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LGR - The 1995 Acer Aspire (Patreon)

Published:
2024-07-22 20:42:10
Edited:
2024-08-02 15:37:58
Imported:

Content

https://youtu.be/8dWtK4lMBJg

Got a certified 90s classic right here! A once-common PC that has now become a desired rarity among certain enthusiast dorks like myself.

If you saw my VCF Southwest video recently then you may recognize this machine. I've been looking for a complete original Acer Aspire system for years now and as soon as I saw this one on the table at the show, I had to make an offer on it. And thankfully we worked out a deal! Shipping was not cheap but I was happy to pay for it to be done properly and get this beautiful machine here to its new home.

The system specs themselves are nothing crazy, but the 575LB was pretty respectable in 1995 with a 100MHz Pentium, 16 megs of RAM, 2MB PCI graphics, and a Sound Blaster Vibra 16. But really though, the biggest appeal is that unique styling by the one and only Frog Design. Peak 90s teal, swoopy curves, swiss cheese air vents, it's a design that has always stood out to me ever since I saw it back in the day. Acer was trying HARD back then, and I love it.

Anyway, I hope y'all enjoy this one! There are a couple bits of b-roll I still need to take care of, but I'm awaiting a piece or two before I can do that. Hopefully they'll be here in the next couple of days so I can drop them into the final edit for Friday. Anyway lemme know your thoughts, and thank you for support!

Files

The First Acer Aspire! $2,500 Windows 95 Desktop PC from 1995

The original emerald green Acer Aspire is a 90s classic! A once-common PC that has become a desired rarity for its styling by Hartmut Esslinger's Frog Design group. And its specs were respectable in 1995 with a 100MHz Pentium, 16MB RAM, 2MB PCI graphics, Sound Blaster Vibra 16 and Windows 95. So let's run the factory restoration CD and explore what it can do! ● Become an LGR YouTube member to see videos early and more! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLx053rWZxCiYWsBETgdKrQ/join ● LGR elsewhere online: https://www.patreon.com/LazyGameReviews https://www.twitter.com/LazyGameReviews https://www.facebook.com/LazyGameReviews ● Archive of the 575LB Resource CD and floppy: https://archive.org/details/acer-ace-2.0-resource-cd ● Background music licensed from: https://www.epidemicsound.com 00:00 Acer in 1995 02:38 this Aspire 575LB 04:35 monitor, keyboard, mouse 06:16 award winning style 07:50 motherboard I/O 08:22 inside the case 09:55 hard disk issues 11:02 restoring the HDD 12:18 first startup 13:45 ACE Desktop 15:40 graphics memory 16:35 sound, MIDI test 17:10 voice control 18:00 City Streets 18:55 ISPs, online apps 19:44 TripMaker 20:21 so much is installed 21:14 Asteroids, Fury 3, WEP 22:32 Jazz Jackrabbit Trilogy 23:33 Acer software library 24:23 Let's Explore the Airport 25:50 Pod by UbiSoft 28:15 Duke Nukem 3D 29:28 Tyrian 30:00 value in the slowness #LGR #retro #computer #Acer #windows

Comments

polymatt

Love that you ended up picking one up from Matthew! I was pretty envious myself.

LazyGameReviews
>>144361065

Yeah man you were right there as I was drooling over it! There was no way I'd let the opportunity pass to buy it so I'm glad he was willing to work out a deal.

Daniel Cayea

I'm a sucker for the IBM Aptiva Stealth myself but do appreciate these systems that break away from the beige box paradigm.

LazyGameReviews
>>144362254

Heck yeah those Aptivas are standout systems from back then as well. I wonder if they hired any outside help to come up with those, or if they did things in-house.

iain

The TV ad is fascinating - the guy who looks like he’s stepped out of a Nescafé instant coffee advert, the hand stroking the plastic case, the cocktail bar acoustic guitar music

Gareth P

Loved this - the trip software reminded me of Autoroute which I had a, ah, "copy" of - I used to use it when I started driving in 1999, right up until Google maps took over. I agree about the value in "of their time" systems like this one for sure, I'd love to get hold of the same spec PS/2 model 60 I had in the early 90s with an 8MHz CPU and 5MB RAM. The first game I remember trying to play which was too much for it was some kind of F-16 sim, unplayable. Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures and Pro Tennis Tour 2 (think it was called Great Courts in the US?) worked just fine though :-)

Headset Guy

Fun trivia bit (fun to me, at least) that you may or may not want to include in the final video, it's up to you: Acer also manufactured the final batch of computers for Compudyne, which by that time (1994-1995) was CompUSA's "store brand" of PCs and PC peripherals. Some previous Compudyne computers were designed by KDS--just can't escape them lately.

