James-F wrote:

Why would anyone in their right mind build a 386-Pentium machine if dosbox can do it all and more on a modern i7 machine?
To re-live the experience of course.

Or because it's fun, and you can get a competent XP machine put together even, for next to nothing.

Old PC isn`t lame and boring when you put in that PC good videocard, very fast harddisk and very much RAM 😀

What I find to be most gratifying is suceeding to run an old game in all its glory on modern pc, using modern graphic card power and filters. But when this is really not possible, yeah, an old PC with decent hardware can be quite cool too.

I don't find old pc to be anyway boring. The more we go on the more I appreciate older hw/sw. Lately I tried these new all-in-one micro atx board and come on, mouse in the (slow) bios with flashing stars and animations and many megabytes of update? Oh please...My point is why? Where is it better than a old 486 or P1? Power? For what?

debian is my favorite os after windows. Today I did read that the pharos sirf3 usb gps I bought with street and trips 2007 might be linux compatible. Good blue sky weather, what to ask more ?

New PC`s is more boring with new windows 7 or even 10, with requiring to login somewhere to play a game or do something, they more online terminals than normal PC`s.

So, there's a few ways to come at the title question - "Why are old PCs considered lame and boring?"

Obviously, this in the context of computing collectors, not normal users that just want something to get the job done.

The first thing is simply that old PCs are arguably the same thing as modern ones, so why collect an old one, when a modern one's the same platform? I'd argue that that's not exactly true, but it's very hard to point to something and say that that is when the PC fundamentally changed (partially because it took years before a change trickled down and got used widely):

• PCjr? OK, that had a decent run in the form of the Tandy 1000, but VGA and Sound Blaster utterly displaced that, it didn't really contribute to the modern day PC platform I'd argue (although for retrogaming, it's actually a big deal, because you really can argue that this is different from the modern PC... except compared to the competition, it was rather lame)
• AT? Most of the AT's actual innovations for end users were in the form of speed, and the peripherals that mattered existed for the 8-bit channel too. And, even the 286's greater addressable memory, while it got used by OS/2, was largely unused until Windows 3.0, and that really wanted a 386.
• DeskPro 386? It was just used as an AT with go-faster stripes for, what, the entirety of its production run? (That is, as that model - there were other 386-powered DeskPros later on, of course, that were used for at least some of their 386 functionality (386 Enhanced mode, if nothing else).)
• IBM PS/2? In the grand scheme of things, as far as what actually became part of today's PC... it added HD floppies (a logical extension), a mouse port (not important), VGA (very important), and later, accessibly priced accelerated high resolution graphics (8514) to the architecture... and IBM themselves backported the first three to the XT architecture, either at or soon after launch. (Model 25/30 for the HD floppies and mouse port, and they sold an 8-bit VGA card because of the 25/30 shipping with MCGA. Everyone else cloned the 8514/XGA's general concepts as part of their SVGA extensions of VGA.)
• Sound Blaster 1.0? As a gaming and multimedia platform, that could be argued to be a truly major change for the PC platform... except it was evolutionary on the AdLib.
• PCI? Faster, better configuration... but it still had to coexist with ISA, and the ordinary 32-bit 33 MHz variant was already becoming obsolete (with AGP being needed for high-speed graphics, and PCI-X being too expensive for consumers) before ISA was gone.
• USB? This was a huge innovation in retrospect... except nobody really cared until Apple pushed it.

Everything else wasn't really a sea change in the platform, I'd argue. But, those presumed sea changes either ended up being dead ends (PCjr), or being gradually merged into the platform (literally everything else on the list).

Basically, the PC platform isn't demarcated by major changes in the platform like the Amiga is (1000/500, then 2000/3000, then 1200/4000), or for an even stronger example, like the Mac is (68k, PPC (and there's a cutoff somewhere in the G3 era for where OS X doesn't run well at all, and you should really just run OS 9 - OS X being a sea change for the platform), x86, and then within x86, one hard cutoff for the EFI32 to EFI64 changeover (that's abandoned hardware that, on the PC side, is still usable for Windows 7 or 10 today)). So, that muddies the waters as far as what an old PC is, and contributes to a perception that they're just lamer versions of what you could buy in any store today. (Now, on the software side of things, there's some firmer demarcations, largely tied to the mass adoption of Windows in the early 90s, then Win9x, then every major consumer NT release. But, even then, the continuum gets blurry once you get into the Win9x era, as the platform - even today - shares a lot with Windows 95 both in terms of user interface and the software that runs on it, even if under the hood is completely different.)

