This 1996 PC Was Obsolete Before You Got It Home: AST Advantage 622
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 พ.ค. 2024
- Unboxing and testing a minty AST Advantage 600 series! A lower-end Windows 95 desktop computer from the mid 90s that bundled lots of software and games with a 100MHz Intel Pentium CPU and a whopping… 8 megabytes of RAM. Whee. Let's get this one up and running for (maybe) the first time!
● LGR links:
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
● Archived images of the model 622 restoration media:
archive.org/details/ast-advan...
● ISO images of the Mayo Clinic/Bellybutton and Eco East Africa discs:
archive.org/details/mayo_button
archive.org/details/eco-east-...
● All background music licensed from:
www.epidemicsound.com
00:00 An intro and overview
02:28 AST Research history
05:26 Unboxing the PC!
12:41 The computer itself
14:27 Inside the case, battery check
17:42 A light cleaning
18:02 First power on!
20:49 Windows 95 setup
22:06 AST OEM software
25:10 Hover!
26:05 MIDI music test
26:58 More AST bundled software
28:56 Microphone test - it's awful
29:21 Fun & Learning...?
29:58 Data disc, AVI files
30:33 Eco: East Africa
32:06 Mayo Clinic
32:57 What is a Bellybutton?
34:20 Welp, lots of things don't work
35:30 Oregon Trail II
37:13 Raptor Call of the Shadows
39:08 Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition
42:04 WinQuake
44:17 Tomb Raider for DOS
46:14 Valuing the undervalued, outro
#LGR #Retro #Computer - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![[Vowel]물고기는 물에서 살아야 해🐟🤣Fish have to live in the water #funny](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3G9MH063Cx4/mqdefault.jpg)
I've upgraded the RAM to 32MB!
th-cam.com/video/YeLedxOjrZM/w-d-xo.html
I woud like to see if you can install some cache memory and some video ram :D and maby cpu upgrade if posible :) ,hmm if the motherboard is made by Hp maby you can find a Hp bios for the motherboard that woud be fun to see if you get diffrent optons in bios ?
Buckle your seatbelt..ram go brrr
1 MB of ram was a very low amount for 1996 my first pc in 1995 had 4MB and a 1 MB integrated video
Threadripper!!!
@@gradystephenson3346 Yeah my Amiga 2000 I upgraded it to 3MB of ram in the late 80's. It came with 1MB but there were slots on the SCSI adapter for the HD to add ram! Weird I know. It was expensive AF.
Just seeing that 90s box art STILL gives me a sense of wonder and unlimited possibilities that those machines offered.
There will never be anything better than New Millenium era advertising and box art
Open up any magazine from the 90s and early 2000s and you get such a sense of wonder...meanwhile its all outdated stuff but the ads were just so well done
That box art screams 90s. Reminds me of Gateway, E-machines, etc, this was the era of the full color box for sure!
Its ugly as f***, but I like it!
Same. It was so hopeful and new.
A new core i7 PC will give me the sense of wonder,but they never will feel the same like unboxing a 90's PC,and it is all because of good box art in the past years.
You have to admit, with 90s computers you could spend HOURS just exploring preinstalled OEM software or other random stuff you had on some CD-ROM that was included with some magazine or you got nobody-really-remembers-from-where.
Nowadays you have all that on the web, but the experience that you could actually go through everything from A to Z and still feel that everything is so vast, was so magical. Good times.
On modern OEM systems, we just call them bloat nowadays.
I had encarta 96 cd back then. It was amazing. Hours of reading and media playing.
Almost everything that comes preinstalled now is literal useless garbage which phones home, and the web stuff available now isn't much better. You used to get actual games on new PC's at the very least.
@@paullllehtx Oh man, I remember netscape on windows 3.1. Our ISP installer package had thrown in every program even slightly related; we even ended up with a version of Lynx somehow. And some sort of chat program I bugged a few perfect strangers with for no reason. Them's the days.
@@venichen1 back in the day, most of the bundled software was actually kinda nice. Hell, my piece of crap Performa came with games and stuff that were actually worth playing
Ah, the days of not just buying a game, but getting to see how well or poor it would play when you got home. Sadly, for me it was usually an “oh crap, this isn’t going to play” moment 😂
This was usually solved by a quick upgrade of the RAM. I can't believe they shipped it with only 8 Mb. I mean, I have a Blue Lightning with 40 Mb right now, and that thing came with 8 Mb... it's pretty much a hopped up 386.
@@the_kombinator So True! For a while it seemed like everything could be solved with "more RAM" lol
@@RocketCityTech The other issue was constantly running out of hard disk space. I recall when I got my first "big" hard disk - a 212 Mb Western Digital. What a wonderful day that was.
A week later it was filled.
christmas day 95 me and my brothers got a PC and a half a dozen games not 1 worked worse Christmas ever lol
@@steviegbcool Yeah must have been a real shit Christmas - what'd you get, a 286-8?
