Video: 1998 was such a good year for PC gaming. Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Baldur’s Gate, Star Craft, Rogue Squadron and many, many more. Dang. Those looking to relive the glory days could easily run most of these games through a virtual machine, but YouTuber nine took it a step (or several) further and built a period-accurate 1998 gaming rig.
Nine’s build features a motherboard with a Pentium 4, a massive 240-watt power supply, 256mb of RAM, two optical drives, a floppy drive and a 120GB hard drive. The crown jewel is an NVidia VANTA RIVA TNT2 — what a goddamn mouthful, right? — to power those sweet, sweet graphics. With all those guts procured it became obvious how annoying it is just to hook all this stuff up and mount it inside a gigantic enclosure.
The real fun starts when nine’s brand new (old) computer starts having driver issues with the video card. Remember having to burn CDs? Me neither, but it seems like a big hassle. After who knows how long, he finally gets everything in working order and boots up the gory goodness that was Quake 3.
The hallmarks of my adolescence are now considered “retro” and I want to die.