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Tech - Yesteryear EQ hardware woes? (1 Viewer)

on dialup, downloading multi-zipped games for days, only to find the last zip corrupt... gah
luclin (i think) was like a 7 disc cd-rom install - and i remember the 7th disc failing repeatedly, it was the absolute suck
 
I was unlucky enough to have to play games pre-EQ when there was dial-up. We did have many a all nighter playing Doom on a 28.8 connection. I was never able to get a faster connection no matter how many times I tried. One of my good friends introduced me to mouselook in Doom. I always used the arrow keys to turn around and man was mouselook like the best thing ever.
 
Then came customized batch files to present you with menus on boot, thereby cutting those dozen disks back down to one.
I incorporated colored ascii art into the menu system for my batch file until eventually the batch file got too large for my system to run.
 
I incorporated colored ascii art into the menu system for my batch file until eventually the batch file got too large for my system to run.
Speaking of ascii art, I remember running a number of different BBS's in my pre-internet days. Anyone remember Legend of the Red Dragon (L.O.R.D.)?
 
My first ever PC i got as a gift from my brother in law (think it was in 1990) had these specs:

- Green screen (Hercules) Mono color.
- CPU was Intel XT running at 4.77Mhz.
- RAM was like 128KB or maybe 256.
- Two 5.2" floppy drives.
- 10MB HDD so clanky and noisy, Yes it's 10 Megs not Gigs. Size close to A4 paper.

Had no games, just running DoS 3.3 OS.
 
I bought my first PC when i was young, went to buy it with my father with all the money i got from xmas etc. Was so happy to get one finally and to be able to play EQ from home.
Infortunaly, when i bought it, it was with Windows Millenium on it. Had more time with Blue screen than in game, un til i changed to Win 98 SE lol.
 
It was the year 2000, and I had just got a gateway laptop with a ati 2meg video card. It was great until Velious came out and had to upgrade my driver. After I did the mag pets turned invisible. I wasn't sure what to do, so it tried somthing extreme. Installed the old drivers then started to install the new drivers but interrupted it halfway through, rebooted and bam, pet appeared again but looked like brown textured people. That worked until I was able to get a new computer.
 
We call that the smoke test. The idea being that chips are made of magic smoke and if you let the smoke out they don't work anymore. Seems reasonable to me.
Back when the 486 was current, and the 386 before it, you could run the computer for limited amounts of time without the fan on the CPU before it would overheat. When building a new PC, sometimes it was helpful to see if it would POST before finalizing the build, and that included not putting the fan on the CPU, cause it was only like 5 seconds. The Pentium processors pretty much changed all that and it seem like the smoke Gman is talking about was tied directly to the power button. As soon as I pressed it, there was a puff of smoke. I only made that mistake once.:sweat:

So fast forward about 15 years and my sister's then boyfriend brought his newly built PC over and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't power on and asked if I would take a look. Everything looked ok on initial inspection and then I found the problem after looking closer. He had taken the fan out the box and fastened it to the motherboard - just with the plastic tray that the fan came in still attached, and now secured between the processor and the fan. At least he didn't let the smoke out!
 
Tech - Yesteryear EQ hardware woes?

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