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December Days 07: IBM PC or PC-Compatbile
Dec. 7th, 2019 11:03 pm[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
I learned to build computers so I could play games.
Once personal computers became a thing, it became relatively lear that you could have a perfectly serviceable machine to handle things like word processing, spreadsheets, and office tasks with some of even the earliest machines. Lotus, WordStar, dBase, and other such applications were already ready and part of even the beginnings of personal computer systems. Software could be loaded on one disk, and data saved to another disk, and there you have it. With BASIC and other programming languages and compilers, programming became easier for computers. (And I dabbled in that some, too, because BASIC was something I could learn how to do and it made sense. Much of my programming knowledge is from being a dabbler.) Really, the only things that would push the envelope for needing stronger and beefier computers would be things that needed to use a lot of resources. Which meant multimedia applications were the most obvious reason anyone would need a more powerful computer. (This is also during the point in time where Apple machines were considered Inherently Superior to the various IBM/PC clones for multimedia, because Photoshop, various desktop publishing softwares, and other applications used to only be available for Macs and their hardware.)
Games, of course, are absolutely multimedia applications. Of the sort where they will take up a significant amount of resources and sometimes need to have things set up specifically so there are enough resources available for them to use. Spacewar!, after all, was unofficially a way of demonstrating the possible capabilities of the PDP-1, because it took advantage of the capabilities of the PDP-1. And boot disks were a pretty common occurrence of the DOS era as well. So games and multimedia were part of the driving force toward developing new processors, new video expansion cards, and things that could go faster and more robustly so they could play games like they were supposed to.
Buying a full computer, however, is still pretty expensive. While we now have a multitude of possible ways of buying our computers, it's still the case that the more powerful the machine being sought, the more expensive it will be to buy it all put together and new. Limited-function machines like Chromebooks, Android devices, iProducts, and the like are less expensive, generally, than a general-purpose laptop computer running either OSX or Windows (and part of that expense is the operating system, yes), but the general-purpose machine can also do a lot more. Chromebooks and tablets and smartphones run apps, sometimes available only from a single source, generally close off access to their internal workings so they can't be modified. (Ish. The jailbreak, root, and alternative firmware and OS communities offer the ability to take back some control of your device, assuming you have the technical know-how and/or find a good tutorial to follow.) General-purpose computers can do a lot more, and often can have their internal workings more exposed and messed with. (Ish, again, because, after all, Microsoft and Apple take a dim view of people reverse-engineering their operating systems. But programs can be built and found that run in those environments, and/or the various flavors of Linux, whether you believe the GNU should be in front of it or not.)
One of the things that makes the IBM/PC clones more attractive to a small me than Macs or latptops (although, in these days, they're actually more like Compaq luggables than the slim, portable, sometimes reversible-hinged, sometimes touchscreen-capable things that we refer to today when we talk about laptops) is that desktop machines are a conglomeration of cards and drives plugged into a motherboard that have software that makes them work harmoniously together. That hasn't changed, even as the numbers attached have gone up, whether it's clock speed, storage numbers, data transfer rates, or sheer amount of transistors available per square inch. Which means, instead of having to buy a completely new computer when the one that I currently have is no longer able to play the games I want to play, I can upgrade a component and enjoy increased performance, or otherwise make a game that had been out of reach playable.
The family computer, in a visible space, is almost always the most powerful machine in the room. It will almost always be the only one that has connectivity to the Internet, at least until broadband finally catches up to the house long after I have left it for university. But computers are in the rooms of the kids as well, with the understanding that we'll use them responsibly. Which is, admittedly, a lot easier because there's no Internet access attached to them. And when you're messing with your own machine, rather than the family computer, there's a certain amount of license that gives you to try new things and experiment, and to learn about how the things work and what you can do to them. And, occasionally, to screw it up where you might have to wipe it all and reinstall. (Make backups, yo.) This is why I love the idea of the Raspberry Pi. It's not perfect, because it's a single-board computer, and it uses the ARM instruction set, instead of x86. , but it's cheap, it's powerful, and most importantly, it is a computer built for learning and experimentation, where if things go totally pear-shaped, you can re-image the card and start again. It's a low-risk environment and there are some pretty powerful things you can do with them already, whether by themselves or as clients to interact with more standard PCs for streaming, gaming, or otherwise.
