The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-11-28, 12:08:

The TRUE average PC gaming experience of the 90s, eh?

Yup. The joys of trying to salvage something out of a family computer with all kinds of compromises...

My thought is to focus on brand name systems, not white box clones. You're far more likely to i) get something stable, and ii) get something lousy with brand names. And lousy in subtle ways, e.g. I had an AST 486 in 1995 that had:
- Cirrus Logic CL5428 onboard video chip, probably soldered through the ISA bus but I don't really know
- a single IDE channel, so zero storage expandability beyond the 2x
- 3 ISA slots, two of which were used up by an SB16 (okay, they didn't get everything wrong with this machine) and a modem
- I'm pretty sure no support for hard drives > 524 megs... and it came with a 420 megger
- BIOS doesn't seem to be on a flash chip
- parallel port without ECP/EPP/etc support, i.e. the absolute lousiest parallel port you could get
- serial ports with 8250UARTs instead of 16550, so byebye the possibility of an external modem upgrade (keep in mind that I was previously a Mac guy, not to mention that external peripherals are a lot less likely to trigger parental anxiety when you're 12-13 years old...)
- 4 megs of RAM (thankfully upgradable to up to 32 with 2 72-pin SIMMs), which was a little on the tight side for Win3.1 and couldn't run Office 4.2 without an upgrade
- Cyrix 486DX2/50 CPU, but of course they didn't tell you in the advertising or spec sheet, I think I found out it was a Cyrix months/years later playing with some early system information program. (There's a reason Intel moved to trademarkable names with the Pentium and this system was a good example why)
These are all subtle little flaws that, if you had just bought a generic white box 486DX2/66 from Joe Schmoe's Clone Shop the same way, you would have avoided. And they are all little flaws that are unfixable and affect the thing's upgradeability big time.

There were a lot of these machines out there. Sold to people who didn't know better, with a BIG HUGE INSANE SOFTWARE BUNDLE, and... nearly zero upgradeability potential.

Interestingly, I saw one with unupgraded RAM sell for... seemingly real money... on Facebook Marketplace a few months ago here, complete with the lousy bundled AST monitor that did 640x480 @ 60Hz and 800x600 at 56Hz. I don't understand how someone can be nostalgic for such a thing - if you want a 486, why not get a nice one?!? Surely there must still be some of those omnipresent generic 486DX2/66 clones floating around somewhere, no? And some CRT monitors that support real refresh rates?

I love trash hardware and generally go out of my way to buy anything low-end that I can come across when it comes to ISA/PCI/AGP cards. dionb has pretty much nailed general motherboard suggestions. My only two suggestions is to look for this specific motherboard (they pop up on eBay frequently enough from Eastern Europe sellers) which has the unholy combination of being an ISA-only 486 motherboard manufactured in 1995, no L2 cache and only supports 5V CPUs, yet has support for EDO RAM and is one of the smallest AT boards I've seen. The other suggestion is a PC-Chips M396F with a 486SLC if you really want to see Duke3D suffer.

My personal favourite ISA SVGA card is the Realtek RTG3102 - if you thought the RTG3105 card was bad, the RTG3102 is about 60% of the speed of that when it comes to running Wolf3D/Doom/Quake benchmarks, and it is literally the slowest ISA card with >=512KB of RAM that you'll find, it even beats the Trident 8800CS and Tseng ET3000AX. Even better, it's one of the few cards that's not supported by UniVBE (Realtek's own VESA TSR only supports VBE 1.0) and I'm not sure if it's a faulty 44.900Mhz oscillator clock on my card or if the VESA TSR/RTG310(5/6) Win 3.1/95 drivers are trying to do something different than what the card expects when accessing RAM beyond 256KB, but it bombs on 640x480x256 and 800x600x256 in the exact same way as this 86Box bug demonstrates. I have not found any drivers specific to the RTG3102, but at least it handles 800x600x16 fine with the standard Realtek Win 3.1 drivers. It's also the only card with Hercules emulation that crashes when trying to run FastDoom's Hercules mode.

