Thanks
> Any recommendations for an RPG that will really show off the graphics
> capabilities of my new PC(and good gameplay, of course)?
Morrowind!
--
Greetings,
Arcana Dragon
-==(UDIC)==-
http://www.phyton.dk/games.htm
Gothic 2 with maximum draw distance ?
Arcana Dragon wrote:
> Aquila <Aqu...@Aquila.com> wrote in news:3F3368C4...@Aquila.com:
>
> > Any recommendations for an RPG that will really show off the graphics
> > capabilities of my new PC(and good gameplay, of course)?
>
> Morrowind!
Thanks for your suggestion. I'm not sure open-ended RPGs are my cup of tea.
Even games like Diablo 2 doesn't keep my interest. I liked Nox, and I like
Dungeon Siege. what does that say about me? I'm looking forward to Jedi
Academy. I may give Morrowind a go if it becomes cheap enough.
Morrowind is a pretty good looking game, give that a swing.
-Slash
--
"Ebert Victorious"
-The Onion
Morrowind is =the= prettiest looking game, but not the one with best
gameplay .. Gothic 2 (even with the bugs) is much more compelling (IMO)
- I actually =want= to finish it as each character class, whereas I'm
not sure I can be a$$ed to finish MW even once more.
--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Outgoing Msgs are Turing Tested,and indistinguishable from human typing.
Well, the answer depends on what you expect your PC to do, of course.
If you are a buttkicking type of guy, then you probably have a fighter PC.
I would therefore recommend an RPG that emphasises buttkicking, such as
Dungeons and Dragons(R), from Hasbro. Don't let others fool you, Dungeons
and Dragons(R) is an RPG that's all about fighting, and so there will be
lots of things to kill for your fighter PC.
If you like magic and stuff, you probably have a wizard PC. Therefore you
want an RPG that lets you cast cool spells and do weird mystical shit, like
blowing people up with fireballs. A very good RPG for this is Dungeons and
Dragons(R), from Hasbro. In fact, Dungeons and Dragons(R) is the very RPG
that invented fireballs in the first place. It must thus be a prime choice
for any wizard PC.
If you like sneaking around and backstabbing people like a NINJA!, then you
no doubt have a rogue PC. You want an RPG that lets you be sneaky and
backstab people like a NINJA!, and an excellent choice for this is Dungeons
and Dragons(R), from Hasbro. Sometimes, you can even backstab people six
times before they fall over -- heaven on a stick for any rogue PC.
If you are a nonviolent type who enjoys contemplating the higher things in
life and healing the dumber people around you, then you will probably have
a cleric PC. Thus you want an RPG with lots of dumb people to heal up, and
maybe even preach to. Naturally, you want Dungeons and Dragons(R), from
Hasbro. Indeed, you won't even think twice, because you want the best for
your cleric PC.
Or perhaps you are tired of the fantasy genre, with all its overdone
tropes, like guys with big swords, and cliched elements, like evil warlords
dressed all in black. You are a free spirit, a truly creative soul, a
think-outside-the-box type. And this is why you have a Jedi knight PC, with
a lightsaber. In this situation, there can be no other choice but the Star
Wars(R) RPG, from Hasbro. Well, perhaps there is one other choice, namely
Call of Cthulhu d20(R), from Hasbro. For then, you could answer the one
question that's been gnawing at your mind all this time: who would win,
Darth Maul or Cthulhu?
Hope this helps!
--
Hong Ooi | "Does *anyone* at WOTC bother to
ho...@zipworld.com.au | _think_ when making housecat stats?"
http://www.zipworld.com.au/~hong/dnd/ | -- MSB
Sydney, Australia |
Hong Ooi wrote:
Obviously a Hasbro fan.
>Well, the answer depends on what you expect your PC to do, of course.
<snip>
Okay, that was the funniest thing I've encountered this week.
--
Ei se mitään.
>
>
> Hong Ooi wrote:
>
>> Well, the answer depends on what you expect your PC to do, of course.
>>
[snip]
>
> Obviously a Hasbro fan.
Yes. He obviously needs to play more Counterstrike...
That you have taste. Life without Diablo is like a fish without a
bicycle.
Rick R.
>
> That you have taste. Life without Diablo is like a fish without a
> bicycle.