Admittedly, about the only thing that necessitated a complete case change was when I swapped motherboards, because the cases I had generally worked best with their motherboards. But upgrading the motherboard meant I could swap in my video card, my sound card, my peripheral controllers, my hard drive, my optical disc drive, a floppy drive, and sometimes even the RAM from the old machine and pick up where I left off with a more powerful processor under the hood, and so I could upgrade on the salary of "gifts of cash at birthdays and holidays, supplemented by various service to the religious community that paid" by doing it piece by piece, scouring various amateur radio and computer enthusiast shows (where the grownups usually went for the amateur radio and my friends and I went for the computer and electronics components). It meant that I wasn't necessarily running the newest machine on the block, but for most of the games I was playing, it was enough to get me there. And it would get me there, at least until I was able to get my own machines and assemble them. Even my most current machines I've popped open to have a look inside and swap in or out a component or two. Not as much as I have before, but I suspect, as time goes on, that will be something that gets done. This time around, though, since I was trying to future-proof, I bought some more advanced components and a bit more RAM than I might have before.
But if I buy something better, because I've tinkered so much before already, it won't be a problem for me to pop it open and slide in a new card, or swap out some RAM, or other such things. So long as I do my research beforehand so I know it will be compatible right from the get-go. Which, once, I didn't understand things completely enough from my research beforehand once, and ended up buying a 3Dfx Voodoo 3D accelearator card so I could play Final Fantasy VIII on my "barely-meets the minimums" machine. What I hadn't realized at the time was that the Voodoo was a companion card, meant to take up another slot and work in tandem with the video card that was already there. Once I figured that out (because the machine wouldn't boot without a working video card in it), I realized I needed an additional cable that would bridge between the original video card and the Voodoo to make it all work. And it did work! And I played Final Fantasy VIII...very slowly. Final Fantasy VII worked fine, except for one spot where I got caught by an error in the renderer and important things that needed to be drawn never actually were, so they couldn't be interacted with. Eventually, we got around that by copying the save file and installing it on a machine where it could run in proper hardware-accelerated mode, where the missing objects were, in fact, drawn, and the triggers needed to progress allowed us to move forward. Sometimes the right solution to the problem is to use a different computer. Which is eventually what I did with FFVIII, as well, because having something more than the minimums in my system was a good idea.
So, yeah, I've looked at the guts of many a PC in my life, and swapped things and made them work and enjoyed performance boosts and bought upgrades piecemeal. Having done it this way might have also informed a certain amount of my enjoyment of making older technology work and do things that may not have been part of the original plan, which is less about me doing the hacking and more about me following other people's recipes and cackling about how I'm keeping these devices relevant past the point where the manufacturer has abandoned them. (It's the same way I cook - I follow recipes and tweak them, rather than looking at a pile of ingredients and creating something new and interesting from the raw materials.)
I learned to build computers so I could play games.
Once personal computers became a thing, it became relatively lear that you could have a perfectly serviceable machine to handle things like word processing, spreadsheets, and office tasks with some of even the earliest machines. Lotus, WordStar, dBase, and other such applications were already ready and part of even the beginnings of personal computer systems. Software could be loaded on one disk, and data saved to another disk, and there you have it. With BASIC and other programming languages and compilers, programming became easier for computers. (And I dabbled in that some, too, because BASIC was something I could learn how to do and it made sense. Much of my programming knowledge is from being a dabbler.) Really, the only things that would push the envelope for needing stronger and beefier computers would be things that needed to use a lot of resources. Which meant multimedia applications were the most obvious reason anyone would need a more powerful computer. (This is also during the point in time where Apple machines were considered Inherently Superior to the various IBM/PC clones for multimedia, because Photoshop, various desktop publishing softwares, and other applications used to only be available for Macs and their hardware.)
Games, of course, are absolutely multimedia applications. Of the sort where they will take up a significant amount of resources and sometimes need to have things set up specifically so there are enough resources available for them to use. Spacewar!, after all, was unofficially a way of demonstrating the possible capabilities of the PDP-1, because it took advantage of the capabilities of the PDP-1. And boot disks were a pretty common occurrence of the DOS era as well. So games and multimedia were part of the driving force toward developing new processors, new video expansion cards, and things that could go faster and more robustly so they could play games like they were supposed to.
Buying a full computer, however, is still pretty expensive. While we now have a multitude of possible ways of buying our computers, it's still the case that the more powerful the machine being sought, the more expensive it will be to buy it all put together and new. Limited-function machines like Chromebooks, Android devices, iProducts, and the like are less expensive, generally, than a general-purpose laptop computer running either OSX or Windows (and part of that expense is the operating system, yes), but the general-purpose machine can also do a lot more. Chromebooks and tablets and smartphones run apps, sometimes available only from a single source, generally close off access to their internal workings so they can't be modified. (Ish. The jailbreak, root, and alternative firmware and OS communities offer the ability to take back some control of your device, assuming you have the technical know-how and/or find a good tutorial to follow.) General-purpose computers can do a lot more, and often can have their internal workings more exposed and messed with. (Ish, again, because, after all, Microsoft and Apple take a dim view of people reverse-engineering their operating systems. But programs can be built and found that run in those environments, and/or the various flavors of Linux, whether you believe the GNU should be in front of it or not.)
