinued products because I considered them dated and past their shelf-life?

What if I decided to keep my favourite expansion card and install it into the latest and greatest PC?

What if I refused to buy any future expansion cards because that would not be 'Period Correct'?

Calling something 'Period Correct' implies there is a 'Period Incorrect'. Where do you draw this line? With an arbitrary 'market availibility' line where you "can't" use future products, even though the PC is designed for said future products?

The point of THE PC is that it was designed with *future expansion* in mind, and if it works to your requirements, then that is your Personal Computer. They are *all* PCs.

I get all your "what-if's" and they make sense, but I get around any of that by using the within a calendar year of each other or less for the parts and generally the same generation of video cards if muliptle that I want to put on each build.

For example, for my Pentium II setup, I have a Motherboard from early 1997 (I dont have the exact date with me), a Voodoo1 from October 1996, a RIVA TNT from April 1997, so all were released within 6 months of each other. A Soundblaster AWE64 from November 1996 is my sound card..

The other items (RAM / Power Supply) are more what I have and what works obviously.

Doing it this way keeps in a Period of time and really takes away any of the other questions:

I could've gone to my local PC vendor and bought a relatively old piece of hardware, and at the same time picked up the latest and greatest piece to add to my PC. What if this vendor kept very old stock at appropriate prices?

There will be a Pentiurm 133 and a Pentium III build as well that I will do the same way with parts from Feb 98 - Feb 99, so all 12 months in this case. In each case, if mulitple graphics cards are present (as with the Voodoo's) the card coupled with them is one of their competitors during that period and not the next card up.

On top of that, for future builds, I will build some newer and some older machines with the parts I have at first, and if the dates are a little further than 1 year and not the parts I want in it, it gives me something to go for and take some time to find at a good price and then get to install it and mess with it.

I like period correct. I like to go through magazines and stuff seeing what was hot and what was not and from the list I put a machine together.
But then there are always exceptions. HDD, ODD, cases, psu. I usually don't go crazy for high end, because f.e. a high end 486 is probably as good as a low end Pentium.
So if I need to skip an era for availability and price, I will.

The only two (slightly) period-incorrect pieces in all of my 98SE builds are a DVD-R burner and Norton Ghost 2003. Absolutely essential. I keep a binder of DVD-Rs with specific "clean" installs for each of my builds:

SE440BX-2 with AWE32 CT3900
SE440BX-2 with Aureal Vortex2
VA-503+ with GUS Classic
VA-503+ with YMF724
etc.

I make the backup using the Standard VGA (PCI) driver so that I can pop in any video card for the restore and have it work immediately.

boxpressed wrote:

The only two (slightly) period-incorrect pieces in all of my 98SE builds are a DVD-R burner and Norton Ghost 2003. Absolutely essential. I keep a binder of DVD-Rs with specific "clean" installs for each of my builds:

VA-503+ with GUS Classic

GUS classic - 1992
VA-503+ - 1998

Doesn't seem much period correct to me...

Hah. You're right. It was the GUS Ace, not GUS Classic. 😉

j^aws wrote:

This is what's nebulous: Where do you draw the line for market availability?

What line? It was either available on the market on a given date, or it wasn't.
In short: it's not an exact science. The point is just that you don't go overboard.
I guess a decent guideline is this: most games would include a recommended system configuration. By definition this system would be available. And especially in the early days, these specs would be high-end to cutting-edge consumer systems. So to be 'period correct', you'd play the game on a machine that approaches the recommended system configuration, so you get an experience that approaches the experience the developers were going for.

j^aws wrote:

The point of THE PC is that it was designed with *future expansion* in mind, and if it works to your requirements, then that is your Personal Computer. They are *all* PCs.

Yea, and if that were true, this forum would not have existed, because we would not have ANY problems whatsoever to run old games on modern PCs without any kind of emulators, specific hardware, drivers, wrappers etc.

Anyway, my point was not about the PC platform as a whole. Please re-read my original post, and see that I was talking about reproducing the gaming experience in a historically accurate context. Basically: "If you played this game when it was released, this is what it looked/sounded like".
I'm not saying that this is something everyone should do, I'm just saying that it would be interesting to preserve old games in this way, for future generations. Playing a game like Doom on a real 486DX2-66 VLB with a CRT is a completely different experience from playing it in DOSBox on a modern system (you see the same argument about real arcade machines vs a modern system running MAME. There's even some shops specialized in restoring original arcade machines). I would like to somehow preserve that original experience for people to see what games really were like.

