Yeah I guess I should have tempered my expectations of this thing.
This is Maniac, an IBM Aptiva Model 330 from around 1994. It's named after Todd "Maniac" Marshall from Wing Commander. And in this photograph, it's trying - and failing - to run Wordhopper by @kokoscript on its 50 MHz 486SX2. Which does not have an integrated coprocessor.
There are many things that Maniac can do. It's got a genuine Roland MIF-IPC-A interface card, which means I can connect basically any MIDI module to it that I want (but usually the MT-32). I recently installed an ESS Audiodrive for sound. It has a frankly ridiculous 64 megabytes of RAM, an amount of memory that's normally common on computers 5 or 6 years newer than this. I have to waste 32 MB of that RAM on a RAM disk in order for a handful of games to even start.
Without a coprocessor, something that the 486DX has and the SX does not, this game won't even start. The same is true of a small handful of other games, most notably Quake (which I don't expect to be even slightly playable but I want to run it for the humor value of trying to benchmark it). The SX represents a cost-cut made back in 1994 when the majority of software believed, "Floating point math? Pff, like anybody outside of CAD people will ever need that."
I am, however, very happy to report that I paid money for Wordhopper. Just because I can't play it on this computer doesn't mean I can't play it. It is trivial to copy it to any other machine in the house, and roughly 99% of them can at least pretend to have a 486DX, even if they can't run the game code natively. I just love that anybody is still making new original games for ancient computers, and darn it all I want to support that with my remaining PayPal balance.
As for Maniac... I might have to shop around for a mild upgrade at some point when I have more disposable income (and desire to open this case again).
[edit] turns out this crash actually hard-locked the computer, so off it goes for a while 😣
Programming around that in QBASIC was/is fuuuuun x333! Why shouldn’t literally everything be an integer??!?
Fascinating to see folks still booting these puppies up.