reliving the games, tech and culture of the Win9X era

The two contenders for 1994's hottest gaming graphics card look almost identical on paper, but are the result of opposite intentions by their creators. ATi's Graphics Pro Turbo, based on their fully 64-bit mach64 GX chip, was Team Red's attempt to deliver a world-beating Windows accelerator and stea...

Last time on this ol' Pentium, I was puzzling over how I could be getting a 'CMOS battery failure' message on POST when no battery was visible on the motherboard. A quick trip to VOGONs yielded an answer, though not a particularly heartening one.

Turns out, intel's chipsets prior to the 430TX di...

Our second episode rings in 1995 with a discussion of how PC game developers and publishers responded to the the '94 senate hearing on objectionable game content before diving into impressions of January's PC Gamer coverdisc demos. Transport Tycoon, Warcraft and Lords of the Realm are highlights, bu...

One of my motivations for producing the Smug and Play podcast is to replay the Win9X era's greatest games on period-correct hardware. Having chosen December 1994, when PC Gamer Magazine debuted the their monthly demo CD-ROMs, as our starting point, I wanted to put together a machine that could've be...

In our debut episode, we begin by recapping the historical, cultural and tech news of 1994 to prepare for our journey through the Win9X era! We then discuss the demos and random crap that PC Gamer pressed into their very first coverdisc, including Wing Commander III, DreamWeb, Detroit, Blackthorne,...

A recent trip to my local recycler yielded an intriguing discovery - a shrink-wrapped eVGA GeForce FX 5500 AGP graphics card straight out of 2004. I paid the $10 they were asking for it and, against my better judgement, recorded a cliche YouTube unboxing video to memorialize what is otherwise a rath...