DON'T BIN YER OLD 486

                       By Phil Darke

I am sure that there are many people who, like me, have recently
spent a large wodge of their hard earned cash to upgrade to a
shiny new PC, with the latest Pentium processor and oodles of
memory and hard drive space. Having got your new machine, you sit
in front of it eagerly expecting stunning performance and
brilliant graphics.

It comes as something of a shock to realise that there are things
that you could do on your old 486 which your new marvel of
technology simply can't do.

Apart from the obvious advantages of having a second machine upon
which to do your word processing, accounts and suchlike, there are
games which the new machines are simply too fast for.

My first experience of this was when I played Toonstruck on my
P200 Pentium. At one point in the game the hero, Drew Blanc finds
himself stuck in a cauldron, about to become lunch for a pack of
wolves. The solution for this is very simple. What you are
supposed to do is to click on first one side and then the other of
the cauldron to rock it so that it eventually overturns. I must
have spent a good two hours trying to do this and was about to
give up in disgust, when I thought, "I wonder how this would work
on the old machine". So I fired up the old 486, installed the game
and copied my saved games from the Pentium. The game played
painfully slowly but within a couple of minutes Drew was rescued.
At another point later on in the game Drew has to carry out an
action in one room and then rush to another room and get in before
the door closes, about 30 seconds later. Here again after numerous
attempts on the Pentium and failing by fractions of second; I
succeeded at the first attempt on the 486.

More recently I have been playing Kingdom O' Magic.  Here at one
point in the game you have to complete a Pacman type arcade game
in which you have to get 8 keys. Now arcade games have always been
my weak point anyway, but I tried for hours and eventually got 4
of the 8 keys after which the game speeded up and there was no way
I could do it. Again I copied my saved games to my 486. It was
much easier but I was still struggling. Then brainwave!! I pressed
the turbo button, everything slowed to snail's pace and I
completed the section easily. (The Pentium, of course has no turbo
switch).

I also recently decided to have another go at Myst which was a
game I played in the past but never managed to complete due to
lack of time. When I tried to run this on my Pentium it came up
with a message something to the effect that the program has made
an illegal call to a DLL file and will be terminated. Now this
means nothing to me and I hadn't a clue how to overcome it. What
was worse was that when I tried to shut down the machine it
crashed. So it's back to the 486 again for Myst.

These are just a couple of my experiences and I'm quite sure there
must be many others with similar problems.

So "DON'T BIN YER OLD 486" just because you've got a new all
singing all dancing wonder machine. You may very well find the 486
still has a lot to offer, and you probably won't get much for it
if you try to sell it second hand.

@~I recently found two library disks which aren't
@~Pentium-compatible, so it isn't only commercial programs that
@~can throw up problems ... Sue











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