VOGONS


First post, by ncmark

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I am just curious as to what people will say.... what is the best video card for the original half-life.....voodoo or radeon? I have played it on both. Of course there is also Nvidia, but I have never had one of their cards.

Reply 2 of 18, by leileilol

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No video card will get past the launcher trash bug.

Half-Life originally targeted a 3dfx Voodoo Graphics regarding the technical limitations and capabilities, and a lot of it was designed for 4mb VRAM, so from that point, there's more "best" cards than there is "not best"; "Not best" being everything not 3dfx starting PowerVR PCX2 and prior.

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long live PCem

Reply 3 of 18, by nforce4max

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For Half life it is something you have to figure out on your own and it has plenty of bugs. It worked for me on a v3 2k pci but performance wasn't that great (p1 mmx and high settings).

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 4 of 18, by Stojke

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Voodoo 3 2000 had very good performance on my system when playing. But i used Pentium 3 processor.

Note | LLSID | "Big boobs are important!"

Reply 5 of 18, by Robin4

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I know that in those years some played it on a Diamond Viper 550 AGP 16MB on, and have also an voodoo 2 coupled.

~ At least it can do black and white~

Reply 6 of 18, by ncmark

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Well now I am sure it's possible to get faster rendering and therefore higher framerates wiht a more recent card, but there would no new features implemented, it wouldn't look different, correct?

I was curious and went to the other extreme, and tried it with an old Rage PRO. Now there I could tell it was seriously struggling with it.

Seems like banshee or voodoo3 is just about right

Reply 7 of 18, by leileilol

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Yeah Rage Pro isn't going to cut it as it has poor alpha blending support. Half-Life uses alpha blending for all of the decals, and the occasional explosion smoke.

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long live PCem

Reply 9 of 18, by Malik

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I'm currently doing a re-run of this original Half-Life in my Athlon II X3 450 system (3.2GHz) with Geforce GTX 280 card running on Windows XP.

5476332566_7480a12517_t.jpgSB Dos Drivers

Reply 10 of 18, by Nahkri

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I played Half Life on a GeForce 2 Mx 32mb ram,ran without any problems.

Reply 11 of 18, by ncmark

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Malik wrote:

I'm currently doing a re-run of this original Half-Life in my Athlon II X3 450 system (3.2GHz) with Geforce GTX 280 card running on Windows XP.

Just curious - where are you at? I finally made it to the last level. I am not sure if it's worth trying to finish it. I have only done it one other time.

Reply 12 of 18, by d1stortion

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I used to play it on Kyro II I think. Worked well enough from what I recall, certainly better than on PCX2 (it's quite a feat in itself that it even runs playable on that card...)

Reply 13 of 18, by badmojo

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ncmark wrote:

Just curious - where are you at? I finally made it to the last level. I am not sure if it's worth trying to finish it. I have only done it one other time.

Yeah I recently played it through to the last level and stopped half way through it. I was loving on it until that last level but I had a peak at a walkthrough because I was struggling, and it didn't look like I missed out on much.

It's a shame when a game whips you out of a cool, atmospheric environment for the big finale. Start like you mean to continue I say.

Last edited by badmojo on 2014-02-08, 09:14. Edited 1 time in total.

Life? Don't talk to me about life.

Reply 14 of 18, by Malik

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ncmark wrote:
Malik wrote:

I'm currently doing a re-run of this original Half-Life in my Athlon II X3 450 system (3.2GHz) with Geforce GTX 280 card running on Windows XP.

Just curious - where are you at? I finally made it to the last level. I am not sure if it's worth trying to finish it. I have only done it one other time.

I just installed it and started playing again, currently in the office complex. Not met the marines yet.

Have not played it consistently since my current "main" game is Anachronox now. (Also installed in the same system.)

5476332566_7480a12517_t.jpgSB Dos Drivers

Reply 15 of 18, by ncmark

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Some of those levels - I don't know what they were trying to prove. Like "surface tension." Okay now I know a few tricks, like save your rockets for taking out the chopper and using grenades to to take out the minefields. But even then it took me like 90 minutes to get through that one level - just WAY too hard. And the "xen" and "interloper" levels towards the end - okay there is health but where is the ammo? If you don't go into those levels with a lot you are pretty much screwed.

Reply 16 of 18, by sliderider

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ncmark wrote:

Some of those levels - I don't know what they were trying to prove. Like "surface tension." Okay now I know a few tricks, like save your rockets for taking out the chopper and using grenades to to take out the minefields. But even then it took me like 90 minutes to get through that one level - just WAY too hard. And the "xen" and "interloper" levels towards the end - okay there is health but where is the ammo? If you don't go into those levels with a lot you are pretty much screwed.

Maybe that's the point, to make you think about the best way to get through each level by putting in unique challenges instead of making every level a reiteration of the one before.

Reply 17 of 18, by Firtasik

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ncmark wrote:

And the "xen" and "interloper" levels towards the end - okay there is health but where is the ammo? If you don't go into those levels with a lot you are pretty much screwed.

It's not that bad. The Hivehand has an infinite ammo supply. 😎

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Reply 18 of 18, by Rekrul

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I played through Half-Life on a 1.8Ghz P4 with Windows 98SE and a GeForce 4 MX440, 64MB video card. I didn't have any issues with it.

I also didn't have much trouble finishing the end of the game. I think I might have needed to consult a walkthough for how to do it, but I don't remember it being that difficult. I guess I'm in the minority, because I liked the Xen levels. They were weird and different.