>
it's even worse, I cannot even remember a single day in my life where I
really wanted to play the game, I want to congratulate the original poster
of this thread for his excellent taste as well :-)
Go for Revenant, that's got the same story driven/gameplay
style as Nox. Both games kept me playing to the end.
> Go for Revenant, that's got the same story driven/gameplay
> style as Nox. Both games kept me playing to the end.
He wanted games that could show him the muscle of his new system, not just
good RPG's.
Right, Revenant is a good game (I never played NOX, soeh..), and so is
Darkstone. But you can play those games on a P333 w/64 MB of RAM.
--
Med venlig hilsen
arc@na
Yes, but when suggested one that would to a small degree he
said what he enjoyed. If he enjoyed Nox he should enjoy
Revenant.
You won't find a game of that style that really shows off a
monster pc's capabilities, in fact even MW isn't that
graphically advanced. Yes it takes a lot of horsepower to get
it looking decent, but that's down to a less than perfect
engine, not the fact it uses fancy effects.
If you want to show off graphics capabilities you have to
look at FPS, e.g. Half Life 2, Doom 3 etc...
> You won't find a game of that style that really shows off a
> monster pc's capabilities, in fact even MW isn't that
> graphically advanced. Yes it takes a lot of horsepower to get
> it looking decent, but that's down to a less than perfect
> engine, not the fact it uses fancy effects.
Afaik Gothic 2 takes quite its toll on your GFX-capabilities as well.
> If you want to show off graphics capabilities you have to
> look at FPS, e.g. Half Life 2, Doom 3 etc...
May I recommend Counter-Strike?
(duck and away)
Oooh, that would be cool. And by cool, I mean TOTALLY SWEET. I want a
NINJA! PC that can totally flip out and kill people. And I want my NINJA!
to be a mammal.
--
Knight37
No one should take themselves so seriously
With many years ahead to fall in line
Why would you wish that on me?
I never want to act my age
What's my age again?
-- Blink 182
> Lithurge <bogof...@btopenworld.com> wrote in
> news:Xns93D1E27C1...@130.133.1.4:
>
>> You won't find a game of that style that really shows off
>> a monster pc's capabilities, in fact even MW isn't that
>> graphically advanced. Yes it takes a lot of horsepower to
>> get it looking decent, but that's down to a less than
>> perfect engine, not the fact it uses fancy effects.
>
> Afaik Gothic 2 takes quite its toll on your
> GFX-capabilities as well.
Yes, but it's always with the caveat of 'for an rpg', having
played the demo it looks nice, but still isn't as good as...
>
>> If you want to show off graphics capabilities you have to
>> look at FPS, e.g. Half Life 2, Doom 3 etc...
>
> May I recommend Counter-Strike?
>
> (duck and away)
>
Heretic :)
Seriously, if we take stuff that is current & not to be
released the purdiest game is Unreal 2, even if the gameplay
may not be totally there. It'll be interesting to see what
kind of game sits behind the Half Life 2 engined Vampire from
Troika.
>
> Arcana Dragon wrote:
>
>
>>Aquila <Aqu...@Aquila.com> wrote in news:3F3368C4...@Aquila.com:
>>
>>
>>>Any recommendations for an RPG that will really show off the graphics
>>>capabilities of my new PC(and good gameplay, of course)?
>>>
>>Morrowind!
>>
>
> I may give Morrowind a go if it becomes cheap enough.
>
>
>
Go-gamer has Morrowind for $14.90
Iya!! Iya!!
Darth Maul isn't fit to scoop the poop of a Hound of Tindalos.
Hear the fluttering? They come...THEY COME!
--
Coby
'69 Z28 '99 XX '01 FLSTF '01 XX '72 710M '03 Tiger
Open-endedness rules.
I stuck with Revenant on my P333 but it was hard work. Soooo Sloooowwwww.
I imagine it could be good on a much better pc. Might try it again when I
get a new one.
Is it because games take so long to produce that the graphics cards are
always way advanced of the game when it eventually comes out?
>>
>> You won't find a game of that style that really shows off
>> a monster pc's capabilities, in fact even MW isn't that
>> graphically advanced. Yes it takes a lot of horsepower to
>> get it looking decent, but that's down to a less than
>> perfect engine, not the fact it uses fancy effects.
