I've been interested in computers and also gaming with them since '87 when my father bought us our first PC; there was an i286 8 MHz processor in it, 5,25" floppy disk drive and 4-coloured CGA -display with 12" screen. Games that I got at that time for my MS-DOS 3.0 operating system: Digger, Archon, Shamus, Exterminator, Pango, Space Invaders, Moonbugs, Astro, Stargate, Karateka, Grand Prix Circuit, Leisure Suit Larry 1, Sopwith etc. Btw. PC-speaker's beeper sounds rock!!!
After some years we got our (actually my; I used our PC always more than my parents ever) second PC that had an i386-SX -chip with 8/16 MHz (there was a turbo button!), EGA- & VGA -display (Cirrus Logic chip in ISA-bus, 1MB memory) and a 14” monitor, a 1200 baud modem card (that was never used however), both the 5,25” floppy drive and the brand new 3,5” disk drive and even a mouse with 3 (!) buttons. A couple of years passed and I got my first sound card:
Gravis Ultrasound which was a true pearl at that time as it had a marvellous sound quality, wave table -technology, was easy to program and didn't load the main processor much, thus an ultimate choice for game makers, demo groups, MOD-musicians etc. Inspite of this the only problem was the native support for Ultra Sound in many commercial games (shareware and public domain games were a kind of exception, luckily), as the OPL2/3 -cards like Adlib and Sound Blaster were the most supported-ones in general. One had always go through horrible battles to get the SB-emulators working etc. The operating system I got was MS-DOS 5.0. My games at that time: Wolfenstein 3D (full version!), Commander Keen -series, Civilization, Lemmings, Loom, Battle Chess, Space Quest 1, Monkey Island I & II, Arkanoid, F-15 Strike Eagle II, Test Drive II, Prince of Persia, Heimdall, Eye of the Beholder I & II, CD-Man, Sky Roads, Alone in the Dark, Zool, 4D Boxing, and in general most of the shareware games by Apogee (later as 3D Realms), id Software and Epic Megagames made so far, as I’ve been a real fan of those since that indeed!
The next PC was then a 486-DX2 66 MHz -machine with a S3-805 graphics card (32-bit VLB-bus) integrated to the mother board, a 15” SVGA-monitor, my good old Ultra Sound -card, 8MB RAM (later upgraded to 16MB), a "huge" 420 MB IDE-hard drive and the newest new MS-DOS 6.2 which I later updated to 6.22. I did also got MS-Win 3.1. This PC was also the one into which I got my first CD-ROM -drive (4x speed!). This 486-period was an extremely innovative and productive phase in my own history with PC-machines; I became an expert in modifying autoexec.bat, config.sys and other files alike to get games and programs to work, I got to know demo making, tracker music, ray-tracing (all hail
POV-Ray), QBasic, Turbo Pascal, C & C++, Assembly etc. In addition I started to learn about all the hard- and software matters and so on. Games of that time: Scorched Earth (all hail!!!), System Shock 1, Cannon Fodder 1, Doom 1, 1.666 & II, Mortal Kombat I, One Must Fall 2079, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Jazz Jackrabbit -series, Ishar -series, Archon Ultra, 11th Hour, Transport Tycoon, Rise of the Robots, Leisure Suit Larry 6, Lemmings 2 - the Tribes, Discworld, Kyrandia 3, Sam and Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, Beneath a Steel Sky, Duke Nukem 3D, Descent, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, NASCAR Racing, Worms 1, Heretic, Terminal Velocity, and a lot of shareware games. In certain games I also used the Gravis Game Pad.
The following PC was completely built up by me; a brand new iPentium 166 MHz, 32 MB RAM (later upgraded to 128MB), Matrox Millennium graphics card (PCI bus) with 4 MB VRAM, a 17” monitor by Nokia, 1.2GB IDE-hard drive, Gravis Ultra Sound PnP Pro (which didn’t ever work and had to be replaced with a Sound Blaster 32 AWE with some extra memory in it; it was a fine card indeed, but still I boycotted the Creative Labs’ products enough to finally buy a new sound card by Gravis Technologies: Ultra Sound Extreme, that worked fine til I bought a new PC after this-one.), new and marvellous 240W PC-speakers, and the 4ever terrible Windows 95 -operating system, which I however managed to get working for my own needs. This was the first PC for which I bought my first CD-RW -drive (HP, 8/8/8x speed) At that time I also got to know the photo editing as I got the Corel Photo Paint 7 (later updated to version 9 that I use even today). I also continued my ray-tracing hobby with newer versions of POV-Ray, and I was very much into demo stuff in general, as well as into shareware games. My favourite games in general of that time: Abuse, Descent 2, Bioforge, Ascendancy, Mortal Kombat II, Crazy Gravity, Hexen, The Dig, Quake 1, Tomb Raider 1, Triplane Turmoil, Knight's Chase, Slicks’n Slide, Lemmings Paintball, Worms 2, Crusader: No Remorse, Curse of Monkey Island, Discworld 2, Terminator: Future Shock, Terra Nova etc.
