In honor of Eurogamer - our partner site - reaching its 20th anniversary, we decided to honor its anniversary by revisiting some of the most classic and interesting games of 1999, by running them on a vintage retro PC with Coppermine Pentium, more Voodoo 2 and Riva TNT2 Pro graphics cards!
Here is our parts list - it would have been a pretty hardcore advanced PC for 1999:
Processor: Intel Pentium III 700 Mhz Coppermine Slot 1 version (0.18 μm manufacturing process) with 133 MHz FSB
Motherboard: Biostar M6VBE motherboard
Memory: 384 MB RAM
Main display adapter: ELSA Erazor III TNT2 Pro graphics card
Secondary display adapter: 3DFX Voodoo 2 12 MB
Sound Card: PCI Sound Blaster sound card
Storage: 20 GB IDE hard drive
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I'm always worried if Richard is not bored
ReplyDeleteIn early '99 I had a P2-400 160MB RAM 2x12MB Voodoo2(SLI) and a 16MB Riva TNT. Later that year I upgraded to an Athlon 700...
ReplyDeleteThe Jurassic Park game is like a VR game concept
ReplyDeleteHow coll would it be a 2000 PC gamer VS ps2 VS xbox VS gamecube ?? Could it run GTA SA ? Halo 2 and other games from 6th generation ?
ReplyDeleteI still have a Riva TNT2 card. It has the whole 16MB of VRAM.
ReplyDeleteI just built myself a Windows XP/Windows 7 machine out of leftover parts..and some new purchases (and a Windows 98 machine lol) lucked out on getting a CRT monitor in pretty mint looking shape! And yes...playing Crysis, Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R, Return to Caslte Wolfenstein maxed out on a CRT is phenomenal! I had completely forgotten the joy of playing PC games on a CRT-monitor really.
ReplyDeleteI got teased hard by that Captain Claw cameo
ReplyDeleteThese visuals from Jurassic Park only 5 years before in 1994 took months to render at ILM computers. It was surreal to saw this at real time on a home computer in 1999
ReplyDeleteyou guys forgot that the 3D fx cards not only had lower color depth, they also had a limited texture resolution of 256px, that made the games very blurry, it's very apparent in Quake III and Unreal Tournament (the only good unreal games are the tournament ones).
ReplyDeleteThe games back then were just absolute magic. Constant tech boundaries being broken and anything seemed possible. It's all so stale now and 95% hype for bullshit.
ReplyDeleteI bought a Sony Trinitron E530 a few years back just for retrogaming...... but sadly i do get a headache everytime i do it for a longer period. Even when running it at 85hz. It is annoying. >.<
ReplyDeleteThe picture looks really good, yet i am happy modern panels got rid of the overall "unsharpness". i am one of those who really enjoys the ultrasharp pixels of a game played in native resolution on a modern panel.
Still both techs have their ups and downs.
Also 29:55 "Scanline Interleave"....... SLI baby! (not detected)
AlsoAlso: I bought a TNT2 because of more colors and D3D etc..... and then sold it and rebounded back to Voodoo (3) because Glide was just so much faster, and the colors didn't bother me back in the day. Specially since Glide had a weirdly increased gamma anyway that i never found out how to lower to normal settings.
no loot boxes everywhere and no constant crashes and no always online requirements, WTH. wheres the DLC? wheres the store to buy all the stats and weapons, its almost as if they made full games at one time.
ReplyDeleteYou should do a video on Voodoo3. It was a huge upgrade for Half-Life (and other games). Paired with a newer 1.4GHz Pentium III (server CPU) it will often max out the HL-engine at 100fps, at 1024x768. Quite impressive for the time. ;)
ReplyDeleteI still wish to find a 1080p CRT monitor
ReplyDeleteI'd buy it in a heartbeat if I had the cash
p.s.: It'd be amazing if steam/valve released the old school GUI for Half-Life/CS. I really miss it
Why would you not put a geforce 256 if you're already pushing 1999 hardware
ReplyDelete16:00 talks about frame rates. Older first person games had next frame response, whereas modern 3rd person games have multi frame (or in the case of RDR2 multi second) animations for inputs which make them feel laggy.
ReplyDeleteWow, I had forgotten about Claw! Is there any legit way to play that on a modern PC?
ReplyDeletenostalgia overload! I built my computer in 7th grade to play halflife, then in 9th grade for Quake 3! I used Voodoo 3 and soundblaster live! My second rig was never stable though, always crashed. Great times. Great video!
ReplyDeleteThis was pretty interesting
ReplyDelete>s3 virge
ReplyDeletewasn't that a decelerator card??
if you got one try the geforce 256 deluxe with 3d glasses.
ReplyDeleteI got one and the 3d glasses don't seem to like my samsung syncmaster 551v (that or my 3d glasses aren't working right) that much, the image of one eye bleeds into the other.
Ha! I had a Viper 770 which was a TNT 2 ultra. Hated Voodoo cards and their 12 bit colour palette. Eraser not was a go to mod for 64 player bot action (they were thick as planks compared to UT bots)
ReplyDeleteThen one year later, No One Lives Forever Came out...that was my Half-Life.
ReplyDeleteAbout at this time I had an intel celeron 300A clocked @450MHz and voodoo 2 sli. Or was it AMD K6 300 with the voodoo 2 sli. I remember these things/games from the past. Unreal benchmark was jaw dropping and unreal tournament was my favourite game on pc. It's graphics was so above from PS1. But I have to admit that playstation games were more addicting, Gran turismo, FF VII and Crash Bandicoot and others. And I was in with the PS1 modding scene here in Finland at that time. Those were the days....
ReplyDeleteWow I almost died of a nostalgia overdose.
ReplyDeleteSimply the BEST video from DF EVER!!!!
ReplyDeleteHow about MDK 2 guys? It's an oldschool masterpiece among all others!
ReplyDeleteI upgraded from 256 to 512 megs of RAM a while into World of Warcraft. World changing effect.
ReplyDeleteI would use a high refresh (eye comfort is the thing with CRT) 1080p DVI CRT if I had the chance. Nothing compares to it. Slightly miss the PVM but I used it so rarely for my retro.
I've waited for that MGS 1 gameplay... but no luck. Great episode and you have killed me with this 58:37 episode! This game 58:37 remind me in many ways ARK: Survival Evolved!
ReplyDeleteJarvis is that you?
ReplyDeleteNow that John talked about How transformative of a experience is to play Modern games on CRT's you should do a video showing the Advantages of using this old kinds of monitors
ReplyDeleteI got my first PC in 2003... a Celeron 1.1Ghrz with a Geforce 2 MX440 64Mb while most of my friends were still using AMD Duron 900Mhrz or P3s at 750Mhrz, and TNT2s and we were happy with 30FPS in Counter Strike running at 1024x768 on our 15 inch CRT monitors... those were the best days I had with PC gaming. No one took it seriously... win or lose, did not matter... we were all just having fun...
ReplyDeleteI met the team demoing Trespasser before they added 3dfx acceleration. He was quite perturbed when I asked if they where going to ass 3dfx acceleration. He scoffed saying we can get 12-16fps without it ! hehe, I guess it was not something developers embraced in the very beginning. I do feel like the game looked better without that early bi-linear filtering 3dfx cards did.
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