All other tech TH-camrs: "The keyboard is rubber dome and feels cheep :( "
LGR: "I like how cheep it feels!! :D"
It's funny how the world turns. In my experience most people wanted this kind of keyboards back then and got rid of the old keyboards. The curved PS/2 Key tronic was gamers' choice for years after USB keyboards became popular. Personally I'm not exactly sure when the "mechanical" trend started but I remember first hearing about it when I was a university student int 2010s.
HHKB. Get one, you will not look back.
@@JayJay-ki4mi hehe I'm kinda surprised it's still living
Thank Arceus for hotswappable Mechanical keyboards though.
My dawg the word is cheap. How can you make it this far and not know how to spell cheap.
Oh my god. For almost 20 years, I have had this vague memory of getting one of my favorite CD roms from the library all the time, but I could never remember the name. I figured it would just be a lost memory for me forever. It was "What Is A Bellybutton?"! Thanks, Clint!
I know this feeling...
@@johnk7302 Me too, I was trying to find TV Show I saw more than 25y ago , couldn't find it , I begin to believe that I have dreamed it, and then I found it, no wonder it was so difficult it actually only had pilot episode - 1.30h long and it was dubbed.Cancelled after pilot so no wonder it took lol quarter of century to find....
@@johnk7302 Ditto with a 3D game from the late 90s (I think)...
so....... what IS a bellybutton?
@@mikcnmvedmsfonoteka sooo????...I'm in suspense brother!!! WHAT WAS THE SHOW?!?!?
I thought the name AST was familiar then when Clint went over the history of the company briefly I realised why. I've been watching the 8-Bit Guy for a few years now
I love the look of a CRT softly getting brighter as it wakes up, far less annoying than today's monitors not detecting inputs, gotta say.
I have to switch between hdmi and display port several times a week at work , it's so annoying!
I've grown up in Kazakhstan and man I can't even imagine how lucky I would have been back in 1995 having this PC. I think I got my first NES clone dandy in 1995. The nostalgia hits me pretty hard.
Dendy
Same here, but to be fair PCs didn't have a whole lot of games until 3D acceleration in late 90s. Most of the "games" around 1995 that era were point and click adventures and puzzles.
@@harryshuman9637 I can still remember how impressed I was with Quake 2, and then I turned off software mode and got full 3D acceleration.
@@harryshuman9637 Dune is from 92, Doom is 93, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Doom II from 94, Descent is 95. Plenty of good PC games by 95.
It's about time, Clint.
You've to phone the 8-Bit Guy to ask for technical support now. That'll be the perfect prank call to pull on him.
(Heck, I feel the YTP's arriving from a distance...)
"Found on Ebay..." Yeah, yeah...we all know that Clint bribed 8-bit Guy for an ol AST Advantage he had in his basement. The *real* question is: How much did Clint had to pay over $500 to get it for this video? 😂
as an even funnier joke/prank, he should send the registration card to the 8-bit guy as well, that would be even funnier.
Call David and make him rant while he's muting his mic and then try to talk calmly
Didn't the 8-Bit Guy use to work in customer support or something?
With the comment around the 7 minute mark about that I have to wonder if he actually has lol
This was the upgrade from our Tandy 1000. I remember the seemingly random assemblage of images on the box. Just seeing you plop it on the desk brings back memories of mom bringing this bad boy home and telling me to put it together.
To go from a tandy to this must have been insane. Like cavemen going from staring at fire to watching a 4k tv.
Lol my mom would do the same with any tech just plop is down and ask me to build or install something like im tech support lol but hey I used to know xp and a compact persario like the back of my hand lmao
@@seththebeatmxchineI can say that I passed almost directly from a Timex TC2048 (Sinclair Spectrum portuguese clone) to a Pentium II 350MHz (with a used 486 DX2 in the middle for a few months).
@@jorgepais2876 omg
Man the 90s was a very special time. So many family's got their very first computer around these years. I remember setting up our first computer with dad in the 90s. Felt like a magic box! Took another year before we got AOL, then all those fun 90s computer games were releasing. Sims, roller-coaster tycoon etc.
Installing windows 95 from floppy disks was one of the most depressing memories of mine...
or EXCITING! You never knew which disk would fail...
@@Blitterbug Came here to say this! I remember that dreadful sound of the head retry gzzztt gzzztt ggzzzzzzt.
Worse was installing Novell Netware from disks!
Well in my case it was good it came preinstalled on our pc... and when someone upgraded it to windows 98, he left cab files on drive, which I then used to install win98 on my own pc I had as kid, when I managed to destroy win95(I deleted too much of registry and that made the login box so huge, I couldn't see all of it even if I grabbed it and moved.. The font was some gibberish. I could just type in password and press enter to get rid of it, but nothing would happen, it just displayed the wallpaper). Of course there wasn't a key included with install files on the family hdd, but I just found it on the internet and that was it :D
@@kurtlester7613 Gotta love that sound. Mmm... It's like angels singing!