Headset Guy

...Huh. Also very interesting that it has a 100 MHz Pentium, because the model numbers usually denoted the correct clock speeds ("575" meant Pentium at 75 MHz, but "5100" was for Pentium at 100 MHz).

Robert Launder

Huh, the woman in the FMV sounds a heck of a lot like the Black Mesa announcer in the beginning of Half-Life.

Nate Greene

As a fellow millennial that grew up using an Acer aspire from 1996, this video hit all kinds of nostalgia for me. I have fond memories of Tyrain, Great Word Adventure, Magic School Bus, Strategy Games of the World, etc. As you said in the video, that computer became completely obsolete rather quickly. It didn’t stop my dad from networking it and dropping it in my room so I could download all sorts of crap via P2P platforms. It was so slow. I think we donated it to a school in 2002 or so.

Headset Guy

Last, but not least, I wish I would have uploaded this sooner so you could have had a more authentic restore experience. But here we are anyway. Just uploaded this tonight. https://archive.org/details/acer-ace-2.0-resource-cd

LazyGameReviews
>>144378088

Ahh that's awesome, I'm glad to bring on the nostalgia. It's wild how fast these became "useless" machines and yet how long some of them ended up being used for. Like the one I saw around 2002, it was still being used as a secretarial/finance system at a local church.

Brandie Drown

We need LGR 90's logo review! XD

DeepestBlue

Excellent video. I love this kind of stuff. Only one obvious thing - at the segment starting 9:06 you refer to the graphics chip as a "CL-GD5540" when the chip shows "CL-GD5440". Interesting, as Device Manager shows it as a 5440/30, and DXDiag shows the chip as a 5430.

Earl Elmore
>>144362254

I know it wasn't really kicking any doors down design wise, I was a huge fan of my Compaq Presario with the swappable colored bezel. Video idea? *puppy dog eyes* IDK if there's anything particular interesting about it's history though lol.

Alyxx the Rat

Yeah that "authenticity" you get with a less insane PC from back in the day is exactly why I love tinkering with my IBM 300GL system or my Dell Optiplex. They are essentially boring computers in a tabletop box form factor that was completely everywhere for a while in offices and schools. They are not by any means crazy gaming machines, but that is what I love about them. When I can do stuff like play O.D.T. or MDK on a legit PC from 1997 that is very legitimately something typical from that era, it just hits differently for me. Honestly if I want unlimited power I will just play these games on a modern system without the restrictions back then. My main Linux systems can easily run just about everything with 3DFX emulation and the works. But when I want an authentic experience, I prefer the limitations of 90s hardware. So I absolutely get that appeal and it is a huge part of the retro experience for me. You have to get more than just the aesthetic. The limitations and the slowness as you put it, is just equally an important part of that time period.

janeway216

This video was such a high grade nostalgia hit! I was so jealous when the Aspire desktop popped up in your VCFSW video because it was my family's first Windows computer back in 1995/1996. Glad to see it went to a good home! We went from a Leading Edge Model M to this. My parents bought the lower-spec model to start with, but we sunk a bunch of upgrades into it so it was at least *sort of* functional. Off the top of my head, we added a larger hard drive, 16 MB of RAM, a Pentium Overdrive (75 to 125) and a SoundBlaster Live. Never did get an actual video card, though. I spent so many happy hours as a teenager sitting in front of our Aspire playing Tomb Raider, Tyrian and SimCity 2000. Thanks for the memories, Clint.

Uncleawesome

What a great pc for windows 95 experience :) It screams multimedia as it should. That's how I remember windows 95. Modern, multimedia, internet, cd-rom. That windows 95 startup sound gives me such nostalgia.

J Ruonti

It's kinda hard to actually realize how fast things evolved in the 90's since many of us were kids then and time just moves differently when you are young. 2 years as a teen is forever. Now it just flies by like a bee on speed.

Brandie Drown
>>144386858

That's what I was thinking too!🤣 ..and as you know...there are soo many of them..that are wonderfully awful.

