Here at the Museum we just assembled a PC computer from the 2000 era. It´s a IBM Aptiva with a Pentium !!! 600 Mhz cpu, 10GB Harddrive with Windows 98 installed. It´s a great system to showcase most of the games from this time period. Computers were still young in in 2000. The generations of computers existing in 2,000 were primarily of the Pentium 3, K6-23D, and Athlon line, by AMD and Intel respectively. Cyrix processors were still being manufactured in 2,000, but they were not very competitive performing less work per clock cycle. Cyrix died out completely soon after.
Games where mostly all released in CD-ROM and sound capabilities where no longer midi files which relied on a good sound card, we where getting the full professional recorded music on wav files. So having a good speaker system was almost an standard to enjoy this quality sound.
We got a stack of CD-ROM games from this period to test out on our "new" computer :) PC gaming remained popular throughout the decade, but was in an overall decline as console graphics technically advanced. Publishers also liked the standardisation that consoles provided, whereas PC game performance was dependent on the graphic capabilities of a player's hardware. Nevertheless, the PC remained the device of choice for many popular strategy, simulation, and online games.
Here is a shot if the CPU that is inside the computer. It´s the first Pentium III variant the Katmai (Intel product code 80525). It was a further development of the Deschutes Pentium II. The Pentium III saw an increase of 2 million transistors over the Pentium II and it has the same cartridge based design. The philosophy behind it was that anyone could just plug in and out a new CPU as they evolved over time. Just like games for NES consoles.
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