On the PCI side, while the Cirrus Logic GD5430 is the slowest overall card when it comes to general operations, the Diamond Viper PCI and early Matrox cards are especially terrible for DOS, with the Diamond Viper in particular needing some awful TSR work to get it to function properly in DOS and gives the Oak OTI087X an undeserved bad reputation due to only giving the chip an 8-bit memory data bus, as they're one of the top chipsets for VGA when found on its own on ISA cards. At least the Diamond Viper and Matrox cards are useful for Windows.

People keep saying that Tseng ET4000s are godlike framebuffers, but they suffer from compatibility issues to the point that several DOS games from ~1991-1993 needed two VGA options just to cater for the stupidity of how ET4000 cards deal with the 256KB wraparound, and there's a Russian DOS game named TimeWalk that only works with the Tseng ET4000 - trying to use any other card will show heavy graphical glitches. I'm convinced that they are bad cards that got popular only for being first to market with being able to hit the ISA limits.

As far sound cards, my favourite FM synthesis chip on an ISA card has to be the Analog Devices AD1816 - if you ever wanted to hear something so completely dull and lifeless, look no further than this. The Crystal CS4235X is another work of art as you're already aware, along with the OPTi 931/933. The Rockwell RWA010 is almost always off-pitch with FM synthesis. As for wavetable cards, the McFly from SerdaShop mostly sounds like nose farts.

progman.exe wrote on 2023-11-28, 23:52:

We had a fancy 28800 modem, but the serial port was only capable of 19200bps. That was a bad design choice, but probably the sho […]
Show full quote

We had a fancy 28800 modem, but the serial port was only capable of 19200bps. That was a bad design choice, but probably the shop doing it on purpose: sell their standard '486 machine, and if a person buys an extra, then they bought that extra. True compatibility? What's that now?

A purposefully bad machine should be crap in ways that peripherals are choked....

So don't have a 16550 UART, 8250 will be nice and crap (those numbers are probably wrong).

If you can some how have a parallel port that only does the most basic communication that'd be great, too.

Those numbers on the UARTs are correct - we were both writing very similar posts at the same time.

My own view on a number of these things is that, unlike Mac world, in the mid-1990s PC world was not at all focused on external expansion. If you wanted a faster modem or a Zip drive or whatever, the proper way to connect it was to pop open the case, shove an ISA card in, then have some fun managing your IRQs and the like. If you were a serious person, you popped open the case and shoved in a SCSI card for things like scanners and Zip drives; if you were a non-serious person, you improvised something with your lousy parallel port that didn't even support ECP/EPP. This started to change, barely, when USB 1 peripherals started to hit the market in the very late 1990s. First scanner I ever had was a UMAX 12...00 or 1220? I think it was one of the first USB scanners, was great, then I upgraded to Win2000 and UMAX was like "we don't support that fancy businessy NT thing, go screw yourself." Oops.

Now, of course, the big brand systems didn't exactly come with a full complement of ISA (or later, PCI) slots for you to actually act on that approach.... so, yeah, oops.

This this THE beginner's starter PC too! That happened to me too but worked ok for some stuff.

Also this is same with consumer who did not specify the hardware from cheap shops. Only the good PC shops who cares about customer specify the parts that works well. That was two PC shops I knew of out of many in my town back then.

Big points for anyone who knows their stuff to specify the parts by the way.

Same with computers and notebooks to the day, still. Even Costco sells subpar computers.

Cheers,

Thanks songoffall ! great topic to read.

VivienM wrote on 2023-11-28, 23:59:

[...]

I don't understand how someone can be nostalgic for such a thing - if you want a 486, why not get a nice one?!?

