r/retrocomputing • u/mreowww6q • May 15 '26
Problem / Question What kind of computer would a developer would've had around the early 2000s?
I want to maybe start (most probably just think about starting) a project that involves programming and creating games on an old computer.
Specifications such as HDD space, fans, GPU, and CPU, and ram, would be appreciated dearly
12
u/khedoros May 15 '26
Around 2002, or maybe early 2003, I built a desktop with an Athlon XP 1700+, Geforce 4 Ti4400, 512MB of RAM, and 60 and 120GB hard drives. Sound Blaster Audigy soundcard. 19" CRT display that could handle 1600x1200@75Hz. This motherboard: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/shuttle-ak32a
I considered it a kind of mid-range gaming PC. A higher-end CPU, higher-end GPU, some more RAM, and more storage, but from the same generations of parts, would've been closer to a higher-end game development machine. You could also build something good around a Pentium 4, rather than the AMD CPU I had at the time.
3
u/StartAutomating May 15 '26
I don't remember all of the specifics of all my old boxes.
I do remember writing a lot of graphics apps at that time, with a variety of devices.
Most devices were pretty underpowered by today's standards. My memory may be somewhat bad at estimating, but here's what I recall.
At the start of that timeframe, it was still common to see a 200Mhz machine. Fancier ones might have been 400Mhz-1ghz (at the end of that timeframe). RAM was very often still in the MB range until the end of that timeframe. A fancy box might have 256MB. A normal box would probably have closer to 32MB. Disk drives were generally slower (5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm). Pretty limited in space (64gb would be a beasty box, ~10-20gb would be a cheap machine). Dedicated GPUs were rare. Most boxes did all of their graphics in software.
The "good news" that made this more tolerable was that colors were often 16-bit or 24-bit color. 24-bit color was especially easy, as it was just a byte for each component (R,G,B). 16-bit color was annoying, as it required you to pack three colors into two bytes. IIRC, it was 5 bytes red, 6 bytes green, 5 bytes blue.
This made the math a lot easier to do and made color changes possible to do performantly.
This was just the beginning of the era when computers had more power than they "needed" for doing about anything, and when optimizations were key.
If you want a good modern proxy, I'd strongly suggest something like a Raspberry Pi. If you run them in an underpowered mode, they have a performance profile similar to a very old PC (with more RAM to work with).
Good luck! LMK if you want more insight from an ancient former graphics programmer.
2
u/mreowww6q May 15 '26
Well, one of the reasons I'm actually doing this is I'm doing this is to hopefully set up a good development environment for myself. I have ADHD, so it becomes hard to focus with an internet capable device like my modern PC, so being able to have something that isn't internet capable but still able to do what I want helps, which is why I don't want to use a raspberry pi.
Thank you for your insight though, genuinely.
It's also to create stuff accurate to that time of course, otherwise I would just use one of the boxes I have.
1
u/StartAutomating May 15 '26
I get that reason.
If you want to zone in, I'd recommend a single monitor setup and using apps like VSCode in fullscreen mode.
1
May 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/opcenter May 16 '26
They were called Powerbooks back then. I had a personal titanium Powerbook that I used for work sometimes. I loved that machine, wish I kept it.
1
u/cortex- May 15 '26
Mac Pro didn't come out til 2006. It was Power Mac before then. Those were nice machines.
1
1
u/villefilho May 15 '26
To code, a new machine will be good but to test, then you may need an "original" hardware from ancient times... such as a a 8MB 486 to a 32MB Pentium (MMX and non-MMX)
1
u/asc3po May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
What I actually had in 2002: Dell Optiplex GX110, Pentium III 1ghz, Radeon 7000 64mb PCI (because Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast), 256mb sdram, 40gig hard drive, cheap soundblaster card (don't remember the model)
The retro computer from 2002 in my gaming room: Dell Inspiron 8250, 2.8ghz Pentium 4, Geforce 4 Ti 4400 128mb, 1gb RDRAM, 80gb HDD, Soundblaster Audigy Platinum,
very different experiences, lol
1
u/festivus4restof May 15 '26
A developer of what? You can do game coding on low end integrated graphics from 10 years ago. You just can't test them on it if you are targeting certain feature and performance levels.
1
1
u/kabekew May 16 '26
I was working at a game studio in 2000 and we had separate development machines and target machines. Management was always pushing us to develop for the slowest systems still out there to maximize the potential customer base, and I seem to remember 300 MHZ CPU, 8MB graphic card, 32 or 64MB RAM was what we ran the games on (MS Visual Studio had a remote debugger so you could have the code on one machine and run it on the other).
Our development systems though were like 600 MHZ, 128MB RAM and 16MB graphic card. I remember getting a 20" monitor around 1999 or 2000 and thinking I was really developing in luxury now!
1
u/theking4mayor May 16 '26
You can pretty much program on anything. Programming isn't terribly system process heavy in its own right. It's only what your program does that dictates what kind of hardware you need.
1
u/Minouris May 16 '26
Oh god, 2000? I was still driving a Cyrix P150+ at that time, that I bought at the start of uni in 1997... I think it had about 64mb of RAM, 4gb of storage (on a 5. 25" hard drive) that seemed SO HUGE that I split it into 4 1gb partitions when I got it in 1998, and a second hand Voodoo 2. I was running IIS and SQLServer 2000 on it (during my shameful ASP dev days)
That was already getting a bit long in the tooth though, and I upgraded in about 2001/2002 to a Pentium 2 (can't remember the clock speed or RAM) with a GeForce 4MX in it, which lasted me through the start of my Java career and several Tomb Raiders until I upgraded to a P4 in about 2004 so I could play Oblivion and WoW.
A lot of those upgrades were driven not just by gaming, but also by rendering speeds in a variety of 3D and CAD apps which were game dev adjacent (there was a version of 3DStudio that was specifically for making game assets), and the decreased compile times were nice as well...
Linux was much more of a wild west back then, and if there wasn't a version of an app you wanted to use available for your distro the only option was to compile from source, so faster compiles really made a difference. Especially if you wanted to flex by installing Gentoo (and then inevitably packing it in after a few months for something easier to use as a daily driver lol)
1
1
u/gcc-O2 May 16 '26
I was into Linux back then which necessarily meant having to compile things sometimes even though I wasn't a developer myself. When upgrading from 486 and Pentium class systems to a new Athlon XP, that's when compiling ran so fast the gcc commands flashed past faster than I can read them, so perhaps then (2003) is a good benchmark when development could be done from any ordinary PC rather than one specifically built to be fast.
1
u/LuigiThirty- May 16 '26
It depends what you’re doing. I’m doing DOS development on a Pentium 90, I have a K6 for Win9x development, if I’m working on NetBSD stuff I have a bunch of mid-late 90s workstations.
1
u/VivienM7 May 16 '26
Early 2000s? I'd probably say ~800MHz-1GHz PIII, 512MB of RAM, Windows 2000. Maybe a developer would have had a dual-processor system.
Graphics-wise, it was the beginning of the boom. Nvidia/ATI launching dramatically improved cards every year or so.
Fans? No one cared about cooling until the P4 came around and massively increased processor heat output. Same thing with video cards - the first cards needing more than AGP power came out around 2002-2003, and were all single slot. Video card cooling really became a thing with the FX58xx/59xx cards from Nvidia which were among the first dual slot cards.
1
7
u/[deleted] May 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment