I remember when PCs didn't have sound by default and you had to buy a Soundblaster or Adlib card. As well as having to buy 2MB extra RAM to play DOOM, which was CPU-driven 2.5D.

Edit: this seems to have gone full "Four Yorkshiremen", possibly remembering the last time AMD was really competitive.

Could not afford a Soundblaster so I used 8 resistors to solder together a crude 8-bit DAC (called Covox iirc) which plugged into parallel port and was amplified by a cassette deck, which was good enough for games

On an Apple II, the built-in speaker could only do two states. You had to PWM your way into sounds while drawing on the screen and trying to keep audio sample rate while reading the analog joystick that took longer to read the more up/right it was.

Perhaps surprisingly the early PC had exactly the same architecture: two-state speaker, RC-timer based joysticks. A few games and eventually lots of demosceners managed to get decent sound out of the PWM speaker. Although I remember when demos and games really would have preferred you spend several hundred £ on a Gravis Ultrasound.

I remember needing to wait for a VBLANK before writing to the 6845's VRAM. Oh... And the write-only EGA registers, that made it impossible to know in what mode you were...

What a revolting machine the PC was...

I remember the first time I got my sweaty little hands on a 286 with VGA graphics (before that I had an XT with CGA).

It was like stepping into the future.

Shortly after I got my hands on a 386 Elonex laptop with B&W VGA and it was amazing (I got it from a family friend who was binning it, the ribbon between the screen and the base had snapped and it was a 50p part for a machine that was selling well north of a 1000 at the time).

I owe my whole career to my stubborness and a broken ribbon cable to HDD on a 286. countless hours and library time to figure out to read HDD with only DOS debug program, and int13. Ooo man i wish i have the same patience and stubborness now

For me it was writing a program to balance my mums household accounts on a ZX Spectrum and figuring out how to load/save data to a tape.

Bless her she actually used it even though it was about as much work as doing it by hand.

I think she was just trying to keep an excited 9yo happy.

It ended up been rather more sophisticated than the original plan.

A colleague of mine remembers using the rotational speed of drum memory to accomplish a "wait" function in his code.

Oh yeah, i remember visiting a richer friend who had a soundblaster until my parents bought me a sound card...

My first sound card took me ages to properly configure addresses and interrupts. I played Doom with MIDI audio only for a long time. It was like going on a homicidal rampage with headphones and loud music.

Yes! Doom with midi sound...I remember it well. I remember unwrapping that SoundBlaster and feeling like a king. Man I miss those days.

And of course, you'd have a different experience to someone else with different MIDI samples.

I remember playing C&C on my 486x66 and thinking the game was a slow.

Then I booted it up on a Pentium 100 and realized that it had only been running at 1/3 speed before.

Luxury!

I remember using Sublogic's Flight Simulator on my Apple II. Frame rates were measured in seconds per frame.

In 80s-90s there were no 3d cards but games in general had multiple graphics modes for different graphics cards. 4 color fixed palette CGA looked very different from 16 color EGA and that was pale in comparison with 256 colored glory of MCGA/VGA. Even after the digital video became obsolete there were huge differences in hardware still. An 8 bit ISA DRAM VGA card was orders of magnitude slower than a VLB SVGA with fast dual ported VRAM. E.g. in early- mid 90s you'd see animations played anywhere between 3 and 30 fps depending on your video card. And in late 90s, when first hardware 3d games appeared, no CPU could make the difference between the HW and SW modes.

I mean that was true for DOOM and the like. Optimizing it was really about optimizing the accesses to VRAM. See all the Mode X and unchained memory stuff.

.. but there was no "graphics acceleration" involved, and use of mode X is disputed: https://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/57861-have-you-eve...

Due to the algorithm it was double buffered, but all rendering calculations were definitely done on the CPU and the graphics device used as a framebuffer. So having a fast processor was critical for DOOM.

It was really only in the post-3dFX era that processors became irrelevant, and then only until physics modelling caught up.

My point isn't about "graphics acceleration" (and the OP doesn't use that term either. It's about reducing memory bandwidth between from the CPU to VRAM.

The huge emphasis that ID guys put on reducing overdraw to basically nothing really helped it run on relatively shitty platforms. The basically optimized it to the point where CPU->VRAM bandwidth was the bottleneck.

I date myself: I remember making games when CPU was everything, trying to get a game to be functional with a 486 DX!

For a long time the most common bus was the ISA at only 8 MHz even for many 486 systems until VESA become popular.

VESA was just a hack on top of ISA that allowed one or two cards to run faster.

PCI was the first real improvement over ISA.

haha right...I remember the first game I ever wanted to play that required a graphics card. "What is this?" The game was Jedi Knight. I lost my soul to that game.

I also remember installing Direct-X via floppies.

Stuff did just work on my 286, and I the only thing I ever ran into problems with was Windows 98 (which required a coprocessor). So it didn't really matter what you had.

You're mixing eras a bit, I'm pretty sure windows 95 and up required a 386.

You are correct, the 80286 was a 16-bit processor. You might have been able to run Win 95 on a 386, but a 486 was probably as low as you really wanted to go, and really a Pentium was needed to have a usable system.

Win95 did run on 386, even with 4 MB of RAM. But you really did want at least 8 MB, otherwise it would just trash the disk swapping.

Running it on Pentium with 16 MB RAM was great.

I ran Windows 95 on a 486. It was... well, it worked. I can't imagine running a 386.