Stockholm syndrome 😜

Nostalgia is a strange beast. You clearly don't have warm memories for the thing, but someone else who perhaps hadn't had the prior experience of something better might have spent half their youth on it and had a fun time despite its limitations. Tbh it sounds like it wasn't so much an inherently bad system as a dated one (those specs scream 1993/1994 rather than 1995) not fit for your purposes and expectations; apart from the crappy I/O the rest sounds perfectly decent for that era and I could easily see someone in the day having good experiences with it, and equally, someone building a nice mid-period DOS retro build with it. But again, nostalgia is subjective both in positive and negative sense and it's clear how that machine made you feel.

dionb wrote on 2023-11-29, 06:54:

VivienM wrote on 2023-11-28, 23:59:

[...]

I don't understand how someone can be nostalgic for such a thing - if you want a 486, why not get a nice one?!?

Stockholm syndrome 😜

Nostalgia is a strange beast. You clearly don't have warm memories for the thing, but someone else who perhaps hadn't had the prior experience of something better might have spent half their youth on it and had a fun time despite its limitations. Tbh it sounds like it wasn't so much an inherently bad system as a dated one (those specs scream 1993/1994 rather than 1995) not fit for your purposes and expectations; apart from the crappy I/O the rest sounds perfectly decent for that era and I could easily see someone in the day having good experiences with it, and equally, someone building a nice mid-period DOS retro build with it. But again, nostalgia is subjective both in positive and negative sense and it's clear how that machine made you feel.

I didn't have a prior experience of something better, though (was coming from a Mac SE which was well past its prime in January 1995)... I think I just had the experience of outgrowing it over the 3.5 years or so that I had it.

With the benefit of hindsight, you're right it was a bit more dated and low end than it should have been, but I think the poor expandability was really the problem. Especially on storage. Can't add a second hard drive because there's only one IDE channel. Can't replace the hard drive with a bigger one because the BIOS probably won't handle it nicely (not to mention cost). Can't add a Zip drive because the parallel port is useless and a SCSI card is well outside a 13 or 14 year old's budget. Can't use DriveSpace 3 compression because my parents think it slows the thing down too much. Etc.

Also, I was a Mac guy. I wanted a Quadra 630 or a Power Mac 6100. Going DOS/Windows was my dad's idea... and probably the right one given this was the beginning of Apple's dark era. I certainly didn't have the knowledge required to compare this thing with, say, the generic clone shop 486DX2/66 advertised in the sketchy free print computer newspapers. Just looked a little slower, came in a box with a real brand name from a serious store instead of some fly by night clone shop, and that was about it. And even if I had known better, these were the days before the Internet, I don't know how you could have gotten a spec sheet that would have told you about the one PATA channel or the 8250 UARTs. So maybe that's part of the bitterness too... as I learned more about the DOS/Windows/Win95/Intel platform I just realized all the ways in which that thing (and the IBM-nee-Acer machine that would replace it in 1998) were just... not very good... specimens.

And I think my enthusiasm for the thing just dropped when I found out about the Cyrix CPU. I'm sure by that time I knew enough to know that Cyrix 486s were slower... so when you compare to the ubiquitous Intel 486DX2/66s that was just a double whammy. Not only was I short 16MHz (which I obviously knew about from the beginning), but the 50MHz I had weren't exactly comparable to Intel's 50MHz... (and yes, again, a more knowledgeable person should probably have taken the hint from the lack of Intel inside branding anywhere, but how many 12 year old Mac guys are supposed to know that?)

songoffall wrote on 2023-11-28, 18:09:

I have an AGP S3 Virge, and I still can't fathom why it exists. I might just pair it with a powerful CPU, to emphasize the "decelerator" part.

I had one back in the day in my 300MHz Klamath too. The thing had an agp slot, so the market provided something cheap to stick into it, as a pci s3 would obviously be unacceptable. 😀

VivienM wrote on 2023-11-29, 12:36:

And I think my enthusiasm for the thing just dropped when I found out about the Cyrix CPU. I'm sure by that time I knew enough to know that Cyrix 486s were slower... so when you compare to the ubiquitous Intel 486DX2/66s that was just a double whammy. Not only was I short 16MHz (which I obviously knew about from the beginning), but the 50MHz I had weren't exactly comparable to Intel's 50MHz... (and yes, again, a more knowledgeable person should probably have taken the hint from the lack of Intel inside branding anywhere, but how many 12 year old Mac guys are supposed to know that?)

