Tell us why your favorite retro computer sucked

[Digital Caveman]

The first computer I assembled myself. I made the mistake of going with an AMD K6 233MHz CPU instead of going for the 233MHz Pentium, or spending the extra money to jump on the Pentium II train. The K6 was a little under powered for the rest of the system. In the end it was all mine, and I had unrestricted access to the internet.

 

[MySpace Tom]

Apple ][. Looking back at it, I don't even know how I used it.

Easy. Wait for the floppy drive light to turn off, put a disk in with some sick games like Oregon Trail or Troll's Tale, then hit Apple + Control + Reset

 

[manpaint]

From 2009-2016 I only had a computer with 1 GB of RAM (500 MB being gobbed up by Windows 7).

It was not very good.

 

[jaedaen]

64k of memory. NO hard drive. 15 minute+ load time from 5.25" floppies. Joysticks that broke every time you looked at them. Thankfully, emulation is a thing.

 

[Junious]

I cut my teeth in real computer gaming on a gateway 2000 first gen pentium with 16 mb of ram and win 3.1. This baby had a cd drive, floppy drive, and a couple hundred mb hard disk. What sucked about it was the integrated sound card. I got all sorts of games running, but only the very old ones would have working sound coming off the "pc speaker" beeper. I would have killed for a sound blaster. None of my lucasarts games had sound, even though some claimed to be fully voiced. I remember silently playing rebel assault and just thinking "darn".

 

[splashy]

Back in the day you would have never admitted that it was anything less than perfect, of course, but now, looking back... what would annoy you if your favorite retro system became your main computer again?

i used to have a p4 (

i think prescott) dell kinda like this one but i don't remember the model name
oh yea and
>single core cpu that's more fit for cooking than computing
>80 GB HDD
>integrated graphics
>locked down bios
>will kill itself when i try to load a typical modern website from a soydev who's so up his own ass he thinks javascript is his lord and savior
>might not even have sata
i would say that it only being able to run up to windows 7 is a problem but that's actually fine

 

[jaedaen]

How about not having a fucking hard drive? How about having to load everything in to memory from floppy disk? The further back in time you go, the more egregious the Computer Sins become, thank god we're living in 2023 right now.

 

[zalaz alaza]

How about not having a fucking hard drive? How about having to load everything in to memory from floppy disk? The further back in time you go, the more egregious the Computer Sins become, thank god we're living in 2023 right now.

dude, my first computer was a second hand vic-20. imagine loading to memory from a cassette. unreal

 

[manpaint]

How about not having a fucking hard drive? How about having to load everything in to memory from floppy disk? The further back in time you go, the more egregious the Computer Sins become, thank god we're living in 2023 right now.

Ah so you are from this era. Apologize for te random question, but I need to know the following:

On a machine running Windows XP, would it have been possible to put the icon of a DOS game on the desktop? If so, would the icoln be custom or would it have been the "generic program icon"?

 

[Some_porcupine]

it couldnt stand pirated minecraft sent thru skype, or was it ICQ?
i guess it was that

 

[jaedaen]

Ah so you are from this era. Apologize for te random question, but I need to know the following:

On a machine running Windows XP, would it have been possible to put the icon of a DOS game on the desktop? If so, would the icoln be custom or would it have been the "generic program icon"?

Well I don't 100% remember, but I imagine you could, if you happened to have a thumbnail of that particular icon size you wanted to associate with it, but the default would have been the MS DOS icon probably.

 

[manpaint]

Well I don't 100% remember, but I imagine you could, if you happened to have a thumbnail of that particular icon size you wanted to associate with it, but the default would have been the MS DOS icon probably.

I see. Thanks fot the info.

 

[PurpleHello98]

Not exactly retro but it was my first computer when I was pretty young. A little 11-inch netbook with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage... which I got in 2015 and continued to use until 2020. It also had a problem with overheating and shutting down for a while until I reinstalled Windows 8 and it magically got fixed. But at least it was pink and cute! The design was its one redeeming feature.