>>
>> If you want to show off graphics capabilities you have to
>> look at FPS, e.g. Half Life 2, Doom 3 etc...
>
> Is it because games take so long to produce that the
> graphics cards are always way advanced of the game when it
> eventually comes out?
>
>
I would say not as they tend to target FPS at a certain level
of system, and seem to get closer to the card manafacturers
to develop specifically for future tech. Remember HL2 has
been in development for 5 years, (or at least the engine for
most of it) and has no doubt gone through revisions as tech
has moved on.
If you want to play HL2 at it's best you will need a Radeon
9800/whatever the latest Geforce is, and a powerful machine.
The danger is you end up doing a Duke Nukem Forever of
course.
I guess it comes down to the monay/patience & people behind
the company. Some companies have to get the goods out the
door to pay the wages, and can't afford to continually
develop the over the years, and in some cases the engine does
what the game needs.
I thought that Enclave looked pretty damn good. Not a bad game
either if you can put up with a few poor decision choices
(e.g. save points!).
I disagree with a previous poster about MW not being that good
looking. Walking into Balmora the first time and seeing the rain
hit the water and the town in a rain mist was incredible looking.
It really helps to add on the good looking character mods that are
out there too...
Kevin
Thank goodness for that, I remember when it was the other way around.
Before the days of competition between AMD and Intel, it was expensive (at
least for us gamers) to stay ahead of software. I remember in particular
fighting to keep up with the system specs of the annual NHL games from EA
back in the mid-to-late 1990s. Also, hard drive space was always a struggle
until the late 1990s.
True for some games, not for others. I don't remember ever feeling the
pressure to upgrade much. Of course, I didn't play Quake or anything
similar. The first game I bought where I thought I might just have too slow
of a machine (a 100 Mhz Pentium) was probably Jedi Knight in 1996-1997. I
didn't upgrade until 3 years later. What probably put the nail in the
coffin for haning onto my aging Pentium was The Sims, which didn't run well
at all. My brother dabbled in Voodoo cards (Voodoo 2 and 3, I think, trying
to get Rainbow Six to run), but he always had problems with them.
I know Wing Commander and Strike Commander supossedly had a reputation fro
steep system requirements, but I never got into those games. X-Wing was one
of the first really graphicly impressive games I played, and it ran OK on a
486 (BTW, isn't it about time for a sequel to X-Wing Alliance?)
My dad soldered extra memory and a faster chip into an Amiga so Sim Ant
would run faster.
The first "big" computer upgrade I made on my own, I remember was in 1994,
I was attending college and had a Compaq computer and went out and bought a
Soundblaster card because I was tired of the bleeps and squelches. My
grandfather and I stuck it in (it had 2 expansion slots), and the sound was
a heavenly revelation in games like Knights of the Sky or Tanks (a strategy
game).
Really? So what PC were you using when 'Trespasser' came out?
Heh, that was the first game I thought of when I read the message. :s
Get Operation Flashpoint Resisistance and see how high you can you
can increase the view distance and detail settings. You should be
able to see sharp terrain for miles if your PC is a good one.
-Dan
and bitched when it didn't run well.
Get over it, trolls.
Prove they didn't. Everyone went insane is the best explanation for
Tresspasser yet.
Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates - personal webpage http://www.visi.com/~nathan/
# Programmer at Pandemic Studios -- http://www.pandemicstudios.com/
# NOT speaking for Pandemic Studios. "Care not what the neighbors
# think. What are the facts, and to how many decimal places?" -R.A. Heinlein
>In article <3F3FB95D...@spam.com>,
>=?iso-8859-1?Q?Eep=B2?= <n...@spam.com> wrote:
>>Um, there WERE systems powerful enough at the time to run
>>Trespasser--they were simply far too expensive for most people. Do
>>you really think a developer would develop something that ran slow on
>>THEIR machine? No. They would go insane coding it.
>
> Prove they didn't. Everyone went insane is the best explanation for
>Tresspasser yet.
>
Insane, maybe - but they loved their cleavage, so they couldn't have
been THAT mad !
--
Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes !
They got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses !
And what's with all the carrots ?
What do they need such good eyesight for anyway ?
Bunnies ! Bunnies ! It must be BUNNIES !
