viper32cm wrote on 2021-07-10, 04:06:
I use a Creative-branded TNT PCI with 16MB in my P233MMX. It runs very well with everything I've tried up to Unreal.
I had been considering buying a Riva128 or a Rendition card to replace the TNT for "period accuracy," but based on some of the comments above that doesn't sound like a worthwhile "upgrade."
Realistically, though, there were probably a decent number of folks in the 1998-99 time frame running P233MMXs with TNTs or other cards of the same generation.
I could not agree more with your last statement .
At any given point in time, computer enthusiasts had a PC whose parts were from various periods . People upgraded what they needed/wanted to when they cold afford it . Save for money constraints , no enthusiast at the time would intentionally constrain himself/herself to an arbitrary point in time : people upgraded their PCs and eventually replaced them (or upgraded them to the point of being equivalent to replacement ) .
IMHO, the concept of period correctness is perfectly fine to simulate an out-of-box experience at a given specific point in time or for a museum type setup . In the real world, people did not constrain themselves to, for instance, having a PC whose parts are all from 1997 to only play games from 1997 on it . Also, playing demanding games from 1999 on a PC whose parts where all from 1997 was not something that people typically did, or at least wanted to do, unless they had financial constraints . Additionally, people did not stop playing a 1997 game when the year ended (obviously) or when they upgraded hardware later on as taking full advantage of a game at higher resolutions and/or quality levels might only have been possible (at all or at least affordably) on hardware released well after the game launched (not too different from the way things still are today mainly with GPUs) .
So IMHO, period correctness, brings nothing to the table either from the "lets do things like they did back in the day" (people did not care for period correctness when tech was current) point of view or from the "let's get the best performance/experience out of a game" point of view .
So, to conclude, if anyone wants to build a so called period correct system, for whatever reason (and there are probably many valid ones in addition to the ones that I have mentioned above), then great . This is a hobby and people are free to do what they want . We all have our preferences and quirks and not everything needs to be rationally or practically justifiable . However, IMHO, there should be no illusion that period correctness is somehow representative of how computers were used "back then", at least in enthusiast circles .
Sorry for the rather ranty post, but your last statement made so much sense to me that I could not resist sharing my unsolicited opinion . Feel free to disagree with anything I have said or to correct me if I have somehow misinterpreted you .
EDIT : corrected sentence structure
