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ecliptik | on: Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)
The hippie copy mentioned was the ad my dad bought our first PC from. He was coming back from a business trip and asked the company computer guy to help him choose one for our family. We ended up with the 486DX2-50MHz "Integrated VESA System" [1].

Calling the Gateway 2000 customer support 800 number was my introduction to understanding computers and I am grateful to their staff for being patient with a 12 year old.

We got rid of it in the early aughts, but I kept the CPU all these years. Recently I found a similar Gateway slimline desktop (badged a 486DX2-66MHz) and have been using Claude to port things to DOS on it, like Cave Story [2][3]. The original 50MHz CPU still works.

1. https://books.google.com/books?id=L2RD68Gg2sMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...

2. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/

3. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YLFztifZKQ8

redm | parent | next
For a while in the 90's, I did Gateway 2000 tech support. It's nice to hear you had a good experience :) The mandate was to move quickly while also solving the customer's problem (which is harder than it sounds over the phone).
niwtsol | root | parent
I was very young and I tried to upgrade the RAM on our gateway computer. I used the wrong type of RAM and fried (or broke) the motherboard. When I talked to gateway support, I think the person on the other end could tell what happened but took pity on me and allowed us to get a new motherboard under warranty. I had completely forgot that story until your comment here, thanks for the reminder on why I double check all the specs before rummaging around in there.
loading story #49223516
loading story #49227491
Dwedit | parent
For DOS, your choices are basically DJGPP C compiler, or using the HXDOS DOS extender. But how well would Cave Story work on 50MHz?
ecliptik | root | parent
I've am working my way through benchmarking it on a few different CPUS [1]. A Pentium Overdrive 83MHz gets around 30fps, and the 486DX2-66MHz around 20fps. Because the 50MHz will use a bus speed to 25MHz I am expecting it to be 10-15fps.

Even with a lower frame rate gameplay is relatively smooth with having a fixed-timestamp mode [2].

The biggest difference in performance is the sound backend [3]. Gravis Ultrasound and Adlib for some reason halve the framerate on all cpus and it's the next challenge to point Claude at.

1. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/FPS-MATR...

2. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/tree/main#fixed-timeste...

3. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/SOUND.md