>Um, there WERE systems powerful enough at the time to run Trespasser--they were simply far too expensive for most people. Do you really think a developer would develop something that ran slow on THEIR machine? No. They would go insane coding it.
They should make coders use medium-range systems (at most) for PC
games. Then we'd see some games that run well.
Joe
What, you mean a PIII-350 and a TNT was too expensive for most people?
That played Trespasser fine at 640x480. The only machines that had
real problems were the ones that had the "Uber" Voodoo-2 cards with a
PCI bus: Trepsasser was almost entirely limited by bus bandwidth
because of their wacky decision to do most of the rendering in
software, not using the 3D chip... AGP was required for decent
performance.
And I've run Trespasser at 2048x1536 on a PIII-1GHz, though I can't
imagine playing it at the 1-2 fps I was getting much of the time :).
Hmm, I should start it up on my new machine here and see how it runs
at high res...
Mark
WAS there even a P3/350? P2/350 sure, but P3? Better check your facts. And, yes, most people couldn't afford them at the time.
Anyway, what framerate do you expect at such an absurdly high resolution anyway? Duh.
No, it was a PII, typing error.
> Better check your facts.
From that attitude to a simple typing error, I can see now why so many
people in these groups don't like you much.
> And, yes, most people couldn't afford them at the time.
That was a thousand pound system, hardly very expensive for the time:
in fact, by the time Trespasser came out in the UK it would probably
have been substantially cheaper than that. You really didn't need a
high-spec machine to run it, just a moderately fast CPU and a
half-decent AGP card: PCI didn't cut it.
>Anyway, what framerate do you expect at such an absurdly high
resolution
>anyway? Duh.
From a game that's written properly, probably around 20-30fps: I've
played Unreal Tournament, for example, at that resolution on that
machine. But then the UT developers were smart enough to use the
hardware for rendering, not try to do it themselves in software.
Anyway, I tried it last night on my new PC with a crappy monitor that
won't go about 1280x960, and at 1280x960 with a P4-2.4GHz, Radeon 9500
Pro and 1G of RAM it ran very smoothly. Now, if only someone could
figure out a hack to remove the stupid sprites in the distance and use
the real 3D objects instead....
Mark
You REALLY need to get your shoulders checked, Eep.
>They should make coders use medium-range systems (at most) for PC
>games. Then we'd see some games that run well.
I'd rather have games take advantage of cutting-edge hardware.
--
"Sore wa himitsu desu."
To reply by email, remove
the small snack from address.
http://www.esatclear.ie/~rwallace
>On Sun, 17 Aug 2003 23:32:13 GMT, Joe62 <NOSPAM...@shaw.ca> wrote:
>
>>They should make coders use medium-range systems (at most) for PC
>>games. Then we'd see some games that run well.
>
>I'd rather have games take advantage of cutting-edge hardware.
Yep - of course, a year or so later, that will BE a medium ranged
system...
> Eep² <n...@spam.com> wrote in message news:<3F40593C...@spam.com>...
> > WAS there even a P3/350? P2/350 sure, but P3?
>
> No, it was a PII, typing error.
>
> > Better check your facts.
>
> From that attitude to a simple typing error, I can see now why so many
> people in these groups don't like you much.
Look in the mirror. Your attitude towards me about hardware set you up for a slam against you for ANY mistake. <snicker>
> > And, yes, most people couldn't afford them at the time.
>
> That was a thousand pound system, hardly very expensive for the time:
> in fact, by the time Trespasser came out in the UK it would probably
> have been substantially cheaper than that. You really didn't need a
> high-spec machine to run it, just a moderately fast CPU and a
> half-decent AGP card: PCI didn't cut it.
UK? Psha...I'm talkin' the ORIGINAL market: the US. Who knows when it was released in the UK...
> >Anyway, what framerate do you expect at such an absurdly high resolution
> >anyway? Duh.
>
> From a game that's written properly, probably around 20-30fps: I've
> played Unreal Tournament, for example, at that resolution on that
> machine. But then the UT developers were smart enough to use the
> hardware for rendering, not try to do it themselves in software.
At the time, hardware accelerators couldn't keep up with what Trespasser did in a cost-effective way. Hence why all the software crap. It's just too bad true mipmapping/LOD wasn't implemented in a patch, or something, or Trespasser would look really kick-ass.
> Anyway, I tried it last night on my new PC with a crappy monitor that
> won't go about 1280x960, and at 1280x960 with a P4-2.4GHz, Radeon 9500
> Pro and 1G of RAM it ran very smoothly. Now, if only someone could
> figure out a hack to remove the stupid sprites in the distance and use
> the real 3D objects instead....
Indeed...<sigh>
Perhaps I simply had an uncanny knack for wanting the most demanding games
out there. ;-) The longest I've ever been able to hang onto a motherboard,
CPU and memory combo was with my very first PC which I bought back in 1991.
I had that for a total of 30 months. However, I will say that it was
becoming a very slow system for the new games in the last six months that I
owned it. My 486SX-33, which replaced it, was doing very well until the
first generation of games requiring a math co-processor hit. For me, this
"hit" came in the summer and early fall of 1995 when I tried running the
original NASCAR and NHL 96. It was literally a case of my system being fine
one day and no good the next day. For NASCAR, it was not a question of how
many frames per second I was getting, it was more like how many seconds
between frames. As I recall, the screen updated once every three seconds,
which obviously made it unplayable. NHL 96 wasn't much better on that 486.
I got a 486DX4-120 to replace it in January of 1996 since the Pentium was
still price-prohibitive for me at that point in time, but that 120MHz 486
only held up for a year before I found myself desiring a new upgrade due to
performance issues.
> The first game I bought where I thought I might just have too slow
> of a machine (a 100 Mhz Pentium) was probably Jedi Knight in 1996-1997. I
> didn't upgrade until 3 years later. What probably put the nail in the
> coffin for haning onto my aging Pentium was The Sims, which didn't run
well
> at all. My brother dabbled in Voodoo cards (Voodoo 2 and 3, I think,
trying
> to get Rainbow Six to run), but he always had problems with them.
>
> I know Wing Commander and Strike Commander supossedly had a reputation
fro
> steep system requirements, but I never got into those games. X-Wing was
one
> of the first really graphicly impressive games I played, and it ran OK on
a
> 486 (BTW, isn't it about time for a sequel to X-Wing Alliance?)
>
> My dad soldered extra memory and a faster chip into an Amiga so Sim Ant
> would run faster.
>
Overall, it sounds as though you've done pretty good. I have to agree about
X-Wing, I was quite amazed at the experience I had with it at the time.
There was one mission in that game I could never get past, but it was
otherwise really good. However, it ran slow on my 386SX and was difficult
to play. The 486SX-33 was a God-send for X-Wing. My play improved
dramatically.
> The first "big" computer upgrade I made on my own, I remember was in
1994,
> I was attending college and had a Compaq computer and went out and bought
a
> Soundblaster card because I was tired of the bleeps and squelches. My
> grandfather and I stuck it in (it had 2 expansion slots), and the sound
was
> a heavenly revelation in games like Knights of the Sky or Tanks (a
strategy
> game).
>
This may sound ridiculous now, but I must say that as I look back at all the
years I've been a PC user, the most memorable upgrade I ever made was
getting a sound card for the very first time. It was a Sound Magic (Sound
Blaster compatible) card which I bought in late November or early December
of 1992 for $100. Going from the PC speaker to a sound card was an
incredible experience even though most of my sound-card supporting games
only had Ad Lib support (which my Sound Magic card could do). For me,
buying that sound card really was a case of Christmas comes early. I was a
student at the time and it's a good thing I got it on a Friday because I was
up very late playing Wolfenstein 3D and other games that weekend! I think I
was up until 5AM the first night I got it until I physically could not stay
awake any longer. I don't think things were much different on Saturday
night. :-)
Yeah ! How dreadfully sad it would be for all of us if Eep dislocated
one, or preferably both........
John Lewis
But you're taking the piss out of someone for having a low spec. machine!
You really need to get your facts right.
> > And, yes, most people couldn't afford them at the time.
>
> That was a thousand pound system, hardly very expensive for the time:
'Expensive' is relative.
Perhaps some people did think that Ł1000 was a lot of money.
> in fact, by the time Trespasser came out in the UK it would probably
> have been substantially cheaper than that. You really didn't need a
> high-spec machine to run it, just a moderately fast CPU and a
> half-decent AGP card: PCI didn't cut it.
>
> >Anyway, what framerate do you expect at such an absurdly high
> resolution
> >anyway? Duh.
>
> From a game that's written properly, probably around 20-30fps: I've
> played Unreal Tournament, for example, at that resolution on that
> machine. But then the UT developers were smart enough to use the
> hardware for rendering, not try to do it themselves in software.
>
> Anyway, I tried it last night on my new PC with a crappy monitor that
> won't go about 1280x960, and at 1280x960 with a P4-2.4GHz, Radeon 9500
> Pro and 1G of RAM it ran very smoothly. Now, if only someone could
> figure out a hack to remove the stupid sprites in the distance and use
> the real 3D objects instead....
I don't think that would be possible. If the game's been coded that way,
you're stuck with it.
>Odd, Trespasser ran fine on my P/233 MMX, GeForce 256, 64MB RAM system a few years ago. <shrug>
>
>WAS there even a P3/350? P2/350 sure, but P3? Better check your facts. And, yes, most people couldn't afford them at the time.
yep, i'm typing this on a p3/350 - it surely does exist! works fine,
with 256MB ram, 30GB h/d, Nvidia tnt2 m64 video card, runs games ok,
no problemo.
regards,
tal
-----------
Send money to:
Bill....@msn.com
"I need it desperately"
-- W.Gates Jr
Huh? Where was I "taking the piss"? Eep said that computers that could
play Trespasser well were too expensive for most people at the time,
as though it required a high-end SGI workstation... I pointed out that
it worked fine on my machine, which was a mid-range PC when I bought
it and pretty low-end by the time that Trespasser came out. You want
to explain in detail how that's "taking the piss"?
> > That was a thousand pound system, hardly very expensive for the time:
> 'Expensive' is relative.
And you could have bought much more expensive PCs at the time. People
who thought that a thousand pounds for a computer was a lot of money
probably shouldn't even have been thinking of playing games on them.
> I don't think that would be possible. If the game's been coded that way,
> you're stuck with it.
You're not: the 3D models are in there, there's just some code
somewhere in the game that says 'if (range > some value) then
UseSprite();'... if someone can find that, it's just as fixable as
removing the check that limited the screen resolution to 800x600.
Mark
And his head fell off.
--
| _ .\ ~~ _ ^~
| <')_,/ , ; .\ >(')__, . ` ' ,
| (_~=/ \._`.'. .\ (_~_/ _, _..-''-._,____,----,____
| ='- \=~_) ; .\ ~^~~^~ ` (_~_/ `'--'` `~~~~)_)=\_\-.(
| -'= .\ ~^~ ~^~~^~
ICQ:11367619 EMAIL:bateau:-)jupiter-io.net WEB:http://tyrian2000.cjb.net
>Thank goodness for that, I remember when it was the other way around.
>Before the days of competition between AMD and Intel, it was expensive (at
>least for us gamers) to stay ahead of software. I remember in particular
>fighting to keep up with the system specs of the annual NHL games from EA
>back in the mid-to-late 1990s. Also, hard drive space was always a struggle
>until the late 1990s.
And RAM!
>This may sound ridiculous now, but I must say that as I look back at all the
>years I've been a PC user, the most memorable upgrade I ever made was
>getting a sound card for the very first time. It was a Sound Magic (Sound
My big significant upgrade came when I went from a 386SX-16 (IBM PS2)
to a Dell Dimension XPS Pentium 90!!! I pretty much went from not
being able to do anything to everything -- like owning a computer for
the first time.
I did have a soundcard in that PS2 for a short while (a microchannel
Soundblaster), but eventually unloaded it since games ran so slowly.
So - I wasn't "multimedia" until '94.
jw
Remember when the price of RAM shot into the atmosphere because that
factory in Taiwan burnt down?
Lynley
Oh yes - a friend and I both needed memory. I bought 2 128mb sticks,
but he decided to wait a few months, as the memory prices were
dropping almost weekly.
2 weeks later the factory burnt down, and prices shot through the roof
overnight.
Heh.
Mark Morrison <drdp...@aol.com> wrote:
>Oh yes - a friend and I both needed memory. I bought 2 128mb sticks,
>but he decided to wait a few months, as the memory prices were
>dropping almost weekly.
