PC gaming was hard in the 90s

[murfle]

And trying to LAN a game where everybody was on different versions, so someone always had to uninstall or re-install depending on whether you had the patches available or not.

This is still a problem... I'll actually be surprised if we don't run into this problem this weekend. 6 or 7 of my friends and I are having a LAN this weekend

[Apollo]

The days of spending hours tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys to get as much base memory free as possible 1byte less then needed and the game wont launch. Aces over Europe comes to mind.

DEVICE=C:\Windows\HIMEM.SYS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\Windows\EMM386.EXE NOEMS

[matt]

The days when games would start off by asking if you something like CGA, Tandy or Monochrome, and CGA had 16 whole colours.

Actually that might have been the 80's come to think of it, by the 90's you could also choose VGA and SVGA

[Snoopimaru]

The days when games would start off by asking if you something like CGA, Tandy or Monochrome, and CGA had 16 whole colours.

Actually that might have been the 80's come to think of it, by the 90's you could also choose VGA and SVGA

I'm suddenly reminded of TIM - The Incredible Machine!

Also asked for a certain word off a page in the manual to able to enter. Old school DRM!

[matt]

I'm suddenly reminded of TIM - The Incredible Machine!

Also asked for a certain word off a page in the manual to able to enter. Old school DRM!

I had a few games like that. An Indianna Jones one in particular springs to mind, and they printed the manuals in light blue ink so you couldn't photocopy them.

And Leisure Suit Larry used to ask you questions that kids shouldn't be able to answer to make sure you were old enough to play.

[Hagan]

Remember when we had to ask permission to play on the computer... Or was that only me?

[Tom]

Remember when we had to ask permission to play on the computer... Or was that only me?

Nope... me too...

256 colours for the WIN!

[Wlad]

Awesome article. Brings back some memories.

My first PC that I got from my father (when he upgraded to a 386) was a 086 with a hercules monochrome screen. I can't remember the exact size of the hdd, but it was either 10mb or 20mb and it only had a floppy drive. I used that PC to finish the first Monkey Island game while my friend was playing it on his 486 with a VGA monitor. I was so freaking jealous that he had all those colours and I only had yellow.

[matt]

I found a hard drive in the cupboard the other day, and thought awesome, extra storage space, then I read the label, and it was only 128MB or something.

[Hagan]

I have an IDE interface HDD of 80GBs, I think. If I can get a SATA to IDE converter cable, I can use it; an extra 70+ GBs is worth it, if I can get the cable.