Another factor that's been brought up is the state of the PC platform in the 1980s. A PC in 1992, or 1995, was a very different beast from a PC in 1987, after all, and the Amiga curbstomped a 1987 PC at gaming and multimedia applications. (Productivity, well, the PC was already entrenched as a standard by then.) Some of it may well be bitterness at the crappy XT clone with CGA or Hercules and PC Speaker audio beating the Amiga in the market place... although that's not the PC that beat their Amiga. The PC that beat their Amiga was probably a cheap MPC1 rig (or at least the same sort of idea - the optical drive might have been left out) with a 386SX, running Windows, that was compatible with everything that the new owner was doing at work, without BridgeBoards or software emulators. Let's face it, an MPC1 rig (especially if it had SVGA) could compete with an Amiga 1200, no problem. Or, it might've been an MPC2 rig in 1994-1995, right as the nails were going into the Amiga's coffin - a 486DX2/66 with a VLB SVGA card, a SB16 or so, and a CD could beat up on an Amiga 4000.

Finally, there's another direction I've seen an anti-PC mentality from - not the consumer direction, but the professional direction. There's people who see the PC as architecturally uninteresting, cheap, underpowered junk, that's clearly inferior to Real Workstations™. (And, nowadays, a workstation is just a PC with ECC and an ISV-certified version of the same graphics silicon that gamers use.) Some of them also will play with home computers, and typically AFAIK those interests will tend towards things like Macs or Amigas - they (especially Amigas) might be cheap junk, they might be underpowered in the 1990s, but at least they're architecturally interesting (read: different from PCs, and not x86). There's a lot of x86 hatred coming from that corner - either more ideologically pure CISC architectures like VAX or 68k, or various RISCs, are touted as being superior. (And, well, they may have been in some ways, but just because the CPU is ideologically inferior doesn't mean that it didn't work well... and a lot of the RISCs had higher memory performance demands due to poor code density, too.) Basically, this actually starts to loop back to Amiga types being bitter that their "superior" platform lost, just coming from a different direction in some cases.

That said, the x86 machines I play with tend to either be unique in some way, or that I have nostalgia for (whether I owned them back in the day or not).

bhtooefr wrote:

I'd argue that that's not exactly true, but it's very hard to point to something and say that that is when the PC fundamentally changed

Well, everyone will have their own experience, but for me personally, it would be around the 486/VLB era (around 1994 or so).
Before that time, there was a clear distinction between home computers and PCs. Home computers were cheap, and great for gaming and such. Most notably the C64 of course, and later the Amiga or Atari ST.
But when the 486/VLB solutions became affordable, they started to replace the home computers and game consoles for gaming. They were no longer just business machines. No longer was gaming just an afterthought, with lousy graphics and sound. The PC was actually THE gaming platform from now on. With games like Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, Comanche etc, which simply weren't available at all on other platforms, or nowhere near as good.
Home computers disappeared entirely from the market around that time, because PC had replaced them.

(I certainly don't agree that an MPC1 could beat an Amiga. Amiga had more colours than VGA in a lot of 2d games because of copper tricks, and it also handled games based on sprites and scrolling much better than VGA on a 286/386 system. Amiga's digital music was also generally much better than Adlib-based stuff).

To be fair, simulations and adventures were often very advanced on the PC.
Even during the home computer era in the 80s. Just think of The MS Flight Simulator or SimCity.
Playing these on a PC with a Hercules card in 720x348 was more appealing than playing other sims
on C64/Amiga/Spectrum machines in a screen resolution equally to a GameBoy handheld.
And don't forget about fixed disks. Most XT machines had those installed or had at least two floppy drives.
Memory is also a thing. Thanks to Lotus 1-2-3 the demand for more memory quickly increased..

Ah, point, MPC1 did allow straight VGA. I should've specified the addition of SVGA (which was recommended).

However, it required Sound Blaster, not Adlib, so digital sound was required. True, only one channel of it, needing software mixing if you wanted more than one, but... And, it required a 386SX (although performance-wise, that might as well be a 286).

bhtooefr wrote:

However, it required Sound Blaster, not Adlib, so digital sound was required. True, only one channel of it, needing software mixing if you wanted more than one, but... And, it required a 386SX (although performance-wise, that might as well be a 286).

Yes, music was Adlib, which was bad.
Sound effects on SB were mono, also bad.
And a 286/386SX was too slow for any reasonable software mixing during a game. So the few games that used it, had very poor sound quality (and basically were playing 4 channel Amiga MODs... so you'd get a poor emulation of the Amiga).
Also, Amiga had 28.5 KHz sampling rate, SB could only do 22.5 KHz.
Audio was... not one of the PC's strengths, until the Gravis UltraSound appeared on the market.

Errius wrote:

PCs were terrible gaming platforms before SVGA/SoundBlaster/CD-ROM became standard. Expensive too.

Wing Commander and Strike Commander is VGA, and so is Privateer. And so is Ultima 6, Ultima Underworld, etc. Did Amiga offer anything better at that time?

bhtooefr wrote:

Ah, point, MPC1 did allow straight VGA. I should've specified the addition of SVGA (which was recommended).