The next machine I got had iPentium II 350 Mhz, 64 MB RAM (I quickly upgraded it to 128), 4GB IDE-hard drive and later a 3GB-drive as secondary drive, integrated Sound Blaster 64 (that sucked a big time), CD-ROM -drive (32x speed), 17” HP Ergo 1280 -monitor, my old CD-RW -drive from the previous PC, and my first 3D-”accelerator”: an integrated nVIDIA Riva ZX (8MB, AGP-bus) with quite poor 3D-features. Later I bought an nVIDIA GeForce 2 MX 200 -card (32MB, PCI-bus) to fix the problem for a while, as well as I then bought my Sound Blaster Live! Platinum with Live! Drive II (that I use even today when recording my music), as my Creative-boycot was already over and Gravis Tech was dead. I also had Win98 that worked a lot better then the previous 95. This was the machine I ended up in upgrading the most of all my PC's so far; in practise I had finally changed and configured everything else inside the machine but the mother board. However, games back then: Diablo 2 + Expansion (I had my necromancer at lvl 52 when I played it for last time a couple of years ago), Darkstone, Drakan, Worms Armageddon, Icewind Dale, Dungeon Siege, American McGee’s Alice, Discworld Noir, Rune etc.
My nowadays PC consists of an iPentium 4 3.2GHz Prescott -core (processor upgraded from iCeleron 2.6GHz Northwood, crappy and slow as hell), Intel D865PERL -mother board, 1GB RAM (in dual channel), 120GB hard SATA-drive, nVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 256MB AGP-bus (8x) with NVTweak and RivaTuner -programs (card upgraded last year from the previous GeForce FX 5700 AGP 256MB), still my good'ol SB Live! Platinum for recording my music, a Lite-On DVD-RW+/- (48/48/16x speed, dual layer 4x) -drive, a 6-button wheel-mouse and and more or less ergonomic internet keyboard by Labtec; the old 17” HP Ergo 1280 -monitor from the previous PC changed to a brand new 19” Samsung SyncMaster 940B flatscreen a couple of weeks ago. I've also looked for a new GeForce 7800 GS 256MB (AGP-bus), and when writing this, I've already made an ordering of it; I'll then get it in 2-4 weeks from now. I'm not very much into programming, ray-tracing etc. nowadays, but even more into recording my music with my PC, as well as into surfing in the net, photo editing and web site -making, but of course I haven't got rid of my playing hobby: during the couple of last years I've played mostly games like Warcraft 3 + Expansion, World of Warcraft, Doom 3, The Chronicles of Riddick, O.R.B., Prince of Persia I & II, Nexus - The Jupiter Incident, Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Master of Orion 3. In addition I've been completely addicted to a free and nice little online game
Legend of the Green Dragon. In my want-list for games there are also some new stuff: Galactic Civilizations II, Shadowgrounds (Finnish-made!), Crysis, Spore, Darwinia and the expansion for World of Warcraft, as I'm somewhat addicted to the game in question (though hasn't disturbed my life ”outside of it” yet, haha); however, I play with a night elf druid (feral abilities under the main development), lvl 34 at the moment, spezializations: skinning and leatherworking, guild: Order of immortals (occupation: soldier), server: Draenor (normal); I go by the name ”Ohdonkaataja”, meet you there if there are any players here.
Of course I've been into other computers etc. machines as well; many of my friends had C-64 and/or and Amiga (500/1200/2000, even 4000) in the past, and some Commodore -games that were more or less legendary: Barbarian, Ninja 2, Pacmania, Spy vs. Spy; for Amiga I remember at least the following-ones: Barbarian I & II, Lemmings -series, Rick Dangerous 1 & 2, Harlequin, Populous, Giana Sisters, Robocop, Turrican 1 & 2, Agony...
I had a 8-bit NES too, say 12-14 years ago, and got a lot of games for it at that time. Some of my all-time favourites: Metroid, Castlevania II - Simon’s Quest, Wizards and Warriors II, Mega Man -series, Turtles 1 & 2, Solstice, Double Dragon -series, Super Mario Bros. etc.
In addition I've still got the good old original Nintendo Game Boy (with many kind of additional and separate devices ie. screen light, magnification screen etc.) left; once I had almost a hundred games for it, but there was a time when I sold much of those to my friends, and I kept the best of those for myself, namely these I've still got: Super Mario Land 2, Quarth, Probotector, Sneaky Snakes, Double Dragon II, Turtles II, Garfield, Tetris, Looney Tunes, WWF Super Stars, and Nintendo Tennis.
I've also got the Nintendo Game Cube, but as the games for it are very expensive, I've now got only four games at the moment and which I've played through for many times already: Metroid Prime, Soul Calibur II, Mega Man Network Transmission and Starfox Adventures. Once I had also The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker, but got quickly bored of it and besides the cartoonish graphics with "cell rendering" -technique started to piss me off a lot, thus I've sold the game already some time ago.