BastetFurry

I ran Duke3D in 640 by 480 on my custom built Am5x86PR75 running overclocked at 150 MHz and it had around 30 FPS. Fully playable for the day. No clue what Acer did to that system but i bet it cut corners on the wrong places just to keep these numbers high, a staple of system builders even today. The fattest CPU but the rest of the system can't handle it. For anyone reading this, some things to check and do that can improve performance: * Make sure your swap file is not fragmented and at a fixed size. To achieve that, deactivate swap, do a defrag, reactivate swap with a fixed size, double the system memory is a good idea on these old boxes. * Check if your harddisk is running in DMA mode, often enough that is not activated after a fresh install. * When running Windows 9x, an empty config.sys and autoexec.bat is mandatory. If you need 16 Bit drivers to get your 9x system running, get rid of the device if you can. I have a boot menu in my config.sys and when running Windows, even 3.11, i only have himem.sys loaded. 3.11 also needs share and the CD-ROM driver. * Just to state that separately again, if running 9x avoid 16 bit drivers like the plague. They cause instability and slow down the system. * If you don't mind modern solutions, running a system from a CF or SD card does work wonders, feels like using a SCSI system from back in the days. Just have a fast rotating rust in there as the secondary harddrive to place the swap on or you will sooner than later kill your flash drive. Learned that the hard way with XP on a Futro S400, cost me a 4 GByte IDE flash module. * If you have it lying around, Windows likes memory, the more the merrier. 64 MByte is plenty for 98SE but it has problems with more than 512, there is a patch but i don't fully trust it for stability reasons. I have a P3-866 with an AGP Voodoo 3, SB AWE and 64 MByte RAM as my main DOS/9x machine with a SD2IDE adapter accessible from the front and a 10 GByte harddisk filled with installers, drivers and the swapfile. Windows 98SE is installed on a 64 GByte SD card. Runs rock solid and, considering the age of the machine, blazingly fast. Would have a SD card with XP too for that machine, but XP refuses to be installed on a SD card. I know there are some wild community patches, but i couldn't be bothered playing around with them. 64 MByte RAM is at the lower spectrum for a decent XP experience anyway.

BastetFurry
>>144393281

Is there a tutorial for getting Wine to "emulate" the Glide API? Because my little 'deck struggles with PCem or 86Box emulating a somewhat decent machine for 9x. The single core performance of the Van Gogh SoC isn't that great, even if the Steamdeck does a very good and green, 15W TDP, desktop with Ubuntu installed.

Alyxx the Rat
>>144393281

I don't think you can do that in Wine itself. I always use DGVoodoo with Wine or Proton to do it.

Bryan McIntosh

One thing I was reminded of when you mentioned the price was that a few families I knew picked up their first PCs from a furniture store. This was because they had pretty affordable financing options, at least in terms of monthly payments. Unfortunately, because the industry was moving so quickly and these PCs were never anywhere near state of the art, most often these transactions just led to people still paying them off while the computer was woefully underpowered for anything approaching modern software.

Bryan Smith
>>144708574

We had one of those cirrus logic cards back in the day and I remember it being major poopoo even with the extra ram. We had an Am5x86 too and I remember having to shrink dn3d to postage stamp size on a few levels because it would drop to PowerPoint mode. We threw in a diamond speedstar briefly and the frame rate more than doubled in that game, but it made Win 3.1 unstable some reason, so dad wasn't having that! Much to my 10 yr old objections of course, I couldn't care less that his spreadsheets were slow, haha.

Bryan Smith

I like the point you made about the 90s experience putting things in perspective. I think us PC gamers were spoiled a bit by the the "fat times" of 2009-2016ish where you could build a great rig for just over a grand and you'd get great FPS on all major titles for the next 4-5 years. Now that stuff has gotten pricier and the obsolescence cycle has shortened again we're salty, somewhat rightfully I think, about the regression, but seeing powerpoint mode in pod on a rig that would have been 16 months old reminds us just how crazy it used to be. Maybe, just maybe, we don't need to bitch and moan quite so much when a new game fails to keep an even 60 fps@4k. I think Nvidia has honestly done a mind job on us a bit to convince us we need 4k/rtx at silky smooth speeds or we should feel bad. It helps them move hardware I guess.

BastetFurry
>>144708574

I don't remember the concrete model but stuff ran significantly faster than with its predecessor, a Tseng Labs ET4000. I could even play System Shock in 640x480 with it. I still have an Am5x86, currently installed in a Compaq Presario 425 AIO, i could test it on a normal 486 motherboard some day with some PCI graphic cards and throw some games against it to see if my memory defied me. But i remember playing Duke3D on my old system back then with 640x480 in playable framerates. Not on the Presario tough, that one has a crappy CL GD5420 in there, already tested that and even back then i wouldn't have considered ~15 FPS to be very playable. Nice for all the RPGs of that era tough. And makes a nice terminal with the right software. :D

Mikkel Graugaard Hansen

I remember selling them when I was an apprentice salesman in a computer store. These models were targeted to women and men that wanted something looking nice at home and not a boring beige xonputer. IBM was listening and made the Black Aptiva models to get into the same market created by Acer with this green design machine.