Back in 2001 my buddy Mike kept saying my old ViewSone 17 inch was flickering because the flyback transformer was going bad. I blew him off for three months until the screen suddenly went dark and started smelling like burnt electronics. Took me two weeks to track down a replacement at a local computer swap meet, and I still wonder if I could have saved it by acting sooner. Anyone else ever ignore a hardware warning and pay for it later?
I was trying to get Star Wars: Dark Forces running on my modern desktop and it kept crashing at the cutscenes. After hours of fiddling with compatibility settings I almost gave up. Then I remembered I had an old Dell Latitude from 2007 sitting in my closet. I installed DOSBox on it, copied over the game files from a CD, and it ran perfectly with zero tweaking. The key was setting the cycles to auto and using a custom config for the sound card emulation. Now I use that laptop as my dedicated retro gaming machine for anything older than 2002. Has anyone else had better luck running old games on actual period hardware instead of modern rigs?