One of the things that makes the IBM/PC clones more attractive to a small me than Macs or latptops (although, in these days, they're actually more like Compaq luggables than the slim, portable, sometimes reversible-hinged, sometimes touchscreen-capable things that we refer to today when we talk about laptops) is that desktop machines are a conglomeration of cards and drives plugged into a motherboard that have software that makes them work harmoniously together. That hasn't changed, even as the numbers attached have gone up, whether it's clock speed, storage numbers, data transfer rates, or sheer amount of transistors available per square inch. Which means, instead of having to buy a completely new computer when the one that I currently have is no longer able to play the games I want to play, I can upgrade a component and enjoy increased performance, or otherwise make a game that had been out of reach playable.
The family computer, in a visible space, is almost always the most powerful machine in the room. It will almost always be the only one that has connectivity to the Internet, at least until broadband finally catches up to the house long after I have left it for university. But computers are in the rooms of the kids as well, with the understanding that we'll use them responsibly. Which is, admittedly, a lot easier because there's no Internet access attached to them. And when you're messing with your own machine, rather than the family computer, there's a certain amount of license that gives you to try new things and experiment, and to learn about how the things work and what you can do to them. And, occasionally, to screw it up where you might have to wipe it all and reinstall. (Make backups, yo.) This is why I love the idea of the Raspberry Pi. It's not perfect, because it's a single-board computer, and it uses the ARM instruction set, instead of x86. , but it's cheap, it's powerful, and most importantly, it is a computer built for learning and experimentation, where if things go totally pear-shaped, you can re-image the card and start again. It's a low-risk environment and there are some pretty powerful things you can do with them already, whether by themselves or as clients to interact with more standard PCs for streaming, gaming, or otherwise.
Admittedly, about the only thing that necessitated a complete case change was when I swapped motherboards, because the cases I had generally worked best with their motherboards. But upgrading the motherboard meant I could swap in my video card, my sound card, my peripheral controllers, my hard drive, my optical disc drive, a floppy drive, and sometimes even the RAM from the old machine and pick up where I left off with a more powerful processor under the hood, and so I could upgrade on the salary of "gifts of cash at birthdays and holidays, supplemented by various service to the religious community that paid" by doing it piece by piece, scouring various amateur radio and computer enthusiast shows (where the grownups usually went for the amateur radio and my friends and I went for the computer and electronics components). It meant that I wasn't necessarily running the newest machine on the block, but for most of the games I was playing, it was enough to get me there. And it would get me there, at least until I was able to get my own machines and assemble them. Even my most current machines I've popped open to have a look inside and swap in or out a component or two. Not as much as I have before, but I suspect, as time goes on, that will be something that gets done. This time around, though, since I was trying to future-proof, I bought some more advanced components and a bit more RAM than I might have before.
But if I buy something better, because I've tinkered so much before already, it won't be a problem for me to pop it open and slide in a new card, or swap out some RAM, or other such things. So long as I do my research beforehand so I know it will be compatible right from the get-go. Which, once, I didn't understand things completely enough from my research beforehand once, and ended up buying a 3Dfx Voodoo 3D accelearator card so I could play Final Fantasy VIII on my "barely-meets the minimums" machine. What I hadn't realized at the time was that the Voodoo was a companion card, meant to take up another slot and work in tandem with the video card that was already there. Once I figured that out (because the machine wouldn't boot without a working video card in it), I realized I needed an additional cable that would bridge between the original video card and the Voodoo to make it all work. And it did work! And I played Final Fantasy VIII...very slowly. Final Fantasy VII worked fine, except for one spot where I got caught by an error in the renderer and important things that needed to be drawn never actually were, so they couldn't be interacted with. Eventually, we got around that by copying the save file and installing it on a machine where it could run in proper hardware-accelerated mode, where the missing objects were, in fact, drawn, and the triggers needed to progress allowed us to move forward. Sometimes the right solution to the problem is to use a different computer. Which is eventually what I did with FFVIII, as well, because having something more than the minimums in my system was a good idea.
So, yeah, I've looked at the guts of many a PC in my life, and swapped things and made them work and enjoyed performance boosts and bought upgrades piecemeal. Having done it this way might have also informed a certain amount of my enjoyment of making older technology work and do things that may not have been part of the original plan, which is less about me doing the hacking and more about me following other people's recipes and cackling about how I'm keeping these devices relevant past the point where the manufacturer has abandoned them. (It's the same way I cook - I follow recipes and tweak them, rather than looking at a pile of ingredients and creating something new and interesting from the raw materials.)