Eco: East Africa is one of "those games" for me; the ones we have vague memories of from our childhood but take us years to identify. We had it installed on school PCs when I was in primary school, and I distinctly remember having to track down poachers by the smoke from their campfires. Really unusual and fascinating game, would love to see a follow-up on it!
I really miss little, fart around, casual software/games/edutainment for PC.
You just unlocked a core memory for me oh my gosh I forgot that game existed!! We played it during school as well. I was in 1-2nd grade, 2000-2002 was when I remember this, but on a much older computer than one from 00-02
Clint, this video really hits me in the feels. My first real DOS PC rig was an AST Advantage 4/33SL from 1993. It shipped stock with 4 MB of EDORAM and a 240 MB Maxtor ATA drive. No sound, and only a 3.5" diskette drive. Later in 1997 (yes I still had it), it was upgraded with an ESS 1868 AudioDrive ISA sound card, an 8-speed Jafree optical drive; The hard disk was replaced with a 1GB Quantum Fireball 1080A, CPU was swapped to a 486 DX2/50 and memory was increased to 16 MB. I owned that computer until 2001 (it still worked fine) when it was finally so dang obsolete I had to part ways with it. Good times man!
this video hit me right in the feels. i have this exact PC at home, currently refurbishing and rebuilding it. what an absolute treat this video was
I remember the day my family got our first PC. I was 13. We went to a "computer show" in Charlotte NC. We must have walked around that place for over 5 hours. My dad talked to almost every vendor in there before deciding on the right computer. I don't remember the make of the computer (guessing IBM). I would assume it had about the same specs as this one, but it was a tower. It came with a 15" monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers. Later on, bought a microphone and web cam. It cost around $1900. All kinds of extra software. The vendor had games for sale too. Buy three get one free. It would be few weeks later before we had dial-up connected for the internet. But playing Doom and other games was just WOW. The sounds of Windows 95' starting up, the grinding sound of a hard drive and the sound of dial up. It seems like it was just yesterday. Yahoo chat was the bomb back in the day. But anyhow. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
8 bit guy introduced me to AST!
A great blerb would be to explore the In-Store Display.
Please! I'm sure it'll probably be quite mundane but I'd LOVE to see it!
Just might do that! Gotta see if I can use the restore media to return to that screen
Agreed
@@LGR Oh, yeah! That would be great!
Yea cause as a retail salesperson nowadays you just take whatever pc from the stock, perfectly normal pc, get a pendrive with the store demo (and it's password protected) and if that's the last one we format it and sell it. So having it like this deep in the Windows install is definitely curious
This video really took me back. It's exactly the kind of experience you'd get from a store-bought computer back then.
Got our first PC (gateway) in 1997-ish and I still remember my dad talking about upgrading it to windoes 98 shortly after. Think that's one of my earliest memories
This revived the magic memories of turning on for the first time our first computer, a Compaq, in 1997 and being greeted by Q from Star Trek TNG congratulating us for "finally buying a new computer" or something like that...
What kind of Compaq was it? I had a Deskpro 386/20e (heap of shit really) in the early 90s.
@@the_kombinator It's a Presario 4164: 150MHz Pentium. Audio, video (I don't remember the details :( ) and 16 MB of RAM all integrated into the mainboard, plus an ISA USRobotics 33.6K modem, 2.1GB Quantum Bigfoot HDD, 8X CD-ROM drive, 14" monitor with integrated microphone and passive JBL speakers.
It had a troublesome start (mainboard, front panel, CD-ROM drive, PSU and hard disk drive all failed at different times, the HDD twice... all during the extended warranty the seller talked us into. Good thing we didn't knew better and bought it!), but worked good after that. I still have it :-).
damn that box brings back so many memories and excitement, upgrading from a 286 running DOS 3.3 to this machine back in 96-97 was so mind-blowing. 🤯 Weezer, Encarta, AOL, oh my!
The AST name really takes me back. My first PC was an AST Advantage! Pro 486DX/33 back in 93. It was my "upgrade" or "transition" from my Commodore 64C. I first got it with Windows 3.1 and upgraded it to Win95 when that edition came out. I did all kinds of things to it. I remember upgrading it to a DX4, RAM and video memory upgrades, second hard drive, CD drive, external devices; you name it. Any compatible upgrade I could afford I would install it. I had a blast using it as a fax machine. It was a great time when the Internet was still in its inception. It was with that computer when got my first email address. I had it for several years until 2001 when I got my first Dell. I still have my old AST kept in storage. One day I intend to bring it back to life.
Wow so much nostalgia. Things really were obsolete basically as soon as you could get it back then. About a year after this machine's time I got a Dell Pentium 200 and had one of the best computers out, envy of my friends, for like a month or three
OMG, we upgraded from a Tandy 1000 TL/2 286 to a AST Advantage 486 DX2/66 in the mid 90s and I absolutely loved that machine. I still have it tucked away in a closet and plan to restore it some day. I haven’t even watched this video yet but I can’t wait to start it! 🥰
Brings back so many good memories. That was my side hustle in the 90s - upgrading PCs for people who were afraid to touch them. Looks silly now but it was an exciting time. Thank you for your great content. Always fun to watch.