I actually mostly build whatever I feel like and I like to just try out stuff.
These may be either "optimal" or balanced rigs (like s370 i815 Coppermine board with 1GHz 133MHz FSB Coppermine and AGP Geforce 2 or Geforce MX or Celeron 800 (because it's the slowest officially released 100MHz FSB Celeron) or K6-3 400 (non-plus) with Voodoo 2 or A64 2.2GHz with GF7600GS/GF6800.

Optical drives I tend to prefer using correctly-colored DVD drives compared to the front bezel of the case (or CDROM drive in case of anything pre-'97), preferably without making the sound of a jet engine when readong a disk 🤣

I do prefer to use somewhat period-correct cases, but only as long as it doesn't hamper the quality of the build (like using a beige case for a Thunderbird 1400, but the case being better suited for improved air-circulation, often resulting in me picking a more recent case).

And after the build is done I start trying out some games to enjoy the experience 😁

Smack2k wrote:

I get all your "what-if's" and they make sense, but I get around any of that by using the within a calendar year of each other or less for the parts and generally the same generation of video cards if muliptle that I want to put on each build.

I see, and within a calendar year is your way of restrictring a build. I could choose 18 months, or 3 years within each other. Or I could choose whatever works in my build with parts available at the launch of the orginal IBM PC to any arbritrary date set past this. So from 1983-1981, 1987-1981, 1990-1981, 1996-1981... and so on.

Scali wrote:

What line? It was either available on the market on a given date, or it wasn't.

This line is a moving line. I understand that you are picking an arbritray date in the past and saying you can't add anything newer to that build because it wouldn't have existed after that given date. But in reality, living through that period, we could've upgraded our PCs past that arbritrary date - 6 months past, 12 monthas past, 2 years past... or rebuilt the PC and taking parts from our 3 year old PC instead. Or built a PC with the latest parts only.

Market availability is restricting the latest available parts for a build, not the oldest available parts.

Scali wrote:

In short: it's not an exact science. The point is just that you don't go overboard.
I guess a decent guideline is this: most games would include a recommended system configuration. By definition this system would be available. And especially in the early days, these specs would be high-end to cutting-edge consumer systems. So to be 'period correct', you'd play the game on a machine that approaches the recommended system configuration, so you get an experience that approaches the experience the developers were going for.

That's a good guidline. Take an arbitrary date and a game, then that will give you the parts available for that build and then you can enjoy that game as the developer intended.

That's for one game. What about all games released prior to that date? Make a seperate build for each? Or for groups of games released every year, and a build for them? Every 3 years? Every 5 years? A build from 1983-1988? From 1994-1981? How many PCs do you want to build?

I see your point about not to go overboard, but why not? Because it would break compatibility? Because it's too far from the developers specs? - The former is understandable and the latter is too, if you want to experience the recommended specs. But if your build covers those two reasons, then build whatever works.

Scali wrote:

Yea, and if that were true, this forum would not have existed, because we would not have ANY problems whatsoever to run old games on modern PCs without any kind of emulators, specific hardware, drivers, wrappers etc.

Yes, the IBM PC was built with future expansion in mind. I don't think anyone at launch would've known where this would end up. And it's a shame the PC doesn't have perfect backwards compatibility. But a newer PC emulating an older PC, in a sense, is going full circle and marching forwards. They are both still PCs.

Scali wrote:

Anyway, my point was not about the PC platform as a whole. Please re-read my original post, and see that I was talking about reproducing the gaming experience in a historically accurate context. Basically: "If you played this game when it was released, this is what it looked/sounded like".
I'm not saying that this is something everyone should do, I'm just saying that it would be interesting to preserve old games in this way, for future generations. Playing a game like Doom on a real 486DX2-66 VLB with a CRT is a completely different experience from playing it in DOSBox on a modern system (you see the same argument about real arcade machines vs a modern system running MAME. There's even some shops specialized in restoring original arcade machines). I would like to somehow preserve that original experience for people to see what games really were like.

I completely understand this and agree with the sentiment. Being realistic, it would be easiest to emulate and compare as I mentioned earlier. Having a museum with real hardware and comparing games across various formats is doable, but someone will have to fund this and maintain it. I'm sure there are individuals out there with collections to display this already. And the most interesting/ valued items should pass around collectors hands until they get donated to a museum or lost to time - hopefully the former...

j^aws wrote:

Smack2k wrote:

I get all your "what-if's" and they make sense, but I get around any of that by using the within a calendar year of each other or less for the parts and generally the same generation of video cards if muliptle that I want to put on each build.

