PC Gaming (1995-1998)
 

First of all, always keep your receipts right? Well, I found one from Jan '99 for the first PC I ever put together. I found all these details by cleaning out an old box I had stuffed in my office closet.

IWill MA-BD100 (100mhz fsb) - $159.00
Pentium II 350mhz Boxed - 269.95
Western Digital 8.4GB Hard Drive (Ultra DMA 33) - $219.00
64MB of SDRAM (1 chip) - $109.95
Diamond Viper V330 PCI Graphics Card - $79.00
MS Windows '98 Upgrade Edition (Fully bootable) - $99.95
ATX Mid Tower Case - $99.95
CA Sales Tax %8.25 - $85.46
Grand Total - $1,121.31 for a smoking hot machine!

The reason I put that killer rig together was so I could play these games without them being so choppy. All that's left is the CD's of games I had with it.

Tony LaRussa Baseball 3 (1995)
Aces Collector Series (Aces of Europe, Aces of the Pacific, ...) (1995)
Civilization II (1996)
Front Page Sports Baseball Pro '96 (1996)
Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles (1996)
Sid Meier's Gettysburg (1997)
John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles (1997)
Age of Empires I (1997)
CART Precision Racing (1997)
Front Office Football (1998)
European Air War (1998)
NASCAR Racing 1999 Edition (1998)
Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far (1998)
Grand Prix Legends (1998)
Gangsters (1998)
Police Quest - Swat 2 (1998)
Soldier's at War (1998)
Starcraft (1998)
Sierra Sports Football Pro (1998)
Sierra Sports Football Pro '99 (1998)

Kind of takes you back, doesn't it?

I still have flashbacks to my early Packard Bell days.

(This has nothing to do with PC's ranging from 95-98 but I still remember my first PC.)

My first ever PC was in the late 90's (1999). It was a DELL (not sure which brand). Then I had a house fire 5 yrs ago and lost that. I have home INS so I was cut a check for $30,000. I spent $3600 on a AREA 51 by Alienware (2000). Since then have built 3 PC's. I wish I knew how to build PCs before I bought that AREA 51. I would have saved about $800 if I would have built it myself. You live and learn I suppose.

Never had a non-TI computer until 1999.

Heck while we're getting nostalgic - I remember getting my first PC on a rental/credit deal while at university - paid around £1,200 for a 486SX-25 with a whopping 16Mb of RAM .... which at the time was a fantastic spec for a student to have (top spec at the time was around a DX-66 I seem to recall).

Spent many a happy hour hacking together game code with it and even now and then doing university assignements ;)

When I got my first summer job after freshman year at school, I spent my first two paychecks (~$2300 - nerd much?) on a sweet 286 PC with a turbo button that could up the clock speed from a robust 8 MHz to a FLYING 10 MHz. Yes, I had sweet EGA graphics, too - 16 colors, baby!

Believe it or not, I had a girlfriend at the time, too. Girlfriends come and go...but the PC and her blinking cursor are there for you until eternity.

Much like my first system. A 286 built from spare parts from a friend's work. It was a 286, but it did have SVGA graphics. I was given the system, but I had to buy the monitor. 15 inch SVGA .28 dot pitch monitor cost me $350.

SVGA graphics? You're one of those damn trust-fund kids, aren't you?! :)

Yes! I remember the turbo button, that really takes me back a little.

First machine was a 386-25dx, I want to say it had a 40 meg hdd, along with 2 or 4 megs of ram. Ran my first BBS off of that machine.

My first PC was an IBM PC Jr... playing games like Jumpman.

My first computer was the one Timex put out (I think it was called the Sinclair). I paid $39.99 for it at Kmart (on clearance from $99.99)

The games REALLY sucked that we available for it. The I upgraded to a Commdore Vic-20, because it was so much more powerful. :eek:

my first pc was a powerpacked Acer Pentium 2 166...i had no choice but to buy it so i could play simcity 2000 and warcraft 2, but i think much more nostalgically about my old commodore 64...i spent month after month playing Gunship, Sporttime Basketball, MISL soccer, and Red Storm Rising, which came on a whopping THREE 5 1/4 inch floppy disks!!! every once and a while i fire up an emulator i downloaded to my pc and play some of them for a little bit, then i realize how bad they are and i go back to playing Rise of Nations.

three of my absolute all-time favorites.

Well - if we're going back THAT far - my first PC was a Commodore 64 with an awesome cassette tape so I could save programs.

I programmed a really lame college football program (at that time, I had very little concept of statistics/random numbers/et.) and actually brought in the completed listing of the program into school. Oh, the humanity!

but did you type it in basic and then save it to your tape drive?

My first computer was an Apple II+. I remember the monitor having a textured screen for those lovely green graphics. Eventually upgraded to a 386SX. :)

the computer my family owned was an Apple IIc.

the first PC I ever bought was in 1999. A PII 333 gateway with a hard drive around 7 gigs. Paid about $4000 (from a 401k loan) for it - that was as high end as you could get at that time.

Heh if we're saying 'computer' rather than PC I can really show my age ;)

My first was a ZX Spectrum 16k .... missed out on the ZX 81 as I couldn't convince my dad to let me have one ...

My first PC was the VIC-20. My dad's first computer was some sodering job that had a 8 or 10 digit read out.

The Commodore 64 with Super Bowl Sunday rocked! This was circa 1986? And there was a really cool soccer game back then. The graphics were stunning for the time-frame, but I can't remember the name of that game. My German neighbor played it like it was going out of style (it did some time later, obviously).

I still have my C64 and all the games. A couple years ago I got it out and played a little Red Storm Rising. I should do that again sometime.

How have you changed as a gamer...

i would guess that it was MicroProse's World Cup Soccer..one side of the floppy had indoor and one had outdoor, comlplete with a world cup tourney and variable weather conditions.

my C-64 blew up...i got it fixed and then it blew up again..i would kill to play red storm rising again...for some reason, that is one game i can never find an emulator version of.

I had an Apple 2GS for a long time. Very nice for gaming. I remember when we went from like .5 megs of Ram to 2, it was like night and day.

I actually had an emulator version of it once. No idea where I got it from though, sorry.

"My" oldest computer was my dad's. It was a smoking 286 with a 2400 baud modem and a laser printer that claimed to do 6 pages a minute and was bigger than a computer paper box. Heavy, too.

SI