I remember my older brother getting an AST PC in the middle of the 90s. Cost about 2000$ but that is pretty much all the info I remember about it. That PC which I inherited years later was the start of my interest in anything PC and tech. Seeing the AST logo brought back fond memories of MS Paint, Need for Speed and other great stuff from my childhood. Thanks for your great content Clint!
Nice to know- my family's Packard Bell had the same specs as this 100Mhz, 8MB Ram and cost $1299 at Best Buy in Feb 1996-the monitor was around $199 and the HP DeskJet 600 was another $200- so around $1700 in all, before taxes.
Looks like Clint was rocking the LTT Screwdriver taking the case lid off... nice.
Raptor is one of those weirdly high quality games that I can't find any flaws in. Every area of design just seems to be as good as it can be. Sometimes you just can't argue with a 10/10.
Dude, I know! And I recently found out Call of the Shadows is available on Steam! I'm not nearly as good as I was (or at least remember being) when I played the shareware version to death, but it's still great fun. Cool game play, solid graphics, fair and rewarding game economy...10/10 for sure.
Dudes I know! This game is just timeless and can be played any day. Get it on Steam and start blasting away.
Definitely, still an extremely good game that holds up solidly to today's offerings.
One of the first games I grabbed on GoG, holds up SO well today. And the weapons are still just so satisfying. :D
@@MattePurple1 Same for me, played it as a teenager on my 486 DX2/66 without problems but when I play it on my retro PC nowadays I suck, thinking to myself "Was it always so hard or what's going on?!" xD
I am SO JEALOUS! Our first family PC was an AST 613e, a Cyrix 5x86 100mhz. Still works today without any replaced parts. The box is still in my parents loft I think. I so want that Clint! AST machines are just way overpriced by sellers on fleabay.
Quake + D3D look way smoother than on our Cyrix (I know, FPU). My mate had a P100 back then, Quake seemed amazing on that. Edit: Sorry, watching this at work, I didn't see the Spot part!
That's cool that you had a cyrix! I had a Intel 486 that I upgraded to a 133mhz 5x86 just so it could still be usable by my senior year of hs 😭the 90s were brutal when it came to rapid obsolescence of tech
For those interested, Nostalgia Nerd has a documentary on Cyrix CPUs and the Quake performance issues.
Same here, exactly that model. I loved it! We upgraded ours to 32MB RAM EDO RAM but unfortunately it only had ISA slots so I couldn't upgrade the onboard 1MB Cirrus Logic graphics with anything much better. It was however good enough to play Death Rally and I could even play the original Tomb Raider on reduced graphics. I remember the 613e also came with different software - Microsoft Golf 1.0, Cinemania '95 and a fairly early version of Quicken.
Actually in Duke3D the FPU wasn't as much of an issue if you weren't near slopes. Even Doom that doesn't use any FPU runs way better on a Pentium than a 486. While a 486DX4-100 will run Doom at just about full speed, a Pentium 75 will run it well beyond full speed.
Our family had the Cyrix version too, don't recall the exact model. By 1999/2000 it was a home under my bed where my rat liked to go, as I'd got in to custom builds and robbed it for what few useful bits it had.
23:27 OMG IVE BEEN TRYING TO FIND THIS FOR YEARS. I remember coming across this on my Dad’s computer as a kid. The music and epic skydiving footage has stuck with me for so long. SO so nice to see this again!! I guess this might be the computer we once owned!
I think the skydiving music is Mark Shreeve late 80s OR Patrick o'hearn from 1988 or 1987. It's one of those. Incredible music
Wow, my first computer! I came across your channel randomly, and to see and hear the same machine I had back in the day makes me feel... old haha. I had the same factory AST discs to restore the beast since I was deleting stuff and making it unbootable all the time. I've learned so much with it, including how and why to do a clean installation. I didn't have internet but my buddy across the street did, we were transferring mp3's via floppy disc splitted in zip, we were so pissed off when for no reason a floppy fail in the process haha.
anything LGR unboxes is just a treasure, add his lovely voice and we have a great time always.
This was the first PC I ever purchased for myself! Next was a 450Mhz K6-2 I built myself… the AST lasted me quite a while… even a Windows 98 upgrade. (With additional ram)
Man, hearing that thing boot, with the spinning HD and floppy drive… made me smile from ear to ear!
This brings back memories. The first family computer was an AST, so this brings back a lot of memories. Ours was a 486, DX4 I believe, 4mb ram, 512mb HD in this desktop form factor.
Microsoft encarta was included, which seemed magical at the time.
I’d really love a company to build a super powered water cooled pc in one of these cases.
Take me back to the 90s with the ultimate performance of today!
