[azalemeth]

I'm pretty sure I completed Morrowind for the first time ever using both wine and a celeron. Likewise before that with VirtualPC (remember that?) on Mac OS (note the space!) and Age of Empires (not even Rise of Rome!).

Single-digit FPS can _absolutely_ be playable if you're a desperate enough ten-year-old...

[squeaky-clean]

When I played (original vanilla) WoW I remember getting 2-3 fps in 40 player raids. The cursor wasn't tied to the game's framerate though. So with the right UI layout made from addons I could still be a pretty effective healer. I don't even remember what the dungeons looked like, just a giant grid of health bars, buttons and threat-meter graphs.

This would have been on some kind of Pentium 4 with integrated graphics. Not my earliest PC, but the first one I played any games on more advanced than the Microsoft Entertainment Packs.

[kergonath]

> When I played (original vanilla) WoW I remember getting 2-3 fps in 40 player raids.

I had to look at the ground and get the camera as close as possible to cross between the AH and the bank in IF. Otherwise I’d get about 0.1 fps and had to close the game, which meant waiting in line to get back. Those were the days.

> So with the right UI layout made from addons I could still be a pretty effective healer.

I got pretty good with the timings and could almost play without looking at the screen. But I was DD and it was vanilla so nobody cared if I sucked as long as I got far away with the bombs.

> I don't even remember what the dungeons looked like, just a giant grid of health bars, buttons and threat-meter graphs.

I was talking a couple of weeks ago with a mate who was MT at the time and told me he knew the feet and legs of all the bosses but never saw the animations or the faces before coming back with an alt a couple of years later. I was happy as a warlock, enjoying the scenery. With a refresh rate that gave me ample time to admire it before the next frame :D

[kreig]

Single-digit FPS can _absolutely_ be playable if you're a desperate enough ten-year-old...

Absolutely, sweet memories playing at less than 10fps using zsnes on a 486 dx2 by 1999...

[morshu9001]

I've only ever played Skyrim on a 2009 13" MacBook Pro in Wine. It took like 30min to load and ran at like 4fps. But I didn't play past the first area.

Wasn't AoE1 released for PPC Mac natively? AoE2 was probably the best Mac game ever.

[kergonath]

> Single-digit FPS can _absolutely_ be playable if you're a desperate enough ten-year-old...

I have fond memories of playing Diablo II at 16 fps on an old (even at the time) PowerMac. I am not sure I could do it now.

[NewsaHackO]

>Single-digit FPS can _absolutely_ be playable if you're a desperate enough ten-year-old...

And somehow, more mesmerizing than games feels like playing now. To be a kid again.

[hparadiz]

Me trying to run Falcon 4.0 on a 166 mhz P1 with 16 mb of edo ram.

[andrewmcwatters]

Flashbacks of gaming on an XP-era HP Pavilion with graphics so bad water didn’t even render in Halo 1 PC flood my mind.

Countless kids played Morrowind below par spec on family computers all across America.

[anthk]

My Geforce2 MX 200/400 with an Athlon and 256MB of RAM began to become useless in ~2002/2003 with the new DX9 games.

Doom3? Missing textures. Half Life2? Maybe at 640x480. F.E.A.R? More like L.A.U.G.H. Times changed so fast (and on top of that, shitty console ports) that PCs didn't achieve great numbers at home until 2009 with a new machine.

Altough I began to play games like Angband, Nethack and the like in that era and in opened an amazing libre/indie world until today.

And, yes, I replayed Deus Ex because it had tons of secrets and it ran on a potato. Perfectly playable at 800x600 at max settings.