It was the day when you realized your Cyrix 486 DX2/50 was about par to an Intel 486 DX 33?
At least it had built-in write back L1 cache, but I'm sure on your motherboard it either was not supported or not enabled.

VivienM wrote on 2023-11-29, 12:36:

[...]

I didn't have a prior experience of something better, though (was coming from a Mac SE which was well past its prime in January 1995)... I think I just had the experience of outgrowing it over the 3.5 years or so that I had it.

Sounds like a better system on a number of things (serial...) that mattered to you.

With the benefit of hindsight, you're right it was a bit more dated and low end than it should have been, but I think the poor expandability was really the problem. Especially on storage. Can't add a second hard drive because there's only one IDE channel. Can't replace the hard drive with a bigger one because the BIOS probably won't handle it nicely (not to mention cost). Can't add a Zip drive because the parallel port is useless and a SCSI card is well outside a 13 or 14 year old's budget. Can't use DriveSpace 3 compression because my parents think it slows the thing down too much. Etc.

528MB HDD limit was pretty common at the time - particularly if that time was 1993-4. My 1995 Pentium system had the same limit and needed a BIOS patch when in 1999 I finally bought a 13GB drive.

As for the second HDD - you had at least one free ISA slot, you could have added a cheap second ISA IDE controller. It wouldn't be fast, but it would have given you options. If that had been a multi I/O card you could have disabled crappy onboard serial and parallell and used the ones on the card instead. But you would have had to know about that possibility, how to do it and of course had the money for it (although if you could have afforded hard disks and ZIP drives you were doing better in your early teens than I was in my late teens at the same time 😮 )

Also, I was a Mac guy. I wanted a Quadra 630 or a Power Mac 6100. Going DOS/Windows was my dad's idea... and probably the right one given this was the beginning of Apple's dark era. I certainly didn't have the knowledge required to compare this thing with, say, the generic clone shop 486DX2/66 advertised in the sketchy free print computer newspapers. Just looked a little slower, came in a box with a real brand name from a serious store instead of some fly by night clone shop, and that was about it. And even if I had known better, these were the days before the Internet, I don't know how you could have gotten a spec sheet that would have told you about the one PATA channel or the 8250 UARTs. So maybe that's part of the bitterness too... as I learned more about the DOS/Windows/Win95/Intel platform I just realized all the ways in which that thing (and the IBM-nee-Acer machine that would replace it in 1998) were just... not very good... specimens.

Yep, if you were a Mac guy expecting Mac-level integration and at least the things Mac did right working well, I can see how an underwhelming PC could be a real downer. That said, some of the Dark Era Macs very much belong in a 'bad gaming' or 'bad anything' build - I've always wanted to get my hands on a Performa 6200 exactly by it's spectacularly awful architecture, design and implementation. Oh, and its serial ports also couldn't go past 9600 baud :')

And I think my enthusiasm for the thing just dropped when I found out about the Cyrix CPU. I'm sure by that time I knew enough to know that Cyrix 486s were slower... so when you compare to the ubiquitous Intel 486DX2/66s that was just a double whammy. Not only was I short 16MHz (which I obviously knew about from the beginning), but the 50MHz I had weren't exactly comparable to Intel's 50MHz... (and yes, again, a more knowledgeable person should probably have taken the hint from the lack of Intel inside branding anywhere, but how many 12 year old Mac guys are supposed to know that?)

Are you sure it was a Cx486DX/2? If so it was no slower than an i486DX/2 at the same clock and the FPU was significantly faster (see some benchmarks here, the ST chip is a Cyrix design labeled by the SGS Thomson fab that made then)... the Cx486DLC/2 (basically a 386 with 486 instructions) was slower though, if it was one of those.

Intel Inside was marketing and did not indicate higher performance, at least not across the board and at all times.