Thanks for getting me into this hobby, Clint. I bought a 5150/5151 and Apple //e Platinum thanks to being inspired by this channel. Really been enjoying the experience. Love your videos! Would love to see some more 80's computer content.
@@marccaselle8108 keep an eye out on ebay, sometimes there are really good deals. I got mine for 200 total. I have also found that many times you can make a pretty good offer (if the option is available) and the seller will take it. A good thing about the apple II is that the keyboard comes with it, and you can hook it into any tv that takes composite signal. that means you have to buy a lot less stuff than say, an IBM. the only thing you really may need would be a floppy drive or some way to get files back and forth.
Awesome, I’m glad to hear! Hope you enjoyed the Sharp PC-7000 video from the other week then :)
The weird nostalgia that pops up unexpectedly is so fun. I of course remember about IRQ, DMA, port conflicts, but what I had forgotten about was how there were some sound card chipset manufacturers who used an IRQ that made it less likely to have conflicts, and that was always a bonus when you had one of those. I feel like it was Creative that loved to use 7,. which was popular, and I think Adlib used 5 along with other fringe chipsets?
I appreciate that this is like going to a friend's house to try old hardware and revisit old days, thanks
LGR! Decades ago I spam watched a CD with people sky diving and was suitably entertained. Now you've reminded me of that, and I now know I was watching The Flight of the Dream Team. Some people who definitely lived life if you ask me. There's much more than 6 seconds of them out there. Thanks for playing that! When this thing was obsolete out of the box I was probably still getting by rocking my DX4100. That was slower than a Pentium 100. Loved it of course.
23:30 I watched that clip so many times. It came with Xing MPEG decoder at a time when there were not a lot of MPEGs around, and it was so cool. There is also a similar couple second long clip with exotic fish in an aquarium.
The clip is from the Flight of the Dream Team documentary.
The skydiving MPEG?! Probably the first MPEG I ever opened. I had completely forgotten about that. Pleasant memories, thanks!
Is that the whole video?
@@DavePoo2 I was wracking my brain trying to remember if there was more to it but I don't think so. I did a quick Google and found the same 5 second clip. Pretty sure this is all I had. I need to find the full clip now
@@tonicblue yeah, it looked like the whole video, just seemed a little bit weird for a screensaver.
@@DavePoo2 it was the mid-90s multimedia revolution! I can't remember if I saw this as a screen saver or just found the file when digging through our home PC looking for anything I could open because I was 10 and computers are magical. I think it was a screensaver but that might just be because of this video
@@tonicblue Yeah, I've got to admit, after coming to the PC over from the Amiga at about that time, any of those videos would have been really impressive to me. The Amiga was a great computer but it couldn't really do anything like that. I think the first FMV I can remember seeing on the PC was probably the opening cutscene videos from Command & Conquer Red Alert
LGR.. What to say! You have unlocked a lot of memories from my childhood. Before see your video I can't remember what was my first computer in the year 1996. I'm from Argentina, born in year '87 and we we're very lucky with my parents to afford a computer in that moment.
The AST model we have has 16MB of ram, a 1GB Hard drive and a 486 DX2 processor.
Fair enought to run some games at the time like Submarine Titans, Commander Keen and other ones.
Thank you for share this great unboxing that also unboxes a lot of memories.
The CPU was oldish by 1996 standards, but the other specifications are ok, especially the 16 MB RAM and a gigabyte-sized hard disk. This was enough to upgrade to and run Windows 95 fairly decently.
that intro music though.......damn what memories it brings back when you're in you're 30's
I particularly like these retrospective videos and how you present them.
It was bugging me throughout the whole video where I had seen those speakers before. At the end I finally remembered being 8, at school and plugging the passive speaker into the class computer’s microphone socket and discovering it worked as a quiet mic and I could record my voice in sound recorder!
Oh my god, I never knew. But I won't dare try this.
Reminds me of the specs and hardware I started building and tinkering with finding these types of PCs at garage sales, yard sales, and church sales for around $5-$10 when I was around 13 starting from around 2002.
They may not have been very gaming capable, but I enjoyed them😆
Pretty sure I was the only kid in my class to have more than one computer in my room at the time😂
Had a very similar AST Pentium 133 as a first PC growing up. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
thanks for making this unboxing! enjoyed it a lot
There's nothing else on the internet that provides this kind of nostalgia, with this level of efficiency.
It's not just the hardware, but you cover the exact same areas that I would cover....
You might be me? But American 🤣
EDIT: ......and then you loaded up Raptor.... Omg
I always went to the first mission for a few seconds, hit Backspace then aborted the mission. Sold all but one of the Death Rays Backspace gave me to buy more weapons. I only used the Backspace cheat once per game. Never tried to see if it would work multiple times. But when Mountain King Software ported it to Windows they removed that cheat! Fortunately the save files were compatible so I could do the Backspace cheat in the DOS version then save and copy the file to the Windows version.