I see, and within a calendar year is your way of restrictring a build. I could choose 18 months, or 3 years within each other. Or I could choose whatever works in my build with parts available at the launch of the orginal IBM PC to any arbritrary date set past this. So from 1983-1981, 1987-1981, 1990-1981, 1996-1981... and so on.

Yes you certainly could, but under my calendar year (which isnt exactly right, its within 12 months of each other and the same generation) I dont have that large range you mention that would start adding the "what-if's". With the timeline down to a narrow range, you are only left with a few choices to work with.

But in the end, the other comment you made was right, build whatever you want...I would build one for every year if I had the space / resources to do so...

j^aws wrote:

This line is a moving line. I understand that you are picking an arbritray date in the past and saying you can't add anything newer to that build because it wouldn't have existed after that given date. But in reality, living through that period, we could've upgraded our PCs past that arbritrary date - 6 months past, 12 monthas past, 2 years past... or rebuilt the PC and taking parts from our 3 year old PC instead. Or built a PC with the latest parts only.

Market availability is restricting the latest available parts for a build, not the oldest available parts.

Yes, but you'd obviously pick the high-end to cutting-edge parts. This is gaming we're talking about. I could even buy an 8088 machine today, but that's hardly relevant, is it?

j^aws wrote:

That's for one game. What about all games released prior to that date? Make a seperate build for each? Or for groups of games released every year, and a build for them? Every 3 years? Every 5 years? A build from 1983-1988? From 1994-1981?

Why are you trying to overcomplicate things? Hardware upgrades came in waves, and so did the games and their system requirements.
I mean, new CPUs would only get introduced once every 3-5 years.
Also, for some games it's more relevant than for others. Some games aren't very speed-sensitive and/or work exactly the same on a wide variety of hardware.

j^aws wrote:

How many PCs do you want to build?

If we're talking about my proposal of a kind of 'virtual museum' that displays all games as the developers meant them to be played, then the answer is: as many as it takes. Which is probably not that many. I guess 4 to 5 machines would cover the DOS era at least (the one I'm interested in). With another 4-5 you could probably cover the Windows era as well, since Windows is not that sensitive about speed or exact hardware features. Eg, pick the best videocard for every era, and build a machine around it. A VooDoo machine, a TNT2 machine, a GeForce3 machine, a Radeon 9700 machine, a GeForce 8800 machine and by then you've pretty much arrived at 'modern' machines.

j^aws wrote:

But if your build covers those two reasons, then build whatever works.

I already explained the reasons, so I don't see why you're still debating this.

j^aws wrote:

Being realistic, it would be easiest to emulate and compare as I mentioned earlier.

Emulators are severely flawed, especially PC emulators. Which is why you'd want real hardware, at least, until a proper PC emulator is built with sufficient accuracy.

j^aws wrote:

Having a museum with real hardware and comparing games across various formats is doable, but someone will have to fund this and maintain it.

It could be virtual. I bet between all the users of Vogons, we've more than got every interesting configuration of real hardware for all games ever made covered. People could just make YouTube videos of the games playing on real hardware.
Ever seen the YouTube channel of TheShadowsNose? He records the same game running on various platforms, using real hardware. His videos give very good insight in how the games really play, look and sound on real hardware. For example his video on Titus the Fox: https://youtu.be/hqgsUemLi84
His recording really shows off just how smooth the Amiga's scrolling is, and how the Atari ST isn't. Emulators on PC generally don't get the scrolling perfectly smooth, so if you play it in an Amiga emulator, you may get an experience closer to the Atari ST, without knowing just how good the game really is.
Also, he records from a real CRT, so you see the graphics as they were designed, rather than the blocky 'perfect' output from most emulators, that don't quite do the original graphics justice.

That's the sort of stuff I'd want for PCs as well.

I prefer games to work smoothly. 😀

PeterLI wrote:

I prefer games to work smoothly. 😀

True, but if a game doesn't work smoothly on any particular rig, I'd just build an additional faster one anyway 😁

Tetrium wrote:

PeterLI wrote:

I prefer games to work smoothly. 😀

True, but if a game doesn't work smoothly on any particular rig, I'd just build an additional faster one anyway 😁

Also the nice thing is really when they don't run smoothly so you have a reason to upgrade again and again.. it's boring when a game run fast at highest levels at the first build. 🤣