Why is it so hard to create my dream 1996 gaming PC?

this episode is supported by monsterjoysticks.com level up your raspberry pi with our all-in-one arcade kit using genuine sanwar arcade parts and oneclickprint.com for your photos on canvas acrylic gifts and more local craftsman and global delivery what was pc gaming like just before the explosive power of 3d acceleration from the famous 3dfx voodoo cards dropped on us in 1996. hello cave dwellers today we're turning this compact rosario here into a retro gaming rig and i thought it would be a great opportunity to consider where pc gaming was at when this thing was released around 1995-1996 it's a very specific point in time in pc gaming history when console gamers had taken to the sony playstation in their masses the hyped nintendo 64 was about to launch and nearly every game on every platform was expected to use polygons to be in true 3d in early 96 the pressure to give us pc gamers accelerating 3d graphics hardware which could be used universally across all games to set a standard was well and truly building and that down would burst with those 3dfx cards but they weren't out yet this is a self-imposed dilemma and so deciding on what video card to buy at this time is a key component to a good gaming pc it's quite the minefield i mean it's hard enough in the present day to pick a video card isn't it but at least you know whichever card you buy it will be supported by all games thanks to microsoft directx acting as a standard software layer an application programming interface that removes the confusion of hardware compatibility for gamers and developers alike but in 96 such luxury wasn't the case as is illustrated by this article from the same year the first generation of 3d accelerator cards have arrived many consumers are holding off though waiting to see which chipset looks to gain the widest support from game developers which is what it boils down to with the market about to be flooded by dozens of 3d boosters of various configurations it's going to be a tough call for buyers especially considering the premium price of these wafers of silicon joy wafers of silicon joy sounds delicious that's the climate of pc hardware at the time of this pc's release i suggest what we do is take a look at it see what its standard base configuration is and then we'll try to make some period accurate upgrades and learn a little bit more about the year and what was available as we go along so this beastly tower cost me 50 pounds on ebay which i thought was a reasonable price but then i do eat sleep and live retro so um perhaps i'm not the best person to ask it's a sizable case it's not a full tower case but it has got space for three five and a quarter inch drives it's got the original three and a half inch hard drive in there still working and space for more i think it's a good looking machine but i understand that many of you might think it's fairly unremarkable looking from the outside the build quality of it really does put it in a price bracket above what you might have spent on an off-the-shelf gaming pc if that's what you wanted you may have gone with a packard bell like i did back in the day or a gateway pc at a lower price point or you may have bought yourself a cheap case as i did with my second pc and built your pc from components but that wouldn't have stopped me from admiring this case from afar back in the day i'm sure now this was more likely to have been found in an office than as a gaming pc but we won't let that stop us today it's hard to find a reference to this machine in the magazines of the day perhaps due to its uh utilitarian nature should we say but it does crop up in this italian magazine pc open in 96 where it's pitched against an ibm aptiva 2168 and there it's listed as 4990 italian lire which translates to around 2 500 pounds 3 200 us dollars and they did praise the overall quality of the machine they were pretty happy with it looking around the back here there's no less than five slots the system board over here and it looks like a modem over here the previous owner seems to put a sound card in here despite it having on-board sound so perhaps they were having compatibility issues it does seem to have onboard video with a vga port here serial port ps2 ports for your keyboard and mouse and uh a parallel port and um oh a game port so it's got an onboard joystick port 15-pin joystick port there so nothing surprising there let's get the sides off and see what we've got inside now i've chosen first of all to take this side off which is closest to the system board ordinarily you take the opposite side off to get to the system board and you'll see why when we take this off because it's a little bit unusual compared to a standard pc you might expect today [Music] yeah instead of finding the back of the system board we find we've got full access to the system board from that side now on paper as standard we would expect to find a pentium first generation pentium cpu running at 120 megahertz eight megabytes of ram although we've clearly got mismatched sticks in here so i'm hoping that it's been upgraded a 1.2 gigabyte hard drive which is not accessible from this side we'll get to that shortly and there's your dial up modem down here not that we're going to put that to the test today but it is unusual that you only see one isis lot of course this tower pc doesn't have a single isis lot let me take you around to the other side of the case and take that side off so we have a dividing partition here into which the system board is mounted on the other side and then we've got four 16-bit iso slots and two pci slots in this proprietary daughter board which breaks out all of those extra slots and you've got the id and the floppy connectors which wind their way up here and you've got your your drive bay up here that as a bonus in the pci slot is a sound blaster card a ct4810 but i suspect we will take that out today so it's a slightly unusual setup but as a computer check this combined with the nice big