And yes, I think we both lived through the most rapid period of technological change (so far). Moore's law was real, the improvements each year were both felt and needed, and the software was coming along for the ride.
Quake was huge when it was launched - there'd never been anything like it. Of course, on my crappy Cyrix 6x86 and some similarly lame graphics card, I recall having to play it at something like 15fps. That wasn't great.
The Y's combo really stood out. You have to understand that late 1991 was still the age of 8-bit NES gaming. This game was very much an 8-bit game that could have run on the NEW and yet it also contained almost DVD quality animated cut-scenes with top quality digital audio. It really felt next level, because the quality of audio was like a studio music album and the animation quality was better than what was on television at the time. It really felt next level compared to the NES.
For some bizarre reason when upgrading from the family Mac SE to a Quadra, I had an idea in my head cd-rom drive was unnecessary. Thankfully in less than ten years I was proven correct.
Obviously I didn’t play enough games.
Good memories playing that one on that massively heavy monitor that was normal back then, under the blankets with ice on the inside of the windows and on top of the blanket.
The real weird one from that era was the 7 segment led MHz displays that were popular in the 386/486 era. It was weird because the the chips could not change speed in the first place. And I don't want to say every system was like this, but every one I ever saw was set by a set of static jumpers or a dip switch. When you upgraded your cpu you put the little sticker that came with it on the chassis and changed the jumpers, they served the same purpose.
I do remember using it to make older games play less bad, but, as you say, this rarely worked, I think precisely because the speed was never the original one (I don't remember the clock speed of my first PC, but the first one with a turbo button ran at 33 MHz which I'm sure is a lot more than twice the speed of the first one; seems closer to 8x from what a quick search implies).
My 486 had a single speed CDROM but it only had a 500mb and a 100mb hard drive, so still wasn't playing mp3s
The game Titanfall on PC has the audio in it twice, compressed and decompressed. The decompressed was for machines with dual core or less so that there was enough overhead to keep the game running.
Given two files, a compressed file which must be uncompressed to play, and an uncompressed one which does not require extra processing - why would the game ever bother uncompressing te compressed file when the same data is already available uncompressed?
There's no true use case for that that I can see.
In this case it was stated that both the compressed and decompressed versions live side by side. So there is no install size saved.