Well.....Creeping Net 1 in it's original incarnation was not a great whizz-bang DOS Gaming 486.....actually, it had a LOT Of hilarious idiosyncrasies...but also a lot like early 90's PCs that were "crap" - it was more of a configuration problem. So here's some ideas to work with....

ZEOS 386/486 upgradable systems mainboard with no CMOS Battery, I had to put the CHS for the Maxtor 7120AT in every darned day - 936, 16, 17, 0, 936. And of course, it has serial ports, but I can't get the damn things to work because I don't unstand IRQ or MEmory addresses yet. So I kept using the 8250 UART Goldstar card with it - even after I got a modem. I think I'm the only guy I know who had a water-cooled US Robotics V90 faxmodem on that thing, I used to put cups of ice water and a rag on top to capture the moisture to keep the modem cool enough so AOL would not disconnect every 20 minutes because the modem came darn near overheating due to no bi-directional data xfer at the same time (you needed a 16650AFN UART card for it, or at least a 16450).

The motherboard had the CPU right under the Kingspao Model 35's Drive Cage, so it was the first "case mod" I ever had to do to hack-saw the plate where the hard disk attached so I could fit a cooler on the 486 (and later a DX4-100 upgrade with voltage adapter) in there. I was still using that Maxtor, and once I had internet, I would occasionally forget to rename LFN files - so I'd have these reports in the AOL directory of files like "monkey i.zip" or "big prob.exe" in there that linked to nothing and therefore were just wasting hard disk space. So I'd back up the entire hard disk to 40 floppy diskettes I bought at Wally world for $11 and restore off the diskettes with a system diskette I created using one of them for DOS 5 - as I was stuck using tha t modem on a uni-directional port, and Microsoft back then was sending C&D e-mails to everyone whod whose MS-DOS 5/6 or Windows 3.1 - so I had to HAND COPY everything over with Xcopy!

Installing a CD-ROM was a nightmare. I bought an EPO 52X drive at the local E.B. Games for $34, but DOS 5 did not have MSCDEX.EXE - so I got my bro in law to mail me a floppy - which got destroyed in the mail. So I stole a copy off a school computer using a floppy....from a MS-DOS 6.21 install.

I could not get a mouse to work until that July (I started in February) so when I installed AOL and finally got a modem in June I spent 2.5 hours playing ping pong with AOL 3.0 and AOL 4.0 to sign up for AOL so I had internet access. Eventually, I managed to get the COM Ports on the Zeos board working and then got the Mouse on it and the modem. Later I bought a SMC 16550AFN UART Serial card and used the modem on that - sooooo much better.

I had only 8MB of RAM, I had poor DOS memory configuration skills, so all sorts of weirdness would happen. My video card was a cheap version of a Paradise VGA PVGA1A, and for some nutty reason, it would get a "STUCK NMI ERROR" during Ultima VI, turning the whole screen neon, but the funny part, is I could keep on playing the game in it's *new* neon green backrooms level -999 corruption puke color scheme. Oh the joys of the sight of a radiating green Chuckles every time I came back to Transclucent Lord British's Nonsensical Neon and Pastel Funhouse!

Then I got it a sound card - with the OPL2 hanging bug - it was one of those wacky Aztec cards from a Packard Bell with a Reveal Branded Sony CD-ROM drive - oh boy, if only YouTube existed back then...one day I was playing Monkey Island 2 and went into Stan's Previously Used Coffins and wandered off to uh....relieve myself...when I came back, the MIDI instruments had all lost sync with each other, and were creating the most glorious cacauphony - it was like a SoundBlaster with adlib support, built by a drunk member of Legion of Rock Stars during a bender as a part of some kind of Spinal Tap adventure game. I think I spent 15 minutes listening to that with morbid curiosity. I can't remember if it was the Aztec SoundGalaxy 16 or the Aztech Washington 16 - it was one of those two cards. I actually had a savegame just to listen to that mess!

Then there was the period before that where I had an IOMagic MagicSound ESS1869 sound card, 🤣. I had this installed in the same computer for awhile. I was running an old Nintendo SOund File program in DOS called BNSF - well.....it was fine for all the REGULAR NES games, but get something Japanese with VRC6 - ie Castlevania III, and it would drop tune it in the most awesome way and slow the tempo down.