However, it required Sound Blaster, not Adlib, so digital sound was required. True, only one channel of it, needing software mixing if you wanted more than one, but... And, it required a 386SX (although performance-wise, that might as well be a 286).

The original MPC-Level 1 required an 80286 @10MHz..

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Wing Commander and Strike Commander is VGA, and so is Privateer. And so is Ultima 6, Ultima Underworld, etc. Did Amiga offer anything better at that time?

If you ask me, SVGA is irrelevant. 99.99% of all DOS games are standard VGA.
VGA itself wasn't the problem. Lack of performance was.
Amiga offered graphics that were roughly the same quality as VGA, but most games ran at a perfectly smooth 50 fps, where PC was slow and jerky.

I always think that the whole combination of the original Pentium release (with the "fast" mhz increase) with the PCI bus and with the Win 95 release was one of the important moment in pc industry to forget the various previous generations with all their problems hw or sw related. Some great games also had their part in increase "the reason to buy a pc".

386SX wrote:

I always think that the whole combination of the original Pentium release (with the "fast" mhz increase) with the PCI bus and with the Win 95 release was one of the important moment in pc industry to forget the various previous generations with all their problems hw or sw related. Some great games also had their part in increase "the reason to buy a pc".

I think Windows 95/DirectX indeed made PCs a lot easier to use (configuring a sound card in DOS was very complicated).
However, in my experience this was mostly still the 486-era. Pentiums were still very expensive back in 1995.

Scali wrote:

386SX wrote:

I always think that the whole combination of the original Pentium release (with the "fast" mhz increase) with the PCI bus and with the Win 95 release was one of the important moment in pc industry to forget the various previous generations with all their problems hw or sw related. Some great games also had their part in increase "the reason to buy a pc".

I think Windows 95/DirectX indeed made PCs a lot easier to use (configuring a sound card in DOS was very complicated).
However, in my experience this was mostly still the 486-era. Pentiums were still very expensive back in 1995.

Yeah, but before Directx I think that the Win 95 GUI concept itself with the fast PCI graphic cards and a serious performance increase that came with the Pentium architecture was the thing everyone could "feel" immediately, new users or old 486/Win3.11 user too.
I never had one myself, when everyone began to use various Pentium's I still had the 386 until the K6-2 when already Win98 was out.

386SX wrote:

I think Windows 95/DirectX indeed made PCs a lot easier to use (configuring a sound card in DOS was very complicated).
However, in my experience this was mostly still the 486-era. Pentiums were still very expensive back in 1995.

I think we owe Windows 95 and Plug'n'Pray all those tasty computer jokes. 😈
Because before their occurrence, these jokes were rather calm and only funny.

I don't find my x86 boring at all. I have two A600s, a couple of Acorn RiscPCs and a number of x86s. I guess I can make an unbiased comparison of each platform.

The system I use the most is a Zenith 286/12 system. Why? Because my first x86 system was a 286. I've enjoy maxing out its ram, adding a sound card and getting it on the internet(irc,telnet etc), adding a cdrom and LS120 drive. It even runs Windows 3.1 quite well with its 8megs of ram. Dos games look fantastic on the 19" monitor!

Old topic :p

But yeah, everything has pretty much been said and I've had this discussion with Amiga snobs (like Kim Justice over at Youtube) who believe the PC is a soulless machine compared to the Amiga. For one, I disagree - PCs could have tons of soul to its owners.

I recall some 10 years ago when someone on a popular Belgian forum promoted their retro gaming expo in Gent and I offered to bring my 486SX with a few dozen PC-exclusive or original games (Doom, Command & Conquer, Little Big Adventure, Lucas Arts adventures, etc.) and I was met with fierce negativity. On the one hand, you had the retro console fans that believed computers had no place there, on the other hand, you had the Amiga and Atari fans who thought the PC didn't HAVE a history.

When I brought up how the first person shooter genre and real time strategy genre were born on PCs (let alone genre defining games such as King's Quest, Ultima, Wing Commander, Alone in the Dark etc.) they huffed and dismissed my arguments calling them bullshit. No no, Resident Evil was NOT influenced by Alone in the Dark despite Alone in the Dark featuring very similar controls, identical methods of rendered backdrops over 3D models, etc. No, it was completely influenced by "Sweet Home" and nothing else.

That kind of stubborn ignorance seems to prevail until today with retro PC gaming always being shoved aside to my great annoyance. The PC platform has many amazing and unique games thanks to the developers being from all over the world while console games were largely Japan-based. On top of that, Europe had a very strong presence on the PC and Amiga platform and some amazing talent which evolved into development studios for the later consoles such as Playstation.