thumb screws on the back would actually make this nice and quick to get the side off and it would have made it an enjoyable machine i think to work on during repair or upgrade duties ignoring that sound blaster card we'll just look at what's on board here and over here we've got for video duties and s3 trio 64v video chip which comes with one mega standard but up here there is a 2meg video upgrade option that you could just slot on to increase that and then down here is an n sonic just behind those cables ess audio drive chip so that isn't actually a bad combination it would give us adequate 2d performance but it doesn't have any 3d hardware acceleration built in unlike s3's other chip the verge which came out in 1995 the s3 verge was one of the first to push for a 3d standard in that instance it was what they named the s3d graphics engine but it didn't take off just looking on the inside of the case here there's a sticker which explains what's on the system board and i notice there's a vga feature connector which is nice that's if you've got an isa mpeg board you would then use the ribbon cable to connect it up so that the decoded video would be overlaid with your regular vga output or svga output and there's an mpeg option connector so the s3 chip had an optional mpeg decoder module that you could put on there in addition to the optional memory that you could put on there so quite flexible very much geared towards multimedia now i'd like to put this through the test we'll be benchmarking this before and after any upgrades that we put in there so we can do a side-by-side comparison we'll take out that sound blaster card i am going to leave the additional memory that's in there and in taking this card out i've come to realize it's perhaps not as convenient as first thought because if your screwdriver is too long it's not going to get in there to be able to undo the screw so you need a short screwdriver chaps and we'll give it a quick dust out as [Applause] well there we go now to complete the look i got back onto ebay and bought some more accessories namely this a compact branded v55 crt monitor a compact keyboard and a compact mouse all of which needs a very quick clean this is not a refurb or cleaning episode so uh bear with me i'll give everything a quick wipe down and then we'll put this to the test [Music] [Music] [Applause] and here is our machine ready to go now this is proving to be one of the trickier ones to get the camera in sync with so there may be some flickering but i'll switch to an actual screen capture for the comparison process so let's power it on hopefully we'll hear that lovely hard drive that original one gig or thereabouts hard drive spinning into life and we've got windows 95 on the drive already i haven't set windows 95 up this is just how it arrived from ebay and there we are in windows there's very little on here to be honest there's nothing too much to get excited about it's a pretty clean install i have found in device manager that because that other sound card was in there which we've removed our ess sound card and the joystick gameport has a red cross against it if we check the properties it's just saying that it's disabled but there is a driver installed so if we just enable that and the same with the joystick port there we go they say they're good we'll give it a reboot and we should have audio and we do indeed now have the audio working so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to capture how this thing works some games some benchmarks things like that then we'll get to our upgrades next and then we'll do side by side comparisons with the captures to see how this thing performs [Music] in its base configuration it really isn't a bad little gaming machine and you will see how it performs when i've got something to compare it to on the screen side by side shortly so it's time to put your gamer pants on mr presario because despite looking like it's made to create spreadsheets and me looking like your dad's accountant i am determined to have some fun with this and to upgrade it and to make it an even better gaming machine my dream 1996 gaming machine in the context of that year without the choice of the 3dfx guard so the mind immediately goes to video and sound for upgrades when it comes to uh gaming machines because i think we've got a pretty solid processor in there in that pentium 120 so let me show you what i've got on the table here as my chosen upgrades so the first thing i've chosen for the video card is this the matrox millennium i used to call it matrix but apparently matrox is the proper way to say it it's got two meg of ram on board it's got the matrox mga 2064 w chip on there and it can be upgraded to 4meg i think it may be you could even take it up to 8meg but it's done through this connector here and i've actually got another card here another matrox millennium with that 2meg upgrade on there so this is a full mag card and we will be using this card incidentally this is a compact oem one um so it suits the case perfectly it didn't come with the case originally i just picked this one up on ebay and instead of ram you could also put an mpeg decoder daughter board on there so it's quite a flexible card the millennium would have cost you 329 us dollars or around 250 pounds at the time which would have been considered a premium price for a video card but matrox could do that matrox has been creating video cards since 1978 and had a reputation for high quality cards with a crisp and vibrant image and the new card the millennium promised that high-end 2d performance so on paper it seemed like a safe bet and the millennium promised so much more support for microsoft's fledgling direct draw and direct video would give us apparently smooth 30 frame per second video playback but we will put that to the test in our benchmarking but crucially this is the key selling point it offered hardware accelerated 3d graphics not via microsoft's direct 3d which didn't appear until june 96 in its first very limited