Some other interesting mentions of hardware in other computers......

- Cirrus Logic CL-GD54xx controller in IBM PC-330 100DX4 6571-W5K - used to blackout on CGA and EGA games like Ultima I, it was a literal glitch in the chipset

- For awhile I had a Trident TGUI-9440 PCI 1MB SVGA Graphics card, this card was god awful, because it would default to 75Hz refresh on EVERY graphics mode due to a design flaw. For the longest time, I thought I had a bad SVGA monitor on the GEM desktop computer I had it on - nope, just that 640x480 @256 in Windows had a refresh rate of 75Hz or more, making games like Postal, Diablo, and Doom95 Eyestrain city to look at. Postal was almost unplayable in the nightime levels like the cave, city, and trailer park levels, and I had to CRANK the gamma on Doom.

- For a time around 2002 when everyone was dumping their cheap mid 1990's PC systems, there was this absolutely horrid rubber dome AT keyboard with a pencil slot across the top and a huge space bar going around. I can't even remember the brand of it, I just remember it was HORRIBLE to type on, to a point my 95wpm with 75% accuracy or better ass could not nail down a single paragraph without it looking like a ham-handed oaf like myself trying to text on a modern touch screen smartphone.

- An ex-room mate I had at the time gave me her old generic 486 system. It was one of those coke-can cases, with a Biostar MB8443UUD motherboard in it, and an Am5x86-133.....this was actually EXCELLENT hardware, the problem was threefold. First off, the CPU was overclocked to 160MHz with a stock socket 3 cooler for like...a DX2-66, with no thermal pad or thermal paste, so it would randomly hang and lock up when it got too hot. How that thing never died via fried CPU is anyone's guess.

- Possibly the worst actual CPU I ever encountered - Cyrix DX4 (green heatsink) - I had a NanTan built Duracom 5110D with that in it, and it would get all sorts of funky Opcode errors and other crap while running in that laptop (FMAK9200D actually - like the one I have now). I don't think it ran right in anything installed it in, even a few IBM products. I pulled it from the NanTan and put a Genuine Intel DX4 in there toot sweet - I ran that 9200 into the ground after that. But that cyrix - blech! I put that thing in an IBM PS/ValuePoint, 2 different ASUS boards, and even a voltage adapter into a FMA3500 and man, that thing would never do right on any compute rI put it in.

You could buy one of the truly terrible sounding external MIDI modules. There are a few websites that have comparisons of various MIDI modules and some of the obscure ones are just terrible.

dionb wrote on 2023-11-29, 18:19:

VivienM wrote on 2023-11-29, 12:36:

With the benefit of hindsight, you're right it was a bit more dated and low end than it should have been, but I think the poor expandability was really the problem. Especially on storage. Can't add a second hard drive because there's only one IDE channel. Can't replace the hard drive with a bigger one because the BIOS probably won't handle it nicely (not to mention cost). Can't add a Zip drive because the parallel port is useless and a SCSI card is well outside a 13 or 14 year old's budget. Can't use DriveSpace 3 compression because my parents think it slows the thing down too much. Etc.

528MB HDD limit was pretty common at the time - particularly if that time was 1993-4. My 1995 Pentium system had the same limit and needed a BIOS patch when in 1999 I finally bought a 13GB drive.

As for the second HDD - you had at least one free ISA slot, you could have added a cheap second ISA IDE controller. It wouldn't be fast, but it would have given you options. If that had been a multi I/O card you could have disabled crappy onboard serial and parallell and used the ones on the card instead. But you would have had to know about that possibility, how to do it and of course had the money for it (although if you could have afforded hard disks and ZIP drives you were doing better in your early teens than I was in my late teens at the same time 😮 )

I'm not sure what I could/couldn't afford exactly when... but fundamentally there were two challenges: affordability and parent-friendliness. Let's just say the idea of popping the only computer in the house open and doing random stuff to it... wasn't exactly something they found very appealing. My parents' anxiety about opening up computers only roughly ended when a) I got quite a bit older, but more importantly, b) they had different computers for themselves other than the one being opened.

