| Back in the good ol' days, I was the proud owner of a PC-compatible 386DX-40 with a whooping 4MB of RAM. The time was 1991. It could run the latest games with ease. Wolfenstein 3D. The latest Commander Keen installment. Anything.
After a year or so, Ultima 8 came out. My blazingly fast computer became a lousy piece of shit. I tweaked it like crazy. I edited config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the perfect amount of memory. I tried every possible cache setting. It was in vain. My computer now officially sucked to owners of spanking new 486DX2-66 systems, and the first Pentium chip, a Pentium-60, was the envy of everyone.
After years of badgering my parents finally bought me a Pentium 200MMX system, the top of the line at the time, with 64MB of RAM and a Monster 3D video card. Damn I was happy. At that point the only game my 386 could run was TIE Fighter, thank God it was a damn good game too, or else I won't have anything to play. I was content. For a few months. Then Kingpin came out. Damn! Can't even get a decent framerate with all details turned off! Shit!
Jump ahead a year. I arrived at Cornell University. So I decided to really splurge on a new system. Pentium III 550, 128MB of RAM, Nvidia TNT2, 27GB hard drive. That should be good for a bit. I was wrong.
Ultima 9 came out. OK that was a horribly buggy game. But I still wanted to play it, and I can't get a decent framerate. So I bought another 128MB RAM, now to 256MB. The game was barely playable, but I beat it.
Looking at the new games coming out, Diablo 2, Team Fortress 2, it looks like my system is going to be bleeding and exhausted by the time the first frame is rendered. Looks like my bank account is in for another rape. Not again.
I can never ride the bleeding edge for more than a few months dammit! What the hell!
That was DMan's primal scream of frustration. | 
