[Blarg]

Looks like I misremembered. The motherboard you linked carries up to 384 RAM, so if that's from 1997, I couldn't have been playing Total Annihilation from the very start with a gig unless I started out on a lesser system and moved up to another one and caught a sinificant technology change as I kept playing, which I did for years. Not impossible, but who knows. At any rate, if I got up to a gig on that game, it looks like I didn't start at one. It came out almost in 1998 though and I played it to 1999 or 2000, so it's hard to guess exactly how high my RAM was during that time.

However, it's interesting to note that the 384 gigs that board holds in 1997 is still more than some games cite as their minimum requirements today -- and isn't Civ 4 one of them?

I do know that RTS's were my genre of choice, and I always eventually bought enough RAM so my machines were maxed out or pretty darn close.. And found I needed every last bit of RAM, and even that often wasn't enough to not have slowdowns and hitching, especially when panning. RTS's and and strat games with lots of units on board absolutely devour RAM.

If I didn't hit a gig at any point in TA, then it must have been either in TA: Kingdoms or AOE2.