That, for example, is what drove the concern with the serial ports. No reason I couldn't just take out the 14.4 modem and put in another ISA modem, except that an external modem would have been a lot more parent-friendly.

Doesn't help that, approaching this with a Mac background, well, on a Mac, you would have done all those things externally over SCSI or serial, both of which had much more parent-friendliness.

dionb wrote on 2023-11-29, 18:19:

Also, I was a Mac guy. I wanted a Quadra 630 or a Power Mac 6100. Going DOS/Windows was my dad's idea... and probably the right one given this was the beginning of Apple's dark era. I certainly didn't have the knowledge required to compare this thing with, say, the generic clone shop 486DX2/66 advertised in the sketchy free print computer newspapers. Just looked a little slower, came in a box with a real brand name from a serious store instead of some fly by night clone shop, and that was about it. And even if I had known better, these were the days before the Internet, I don't know how you could have gotten a spec sheet that would have told you about the one PATA channel or the 8250 UARTs. So maybe that's part of the bitterness too... as I learned more about the DOS/Windows/Win95/Intel platform I just realized all the ways in which that thing (and the IBM-nee-Acer machine that would replace it in 1998) were just... not very good... specimens.

Yep, if you were a Mac guy expecting Mac-level integration and at least the things Mac did right working well, I can see how an underwhelming PC could be a real downer. That said, some of the Dark Era Macs very much belong in a 'bad gaming' or 'bad anything' build - I've always wanted to get my hands on a Performa 6200 exactly by it's spectacularly awful architecture, design and implementation. Oh, and its serial ports also couldn't go past 9600 baud :')

I had left Macland by the time the 6200 rolled around, so... I've only read about it on web sites a decade later. Although, actually, thinking about it, if that 486 (or a new Mac) hadn't been acquired in January 1995, there's a good chance I would have jumped on the 6200 at its release. I don't know if the many flaws about the 6200 were known at its launch, but assuming they weren't, I think the 6200 would have been very, very appealing for people wanting an affordable PowerPC machine at a time when the life expectancy of a 68040 was very unclear. Not to mention, IIRC, the 6200 had the Apple keyboard power-on/soft power-off, unlike the 6100.

I think I wasn't expecting the subtleties involves in good vs bad PCs, and how the majority of what you'll find in a store clean and organized enough to get parental approval (as opposed to Joe Schmoe's Clone Shop where motherboard boxes are piled up all over the floor) is basically bad in subtle little ways that you don't see on the spec sheet but that usually bites you when it comes to upgrading. Something equally true in 2023 as it was in 1995, I might add, and all the way in between (look at all those i810 systems from 2000 with lovely PIIIs... and lousy on-chipset graphics with no AGP).

And it's not even a matter of money. You could have spent $4000CAD on a top of the line IBM Aptiva in 1996 and you were still getting a bad system - Mwave, soldered graphics, etc. Just a bad system with a faster CPU and more RAM/storage than the bad system next to it for $2000.

The AST got impulsively replaced by another underwhelming store box, an IBM-nee-Acer K6, with its own set of flaws (e.g. an onboard ATI graphics chip that badly needed new drivers that ATI didn't make). First 'good' machine I got was my Dell PIII in 2000 with discrete everything. Was also the first time I somehow managed to get my parents to agree to get something they couldn't see in a store.... and the first machine where I got a good monitor instead of the bundled matching-brand CRT in the package from the store. I guess it took me 5 years (and getting 5 years older... 12 to 17 is a big gap) to finally learn how to properly shop for a Windows machine.

dionb wrote on 2023-11-29, 18:19:

And I think my enthusiasm for the thing just dropped when I found out about the Cyrix CPU. I'm sure by that time I knew enough to know that Cyrix 486s were slower... so when you compare to the ubiquitous Intel 486DX2/66s that was just a double whammy. Not only was I short 16MHz (which I obviously knew about from the beginning), but the 50MHz I had weren't exactly comparable to Intel's 50MHz... (and yes, again, a more knowledgeable person should probably have taken the hint from the lack of Intel inside branding anywhere, but how many 12 year old Mac guys are supposed to know that?)

