Duke Nuke'Em 3D was what swung it for me! Running that on a friend's Pentium-based PC with 16-bit Soundblaster soundcard finally made me move on from my A1200 (which I still have and still use now occasionally).
The A1200 had done a fair job until that point (1996), and I'd had a work '486 laptop in the couple of years prior, which ran Win95 well enough once it was released, beginning the end of really bad Microsoft OSs that finally stopped with the release of Win2K.
Running those early releases of UAE used to make me chuckle but the writing was already on the wall, especially after the bankruptcy of Commodore. On an early Linux release running on a 486DX2/66, UAE used to be very slow - but it already pointed towards the future.
-Ali