When the epoxy resin plant in Japan burned down in 1993 and RAM prices
more than doubled overnight and didn't come down to pre-fire 1993 prices
until 1996, RAM wasn't available in 128Mb sticks.
>2 weeks later the factory burnt down, and prices shot through the roof
>overnight.
I bought 4Mb of RAM (4x1Mb SIMMs) just before the fire in Japan.
I remember checking out prices in 1995 and being surprised to find that
they were still higher than what I paid back in 1993.
Ross Ridge
--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/u/rridge/
db //
>Magius <mag...@netactive.co.za> wrote:
>>Remember when the price of RAM shot into the atmosphere because that
>>factory in Taiwan burnt down?
>
>Mark Morrison <drdp...@aol.com> wrote:
>>Oh yes - a friend and I both needed memory. I bought 2 128mb sticks,
>>but he decided to wait a few months, as the memory prices were
>>dropping almost weekly.
>
>When the epoxy resin plant in Japan burned down in 1993 and RAM prices
>more than doubled overnight and didn't come down to pre-fire 1993 prices
>until 1996, RAM wasn't available in 128Mb sticks.
>
No, this was about 5 years ago. IIRC, there was an earthquake that
caused a fire at a plant.
Taiwan and Japam are different countries, so you may be getting mixed
up between 2 events.
rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Ross Ridge) wrote:
>When the epoxy resin plant in Japan burned down in 1993 and RAM prices
>more than doubled overnight and didn't come down to pre-fire 1993 prices
>until 1996, RAM wasn't available in 128Mb sticks.
Mark Morrison <drdp...@aol.com> wrote:
>No, this was about 5 years ago. IIRC, there was an earthquake that
>caused a fire at a plant.
>
>Taiwan and Japam are different countries, so you may be getting mixed
>up between 2 events.
Well, no, I don't beleive there was a second event. Lots of people mix
up Japan and Taiwan, and the epoxy resin plant fire became the basis for
something of an urban legend, mutating into rumours used to explain all
sorts of price spikes in semiconductor prices.
The fire in Japan actually triggered a huge overnight increase in prices,
more than double, and had a long term increase in RAM prices that
flew in the face of Moore's Law. There's been nothing like it since.
Prices haven't spiked as high and for nowhere near as long.
Right now DDR SDRAM prices are about 25% higher than the low they reached
a couple of months ago. No fire, no trigger, just the industry managing
to call a truce and start limitting supply. Likely the truce will fail
yet again and prices will tumble.
No this really happened, in Taiwan, like in 1998 or so.
James Garvin <bo...@nmt.edu> wrote:
>No this really happened, in Taiwan, like in 1998 or so.
The closest event I can find was a fire in UMC subsidirary's wafer plant
on October 3, 1997 that affected about only 20% UMC's wafer capacity:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/97/975news/fire.html
But if it had any effect on memory prices at all, it was very short term.
By the end of the month DRAM prices were there lowest level ever and
falling fast. It was described as a bloodbath:
http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20021028S0040
If this was the event Mark was talking about, and prices did go up as a
result, then his friend could've just waited a few more weeks and gotten
memory even cheaper than Mark did.
>Ross Ridge wrote:
>> Well, no, I don't beleive there was a second event. Lots of people mix
>> up Japan and Taiwan, and the epoxy resin plant fire became the basis for
>> something of an urban legend, mutating into rumours used to explain all
>> sorts of price spikes in semiconductor prices.
>
>James Garvin <bo...@nmt.edu> wrote:
>>No this really happened, in Taiwan, like in 1998 or so.
>
>The closest event I can find was a fire in UMC subsidirary's wafer plant
>on October 3, 1997 that affected about only 20% UMC's wafer capacity:
>
> http://www.eetimes.com/news/97/975news/fire.html
>
>But if it had any effect on memory prices at all, it was very short term.
>By the end of the month DRAM prices were there lowest level ever and
>falling fast. It was described as a bloodbath:
>
> http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20021028S0040
>
>If this was the event Mark was talking about, and prices did go up as a
>result, then his friend could've just waited a few more weeks and gotten
>memory even cheaper than Mark did.
>
That wasn't the case in the UK - it took a good while for prices to
fall again.
More a case of the traders gauging their customers than down to any
supply and demand factors, I think. :)