PC
The first Tomb Raider game was release for several platforms, one of which was the PC. To run TR1 you needed at least a Pentium 60 PC running DOS 5, so says the packaging. But it's more fun on faster PCs with an acceleration card installed (3Dfx Voodoo, Diamond Monster, Matrox Mystique, Rendition, and S3 chips are supported). Today the best way to play the first Tomb Raider is to use Glidos which emulates the glide api of the Voodoo card.
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Tomb Raider on PC
All following Tomb Raider games used DirectX and therefore only run under Windows. Tomb Raider II needed a Pentium 100, 16MB and DirectX 5.0. Tomb Raider III needed a Pentium 166, Tomb Raider IV and Tomb Raider V a Pentium 233.
Tomb Raider VI uses a new graphics engine and therefore has much higher demands on hardware. You need at least a 500 MHz CPU and a DirectX 9 compatible card, but it is best to have a 1500 MHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and 128 MB graphics card.
History
Today the abbreviation "PC" is mostly used as a synonym for the IBM compatible computer. The history of that began in the early 1980s. The first IBM PC XT was sold in 1981 for over 1.000 $. Back than it was nothing more than a better typewriter and it was mostly used in business. The application that was one of the reasons for the big success was a spread sheet calculation called VisiCalc.
The original IBM PC XT was based on a Intel 8086 processor. For a long time Intel was the only manufacturer of processors for the IBM compatible PCs. AMD was the first competitor to build Intel compatible processors. Then came Cyrix and afterwards VIA.
The success of the IBM compatible PC is based on the fact that it has always been a more or less open system. It was possible for other manufacturers to build "compatible" computers for less.
Games
The first games on the PC were nothing more than moving blocks in text mode. There was not much one could do with 80x40 text blocks. So adventures mainly consisted of text. After that came CGA (color graphics adaptor) which could display 4 colours at 320x200 pixels. The first 2D adventures were written for this graphics card. Everything was very blocky but even though a huge success. Still you had to interact with by typing text. After that came EGA and VGA, adding more coluor and higher resolutions, and adventure games started to use the mouse.
Around the early 1990s the first acceleration cards appeard. At first these were separate cards that had to be plugged in to the computer in addition to the VGA card (Voodoo), but soon the 3D acceleration was added to the VGA cards.
Tomb Raider Games for PC
- Tomb Raider and Unfinished Business
- Tomb Raider II and Golden Mask
- Tomb Raider III and Lost Artifact
- Tomb Raider IV
- Tomb Raider V
- Tomb Raider VI
- Tomb Raider Legend
- Tomb Raider Anniversary
- Tomb Raider Underworld
- Tomb Raider (2013)
- Rise of the Tomb Raider
