This is a fascinating read.
Back in 1997 my father had a Pentium box with maybe 16MB of RAM. I was able to play Duke 3D and I stuck in E1M3 too and didn’t figure that out until much later.
I wonder how well Fabien’s build runs Unreal. It was the pinnacle of classic FPS IMO. I used to drool over a voodoo card but I immersed myself playing in software rendering mode in a netbar.
Good time.
Outstanding!
I cannot wait for a quake engine book. I'm sure a few hundred of us would be happy to pre-pay so you can take some time off work and write it all up :)
That Linksys card feels out of place in an over-the-top late 90s build.
As I recall it, the local LAN scene had an almost religious cult around 3com 10mbit ISA cards, that eventually morphed into a similar thing for Intel 100mbit cards.
Drivers and hardware were even more shit back in those days than today. Cards known to have worked in multiple motherboards and across multiple operating systems were held in high regard.
> As I ranted against the '90s and "how hard it was back then to have access to information", my wife came over the workbench, looked at the HDD, and then calmly informed me the J50 was the pins on the left. Hein, mais comment tu sais ca? Then she flipped the HDD to show me the PCB pins were labeled!
Mr. Sanglard is a lucky man :-)