Woah, I haven't seen or even thought of Xing MPEG since the mid-90s... I remember that skydiving clip too that always ended in an abrupt corrupted blob just like your screensaver :) I used to use XingMPEG to watch bootleg movies on Video CDs bought from local markets.. ah those were the days...
Wonderful video as always, and bravo on perfect subtitles!
Yes, I enjoyed this and every LFR presentation. TY
This was a cozy look, I was afraid that it's gonna be boring in the second half with all the packed-in software but they were all interesting. Cheers!
Companies were big on that back then. "Loads of free software" was a bullet point on the package.
This extended to Microsoft office, adobe Photoshop, or any other high profile software included as a bonus.
Heck, my Packard bell in 1995 came with loads of stuff including 3d body and dinosaur adventure, speed, space, undersea, Microsoft works, grolier multimedia encyclopedia, megarace, aol, and best of Microsoft entertainment pack for Packard bell.
It's nice to see what I remember from that era. Even though it is not completely full of bloatware, Windows 95 was usually around 40 to 50mb installed unless you installed more included features and added MS plus on top of that. So having only 340mb free of disk space, this PC was preloaded with a lot. Which is par for the course. The $1899 price was cheap for the time with it including a monitor. Back then when I sold computers and did PC support, a top of the line store bought PC with monitor was around $3000 to $3500. More if you went all out and bought additional software too.
I miss that nostalgic era. I don't like how some PCs of the time were not open architecture but it was still a good era. Thanks for the video LGR
Oh. My. God. I had this exact computer with these exact specs! I remember the Advantage box and disc, I remember the man and woman talking when we booted it up in 1995-1996 while my Dad was setting it up. I remember Spot (hated it then), Hover, Grolier 1996 Encyclopedia (it came with the CD), even that Skydiving screensaver. When you showed "What is a Bellybutton" I lost my mind. I had completely wiped that from my memory until today! We ended up upgrading to 16MB of RAM too! Thank you for making this video!
Oh man... I had those exact speakers at one point. What a nice flashback memory. Cool video to see AST at their "height" with a nice little desktop PC.
@LGR your channel inspired me this month to upgrade my computer myself and install new parts. I fully see why you love this hobby so much. It's just so cool to see all sorts of different computer parts that are out there.
I remember play Duke, Descent and Tomb Raider about the same time with my P100. It was still so far advanced from what we had seen, poor frame rates were acceptable if brief. Great times. The feeling of endless possibilities as you booted it up, getting on the Net made it even more exciting.
I don't think the framerates would've been poor with a DOS boot disk to optimize memory (or perhaps even just exiting to MS-DOS mode), unless it's because of the lackluster GPU.
I think we had this computer in 1996. I was in the eighth grade, and was thrilled to have our first computer with Windows and Word (I'd always written papers or made signs/banners on Word Star in DOS before then). Thanks for the nostalgia trip!
I'm amazed you were able to get your hands on a pseudo-sealed box of this system! It was like opening a time capsule. Even though it's been used before, it's so lightly used You could argue it's like-new. It's still a misrepresentation by the seller, though.
Even if not new in box, you have to give them credit for having everything in the box, including the bags.
It might have been new. People don't realize but back in the 90s all the pc makers would reuse used parts. There was even a lawsuit from Compaq against PB because all the other companies stated it in the warranty or user agreement, and PB tried to hide it There was no guarantee that a new computer was all "new" back then.
Nice to see a computer that had the spec's that 50-80% of everyone actually had in the 90's
I must be that 50-20% ... along with most of my friends back in the day.
This is, like, the most comforting video I've ever seen
Absolutely loving this video and brings me back to 1995... This was my first computer but with Cyrix 5x86 75MHz CPU... Got it from Future Shop in Canada :)
AST rings a bell. Didn't the 8bit guy work their support?
Yes
I think he even did a video on his time at AST
@@TheRaggiesoft It wasn't just a standard video, but was actually a live panel he did at a convention, and recorded.
I didn't expect the battery powered speakers to hit my in the nostalgia so hard. I had that set.
Thank you so much for spending the time you do on these treasures. The first PC I bought with my own money was a CTX almost identical to this in 96. You give us all something to enjoy with our rose-tinted glasses...
nice piece of nostalgia, thanks for bringing back some of the 'good old days' :-) I can recall win95 really WAS a pain in the ass with just 8 Megs of ram, first thing I did after installing it on my P90 PC was upgrading it to 24 Megs, which was the boost needed to make it all smoother.
One thing I hated about pcs back then was they always starved the ram while puttings tons of software in the box. 95 ran fine in 16mb. It flew in 32mb. It was always about all the software you got and never about having enough ram.
Yeah first thing I always did was delete/stop all the tasks from running. Every time I'd restart ctrl+alt+delete every task you don't need. You could get task manager in win 95 down to like 3-4 processes.
I suppose this was an entry level system in that specific time, I remember people with means specking their 486 DX2 66 with 16MB and lot of people that had 8MB purchasing a 8MB upgrade alongside their Windows 95 CD.
