Building a Quake PC • Hacker News Board

Re: Building a Quake PC

#11

Post by toast0 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

apelapan wrote: post #9

That Linksys card feels out of place in an over-the-top late 90s build. As I recall it, the local LAN scene had an almost religious cult around 3com 10mbit ISA cards, that eventually morphed into a similar thing for Intel 100mbit cards. Drivers and hardware were even more shit back in those days than today. Cards known to have worked in multiple motherboards and across multiple operating systems were held in high reg…

A 3rd party NE2000 is a pretty reasonable choice. Certainly, some circles would have a following for specific makers and boards, but the NE2000 was everywhere... There's a reason it's so common in virtual machines; the open design helps too.

Re: Building a Quake PC

#12

Post by nineteen999 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 7:35 PM UTC

apelapan wrote: post #9

That Linksys card feels out of place in an over-the-top late 90s build. As I recall it, the local LAN scene had an almost religious cult around 3com 10mbit ISA cards, that eventually morphed into a similar thing for Intel 100mbit cards. Drivers and hardware were even more shit back in those days than today. Cards known to have worked in multiple motherboards and across multiple operating systems were held in high reg…

At the cheap end we relied on NE2000 ISA card clones, we couldn't afford fancy gear like 3com and they worked under Windows/Linux just well enough to play LAN games.

Re: Building a Quake PC

#13

Post by roskelld » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

apelapan wrote: post #9

That Linksys card feels out of place in an over-the-top late 90s build. As I recall it, the local LAN scene had an almost religious cult around 3com 10mbit ISA cards, that eventually morphed into a similar thing for Intel 100mbit cards. Drivers and hardware were even more shit back in those days than today. Cards known to have worked in multiple motherboards and across multiple operating systems were held in high reg…

You've just brought back an old memory there. We used to do LAN parties at the weekend, and none of us has network cards, but one of our friends worked in the IT department of the local university. So he would bring a stack of cards with him and we'd spend hours setting them up and getting each PC on the network, often with great failure if he couldn't bring a batch of same branded cards.

We did learn over time which cards hated connecting with each other, and if he could bag a full batch of 3com we knew we'd likely be in for some early gaming.

Re: Building a Quake PC

#14

Post by jasonb05 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 8:09 PM UTC

Outstanding!

I cannot wait for a quake engine book. I'm sure a few hundred of us would be happy to pre-pay so you can take some time off work and write it all up :)

Re: Building a Quake PC

#15

Post by ahartmetz » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #2

This is a fascinating read. Back in 1997 my father had a Pentium box with maybe 16MB of RAM. I was able to play Duke 3D and I stuck in E1M3 too and didn’t figure that out until much later. I wonder how well Fabien’s build runs Unreal. It was the pinnacle of classic FPS IMO. I used to drool over a voodoo card but I immersed myself playing in software rendering mode in a netbar. Good time.

>16MB of RAM

Speaking of which, pretty sure that none but the earliest Pentium PCs had a chance of having less than 16 MB of RAM. The article says 8 MB were typical.

I got a 486 with 4 MB in mid 1994, which was shortly (months, I think) before 8 MB became the norm. Pentiums became the norm maybe in mid 1995. That was in Germany, but PC part prices have always been global and I suspect that all high income countries spent similar amounts on computers.