alt Hacker NewsBack in the day:
> 3-D Hardware Accelerator (with 16MB VRAM with full OpenGL® support; Pentium® II 400 Mhz processor or Athlon® processor; English version of Windows® 2000/XP Operating System; 128 MB RAM; 16-bit high color video mode; 800 MB of uncompressed hard disk space for game files (Minimum Install), plus 300 MB for the Windows swap file […]
* https://store.steampowered.com/app/9010/Return_to_Castle_Wol...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein
Even older games would be even smaller:
* https://www.oldgames.sk/en/game/ultima-vi-the-false-prophet/...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_VI:_The_False_Prophet
Replies
I for one simply cannot believe that a game with 4K+ textures and high poly count models is bigger than a game that uses billboard sprites which aren't even HD. Whatever could be the reason? A complete mystery...
For gaming, this doesn't bother me much, given that, even at today's prices, the cost of maintaining a midrange gaming PC with ample storage and "recommended" specs for new releases is probably no more than $200-$300/year.
The ever-increasing system requirements of productivity software, however, never ceases to amaze me:
Acrobat Exchange 1.0 for Windows (1993) required 4 MB RAM and 6 MB free disk space.
Rough feature parity with the most-used features of modern Acrobat also required Acrobat Distiller, which required 8 MB RAM and another 10 MB or so of disk space.
Acrobat for Windows (2025) requires 2,000 MB RAM and 4,500 MB free disk space.