iteration but with its own proprietary api which games would need to support if the card's full potential was to be unlocked it wasn't matrix's first attempt at 3d acceleration they had previously released the impression plus which was aimed at 3d acceleration for computer-aided design the millennium card incorporated some of those 3d capabilities but like the impression plus a major admission was that it has no hardware texture mapping support but this was matrox a trustworthy name in the business this is surely the future of pc gaming trust me everything is going to support this card similar cards which we may have considered as an alternative were the creative 3d blaster which is based on the verity v1000 chip the nvidia nv1 the ati 3d rage and the s3 verge which we mentioned earlier all of which had their own proprietary 3d apis just like the millennium and expected game developers to cater to them and that's just the tip of the iceberg everyone was trying to get in on this even game developer sierra put out a 3d card called the screaming 3d card which also had the verity v1000 chip on it the sensible thing to do of course would be to just sit and wait it out and to let the market figure itself out to see which card to go for that's what i did i had a cirrus logic daytona i think it was video chip i think it was an onboard video chip and i just sat and waited until we saw who the victor was i even went down the video shop and used to hire a playstation and gran turismo at the weekends to get my 3d gaming fix but i got my upgrade in the end so we've got our video installed let's turn our attention to audio next and this was a much simpler choice i've got a card right here on the table to show you in the mid 90s sound blaster reigned supreme if you didn't have a genuine sound blaster card from creative labs then you got one that was sound blaster compatible it's just the way it was and the ess and sonic sound chip in the compact that we've got today is sandblaster compatible but what i always wanted was this the or 64. this arrived in the second half of 96. it has 512k of ram on board and you could get a 4mag version if you've got the all 64 gold edition and that also had some other extras including gold connectors and this was probably an earlier model because it's got the black ports on the back so the later ones had the ac97 color coded port and there was also a pci version that came later but this is an iso version which i hope will help with compatibility in dos gaming for me the big feature on this card is wave table synthesis sound fonts that's not too easy to say i can tell you realistic sounding instruments which will hopefully help our midi music to sound much nicer than the n sonic that we've got on board so let's get this installed and we'll go for round two of benchmarking and testing [Music] so what can our machine do and are my upgrade choices the right ones we'll start by checking that cpu insist id here and it is indeed an intel pentium running at 120 megahertz there's no fancy mmx support this is a first generation pentium and checking the ram we have 56 meg installed which is plenty more than i think i'm going to need in this system everything is looking good in device manager you can see our s3 trio 64 v plus video adapter and i have to say it's much better than what i was expecting to find in here it's definitely reflective of the premium price this compact tower commanded but it does only have one mega video memory and that means as we slide the resolution up the color depth goes down because there isn't the memory to define all of that per pixel information so the balance here is a resolution of 800 by 600 with 16-bit color depth and you wouldn't really want to take it any higher anyway at least the resolution any higher on my 15-inch crt monitor it just gets uncomfortable if you do contrast that with our upgraded system the matrox millennium gives us its own display property tabs and we can see that the extra memory affords us 32-bit color at any resolution i throw at it and if we drop into the advanced settings we can see that full meg of memory is detected both cards give a bright clear and steady image though and the addition of extra memory to the video ram expansion port on the motherboard would bring that s3 on a par for display options here i think let's see though how it handles our mpeg video file i've pulled the intro video from the game return to zork and it's the real magic version of the game that relied on you owning an mpeg decoder card to be able to run it and decode these videos playback in a window first then and to my eye the matrix card is a little ahead of the s3 it seems smoother to me when in motion and the image is just a little clearer but it's really hard to see the difference in image quality if i freeze the video here what we've got on the screen is the s3 image and now i'm going to slowly bring the matrox image in from the right to the left and then i'll freeze it halfway so the right side is the matrox the left side is the s3 and you've got to look really really closely to see a difference here especially when the video is in motion but for me in this still image the contrast is just a little bit better on the matrox you can see around the tree trunks in the background and around the grass textures it's just a little deeper and a little bit more well defined but i've stared at this thing for about 20 minutes to try and see those differences so is it a 250 pound difference no so far it's absolutely not there's a tiny difference there the real difference though comes when we go full screen all of the color depth goes out of the window here on the s3 and a heavy use of dithering kicks in all over the screen switch to the matrix now and it maintains the full color depth and that slightly smoother playback and if there's one thing you wanted in the mid 90s the era of fmv cutscenes it was that high quality full screen playback so the matrix wins the 2d tests for me and we will come on to 3d shortly but what about the sound card upgrade first was that worth it well let's try out some midi files and we'll alternate between the two devices to hear the difference [Music] do [Music] i mean i think that's really clear-cut the sound fonts loaded into the all-64's memory elevates midi music hugely let's listen to something more familiar now this is duke nukem 3ds theme song grab a bag playing in the fm mode on the ess [Music] chip [Music] [Applause] and here it is in all mode on the or 64. [Music] [Music] it's kind of odd because i'm so used to that first version that i can appreciate the instruments sound better on the o64 but the tune sounds not quite right for my taste in this instance it's just not how i remember it on now to 3d gaming which is where the matrox millennium promises me an elevated hardware accelerated experience over the s3 the key to enjoying this though is games that are aware of the 3d hardware or patches to make them aware of it to take advantage of the millennium card so if we run a quake benchmark for example on our stock system that comes out with a result of 18.2 frames per second on our upgraded system it runs almost identically i'm getting 18.4 frames per second and that's to be expected because this is all running under software rendering a game that is supported is papyrus's nascar racing truly the crisis of his day this thing was known to slay the most powerful computers in svga mode the box recommends a pentium 60 cpu and we've got double that speed so um in vga mode here it zips along on our stock system yes it looks like a pixel soup at times in this low resolution but it's entirely playable and i would have been pretty pleased with this at the time [Music] but switch now to the high resolution mode with software rendering and everything changes even with the game automatically turning off textures on the road and the grass it's visibly choppy [Music] in comparison we'll run the matrox accelerated version specifically the high resolution mode which is catered to our millennium card um yeah i've got to be honest i'm not seeing a great difference here is this thing even on let's check it side by side it's difficult to see a noticeable hardware acceleration effect it certainly made no difference to the image quality there's no hardware anti-aliasing or anything like that it's not giving the game a sufficient bump to turn the road or grass textures on while maintaining a good frame rate and if you look closely at times it's even switching more things off on the hardware accelerated version to keep the frame rate up at times when compared to the software render [Music] so let's max out the graphic settings in the game and see how it compares then now with everything turned on to the max we are getting a noticeably better frame rate from the matrox i can definitely see it with my own eyes but i mean this was 250 pounds it promised me hardware acceleration and if i've got to strain to see the difference side by side with software rendering then come on matrix i'm feeling a bit cheated out of my money here but nascar 2 is just one game let's see how that hardware acceleration performs on some other games well i'd love to but nascar racing was the only game ever released with support for the matrox millennium's 3d acceleration that's it not tomb raider not quake nothing else 250 pounds in 1996 for a card that offered me not a lot more than i already had in the tower admittedly the chip that i found in there the s3 chip was a lot better than i was expecting so that narrowed the gap in 2d performance but come on where's my 250 pounds worth of 3d acceleration clearly i've backed the wrong horse and plenty of others did too there was the creative 3d blaster which received support for about 13 games the nvidia mv one with seven games the s3 verge got 18 games uh matrox's next attempt the mystique that same year in 96 got 12 games and the most popular the one that nearly made it was the rendition verity which had 26 games with hardware support for it so many different graphics cards were promising to be the future of 3d and well it's hardly surprising is it that i ended up going down a dead end it was a tough time to be a pc gamer the answer of course came with that raw power of the 3d fx cards they arrived in october of 1996 and yes it would have been painful but i would have put my hand in my pocket to get one and that matrox card doesn't go completely to waste because this is a diamond monster 3d effects card it's 3d only and it still needs a 2d card to work alongside it so the result is for this build my pretend 1996 build is that i get to enjoy the benefits of a premium 2d performance matrix card we'll forget it ever whispered promises of 3d acceleration into our collective ear and i can enjoy the raw 3d power of that 3dfx guard now that is a 1996 gaming pc 96 has been an expensive year for me but as i head into 97 i've got a very powerful games machine and i'll have a lot of enjoyment with it at least until the 3dfx voodoo 2 cards come out i don't need to think about spending any more money which is in about 12 months time in 1998 i better start saving as always thank you for watching do share your thoughts did you pick this card did you pick one of those other dead end cards before getting a 3dfx card like i did let me know in the comments section take care bye-bye [Music] if you've enjoyed today's video and what i do here in general then consider heading over to patreon.com forward slash retro man cave where a small contribution will give you access to all videos one week early without any adverts but most importantly you'll become an official cave dweller i hope to see you there and thank you [Music] you

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 237,091

Keywords: computer history, nostalgia, retro, retro computer, retro man cave, compaq presario, matrox millennium, 3dfx, gpu, voodoo, pc gaming, retro pc gaming, retro gaming

Id: yFPCU40RxO8

Length: 29min 26sec (1766 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020