@@RetroTinkerer it was terrible back then. Packard bell used to be the worse for cheaping out on ram. There again the general public didn't know about specs back then so a load of software was looking good to them.
@@salaciouscreations4323 The specs were right there at a big retailer like a Best Buy or Staples, it was just sometimes lost in the looking back and forth between the different offerings at a similar price, I think. Buyers would get swayed by a deal that was running at the time, for example. I remember advising friends to get a memory upgrade to16 mb to get their new Win 95 machines running "smoothly", which usually came down to them spending all the money they thought they had just saved on a deal. Not all were pleased by this info..
This makes me want to build my own retro 486 PC... That was the era I learned to build them, brings back a lot of nostalgia.
To quote one of the great poets of our time:
"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box."
Love these kind of PCs, very similar to what our first PC was back in like 96-97
Holy crap! What a nostalgia trip. I have AST Advantage Adventure 486, bought it new and kept it ever since :D
Awesome! Watching this on May 01, 2023. In 1996 my system was the exact same specs except for a 14.4 modem!
My first PC, in about 1994, was an AST with 8 Mb ram, a 145 meg HDD, a 33 mhz clocked to 66 mhz, 2 speed CDROM drive and an actual Sound Blaster card, complete with colour monitor. It came with DOS 6.2, Windows 3.2.2 and MS Works on a single disk, along with drivers. Not state of the art but I loved it and it was good for gaming, especially DOS games. To reinstall I just had to insert the CD and let it work. I miss those days. I played Doom 2 a lot and eventually learned to design my own levels. I remember Pentiums had started to come out just after I bought it but I didn't upgrade until Windows 95 was released.
Oh, Clint, thanks again for this little journey. As usual a high quality video. Wel done!
That's roughly what I had in 1996. Single digit framerates in some games weren't an issue. Just the fact that it was a Pentium, meant it was "fast". I was more into adventure games and strategies. My CD drive was 8x Teac, and audio was an OPL3 clone, so it was quite decent.
Now THIS was cool. I was an adult in the 90's, in my late 20's to early 30's when the 386/486 PC's were still around. My Dad bought one of these AST Advantage boxes at a PC auction sale in 1994, though it was the 486/DX33 version of this machine.
It didn't come with Windows, but DOS if I recall, maybe not even that, anyway, it did get Windows 3.1, then 3.11 for Workgroups and it has the 2400Baud modem, Dad replaced it with a 28.8Baud version when he gave it to me. We bought a CD-Rom drive and it had its own expansion card so it was usable, adding an 8bit audio card, so early multimedia. I would get a 16, stereo card to replace that 8 bit one.
When it became mine in 1997, I upgraded it to Windows 95, added more memory and AOL 3.0, and it was AOL that took that PC down by slowing it WAY down and it took about 5 minutes, or so it seemed, just to get to the home screen (remember those?). Trying to job search, it was not practical, so went to a used PC place and bought the Bravo tower, a Pentium 133 from AST, gutted the 486 and reused what I could from that PC in the "new" one, sadly it came with a used IBM drive, I think the Deskstar with the ceramic platters and it eventually crashed due to the ceramic dust, caused by the heads hitting it and replaced it with a refurbished 17.2G Western Digital HD. Sadly, Win 95 could only see it as 17.2MB. I forget what I did to circumvent that, but ended up building an Athlon 800 based PC by purchasing a Asus A7V motherboard, with that processor and a "whopping 512MB of RAM, it needed a graphics card and an audio card and the rest I had, got Windows 98 (borrowed) and I was good to go.
I did basic games with mine, as I was not much of a gamer, but did the internet a lot and over time and did a lot of other tasks as well, the dialup modem would hang often when it rained. By 2001 or so, went DSL and broadband and have not had dialup since. BTW, that Bravo PC was upgraded to the 56K modems and I think it stopped working some years later.
I totally need to see this thing with 16-32mb of ram, a coast module, and an upgraded video card.
When I was in highschool in the late 90s I was given a pile of computers similar to this. I mixed and matched parts and various upgrades I found in them and built the best combination for 4 systems. I probably had 32-64mb of ram in them along with pentium 100 overdrive chips. They also had coax network cards so I set them up on a folding table with two on each side. We played Doom, Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior, and other dos games with my friend and neighbors. I used to make Duke death match levels and had a bunch we all loved. This was a time where nobody had a home network or broadband. Sitting across the table from each other and lan gaming was a blast.
I'm very surprised how relatively smooth quake ran for such specs, great optimization
Pentiums ran quake just fine, our school had p75 and we played it along with Warcraft II in multiplayer. My home 100mhz 486dx4 couldn't handle it though.
Even the slower Pentiums will run it better than even a 160 MHz 486. It seems like the Pentium runs it 4x better than a 486 clock by clock.
