Quake is 10

cyclomedia writes "Late on 22nd June 1996 Quake was uploaded to cdrom.com's archives in the form of 7 1.44MB floppy disk images. Though it wasn't until the 23rd that everyone realised (or at least, that's my excuse for being a day late with the news submission). Cue much aggravation on the newsgroups as eager downloaders experienced glorious 2 FPS gameplay."

Comments

Re:Classic quotes

[stratjakt]

There were no GPUs in the mid 90s, the Voodoo/Voodoo 2 didn't have GPUs, they were mere rasterizers. The first GPU was nvidia with the GeForce 256, Aug 31 1999. It took a long while for it to really catch on, since it's just as easy to do the 3d to 2d conversion in memory (CPU).

The 3D engine used by Quake and Quake 2 was pure software, the CPU did all the heavy lifting geometry wise (and still does, for the most part). AFAIK, the 3d geometry part of it is still mainly CPU based, you can't just send every polygon in the world up to the GPU and expect it to sort the shit out in a timely fashion. BSP trees and face culling and all kindsa nifty hacks abound for such things.

We had no fancy hardware T&L business or programmable pixel shaders, and that's how we liked it.

I remember walking uphill 40 miles in the snow just to frag newbies with my nailgun.

Re:2 FPS?

[Craig Davison]

486DX - has an FPU.
486SX - no FPU. (you could buy an add-on called a 487)

This is not to be confused with the 386 series, which all needed a 387 to do hardware FP.
386DX - no FPU. 32-bit wide external bus.
386SX - no FPU. 16-bit wide external bus.

Quake Done Quick With a Vengeance

[necro2607]

Or even better, view the entire thing in the actual Quake 1 engine using the recorded demos (.dem)

http://qdq.planetquake.gamespy.com/qdqwav.html

Full collection of Quake 1 demo files for the run.