Are you sure it was a Cx486DX/2? If so it was no slower than an i486DX/2 at the same clock and the FPU was significantly faster (see some benchmarks here, the ST chip is a Cyrix design labeled by the SGS Thomson fab that made then)... the Cx486DLC/2 (basically a 386 with 486 instructions) was slower though, if it was one of those.

It was advertised as a 486DX2/50. I... couldn't tell you, 20 years after the thing was e-wasted, what it was. I'm googling now and thinking it was a Cx486DX2/50 but it's hard to tell from the limited amount of information on this machine.

Bottom line, though, I think it's like buying anything else and discover you got a knock-off, even if the knock-off is just as functional, you feel... taken advantage of. And certainly at the time I thought the Cyrix would have performance closer to a 33MHz Intel...

dionb wrote on 2023-11-29, 18:19:

Intel Inside was marketing and did not indicate higher performance, at least not across the board and at all times.

Intel Inside... at least indicated Intel inside. Whether Intel being inside actually gave better performance/reliability/etc, obviously, is a different question, but you wouldn't discover 6 months after buying something that it wasn't Intel.

dionb wrote on 2023-11-28, 19:35:

Or maybe a somewhat heretic view: the Terratec AWS64XL. On paper and in the flesh one of the greatest sound cards out there, with excellent wavetable, excellent audio in and out, routing, SNR, you name it. And yet one of the biggest, worst driver hells you could imagine, with massive issues in DOS (want to work alongside another card? ha ha ha), Win9x (BSOD r us), Win2k (it might give sound. Might) etc. I recommended it for a friend back in the day who needed serious studio level stuff, but couldn't afford it. TLDR turned out a waste of money - probably due to immature WDM Win2k drivers, which he neededd due to massive RAM requirements for rendering stuff. In retro mode I found one too not too long ago. Wanted to put it in my flagship GUS + AWE + best GM and SB clone I could find build. Nope. Will put it in some build because it's so awesome, but it might just be a hardware-only show-off build 😜

As someone who enjoys doing ridiculous multi-sound card builds, that sounds like a fun challenge.

Now I'm really tempted to try an EWS64XL along side a bunch of other cards just to see what happens. 😁

Unintentionally bad but retrospectively the worst 286 you can get is the 5170 6Mhz version, with RAM possibly as slow as 180ns on the motherboard. It's faster than a 5160.. just. Actually you can tell on CPU intensive stuff like maybe fractint or something that it's twice as fast or so, but anything where it's more i/o bound makes you doubt it.

The first half of the 90s, if you were suckered into the "Miraculous low price" white box "486" for under $1000, it may well have had a 486SX25, or even sx20, that may have been soldered to the board, no L2 cache installed, though if you were lucky it at least had the sockets gaping emptily, and towards the beginning at that time, you may have found all 8 30pin SIMM sockets generously filled with 80ns 256MB SIMMs for a whole 2MB, half of which you had to throw out when you scraped up another hundred or so for 4x1mb. Those might have had the crappy Oak or the crappy Trident for graphics, although Chips and Tech might have got a look in, which were middling fast but didn't do high modes. Though if you found a geek who took pity on you he might have "clockchipped" it up to 33 filled your L2 and about doubled the speed meaning it was okayish for games getting released up to 94ish.

Deliberately bad in the Pentium era might include strange early Cyrix configs like 55mhz bus 6x86 of low speed. On to PII class we have the Pre-A celeron which was castrated to uselessness, and the higher/later 66mhz bus Coppermine Celerons were feeling a bit like that too, only giving you about as much ooomph as 2/3 the clock in the PIII. They often could be run at 100 though which narrowed the gap to 10-15% down rather than 30-40.