@@fungo6631 correct. The fastest 486 by CPU Galaxy at 186mhz could only manage about 21fps. The FPU unit in 486 was much weaker and that seemed to be the reason.
@@fungo6631 no wonder they're getting increasingly expensive
@@djnjoy Actually he manages to overclock it to 200 MHz more recently. And it's not just the weaker FPU, but the inability to run integer and floating point calculations at the same time. That and the 32 bit data bus.
Oh man! These type of PCs would get me so excited back in the day! The golden years for sure. Thank you for doing this!
Lol I actually went “wait, just replace it now” as soon as you looked at the battery the first time 😂😂. Love your work, keep it up!!
Holy crap! I have vivid memories of my grandfather getting my family a PC around 1995/1996 (before that we only had a Macintosh Plus). I've been trying to search for the computer for years and then you happen to make a video about it 😮 I had no memories of it being an AST but now I'm 100% sure it was from their lineup. It's not exactly this model, but very close to it (the speakers and the software were mostly different, but it included the same mic and I'm quite sure the mouse was the same too. There was also a mouse mat with the AST dolphin, the flying violin etc.).
A true multimedia machine, but got old quite fast. At least it ran Warcraft 2 which was the most important thing for me.
Thank you so much for this video. Now I'm bathing in nostalgia 😍
I'd love to get a scan of that mouse mat btw. The picture it had is forever attached to my brain. So if anyone has one, it would be highly appreciated 😅
Used to use AST 4 port serial cards. They were well made and compatible. LOL Loved the Dave Murray reference
I actually had a SixPakPlus that exploded (caps blew, hard) inside a 286.
The performance level shown here is pretty much what I experienced back in the day.
Thanks for not upgrading it and keeping it original! It brings a lot of memories. :)
30:30 aww you really did. Thanks, I actually did want to watch a few of those. What a blast from the past.
As a computer user back to the early 80s and my commodore 64, to my early dos ibm clone in 1991, I was never more thrilled then when I got my first windows 95 machine, I thought it was the most amazing feeling. Great video, really enjoyed it.
That PC really looks good.A great hit of nostalgia.
This was the sort of PC you would find at Sam's Club in a bundle with speakers and with a CRT monitor strapped to it.
It was a good deal.
I just built my own and saved a ton. By 1998 I had a 233 MMX with a Voodoo II, and I paid a lot less for it than this heap was going for.
@@the_kombinator The bundle we bought was just $600 including the monitor. Can't complain about that in the mid 1990s.
This is one of my first computers!! OMG flooding me with memories!
those microphones were so cool i love this channel
The Quake nostalgia hit me so hard in this one
Yessssss!
I never expected to see you review the exact same model of PC that I owned from 96-98! Really cool! I have some awesome gaming memories with this one. Spent all my time after school playing late DOS era/Win95 games on it, such as Warcraft 2, Diablo, Grand Theft Auto, Duke Nukem 3D, The Pandora Directive and many other classics from that era. It was a pretty decent gaming PC until mid 1997 or so, when system requirements for most games jumped to 16MB RAM and 3DFX cards really started to take off.
Sure enough computing moved too fast those days. Granted this PC was somewhat underpowered to begin with, but imagine buying a PC today and it feeling long in the tooth after less than two years!
@@BilisNegra Yeah, tech developed insanely fast back then. The Ghz barrier was broken only three years after this PC was released. And the original GeForce also came out in 1999. An exciting time, but also a very expensive time to be a PC gamer.
@@kjetilhansen5363 That's it, exactly. A very exciting time for the PC magazine reader while ungrateful for the man on the street. Looking at it from the present time, where computing is more affordable than ever and machines over a decade old can run a modern OS, at least for not very demanding tasks, it looks cruel even. At the same time though, without that frenetic era of development, we wouldn't be where we are now...
I do miss the creativity of the 90s... they really knew how to sell it to you and make you feel like you were buying the best piece of machinery for your money... great video :)
That era was what drove me away from PC gaming. Back in the DOS days, my 486 could handle games just fine for multiple years. Once games moved to Windows 95 and up, after one year your computer needed upgrades to play the latest thing.
Not much different now. My current rig cost $2k, which while not super top of the line, should be able to run anything reasonably at 1080. Baldur's Gate 3 turned into a slideshow. Still beat it twice, but I think if I play it again, it's going on my Playstation.
Love the nostalgia from this! I too had that mic. I had a Packard bell pc when I was a kid in the early 90s enjoying every minute of MegaRace!!! =D thanks LGR!!!
Welcome back to megarace the show that makes reality wish it wasn't.
This is the perfect channel if you want to relax and escape from the modern hypocrisy of technology and video gaming...thanks LGR
Yeah, as awesome as it is to be able to go back and build one's dream machine from a certain era, it's also cool to just see the average joe setup that most of us actually had. This one in particular reminds me of the IBM (cr)Aptiva my family had in the mid 90s, and the struggles of trying to get it to run modern games as time went on
I love videos like this with new old stock or complete in box unboxing and reviews