PC gaming was hard in the 90s

[DarthMol]

I had to use a boot disk to run Simcity 2000 on my 486 which had less than 4mb of RAM.

I also learnt some things the hard way - made Windows 3.1 unusable by selecting a colour mode that couldn't be displayed (had to reinstall DOS), deleted the command.com file somehow (reinstall DOS once again). The PC never ran the same again...

[Graal]

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!

Haha, some games on GoG and Steam still do that. I started up Wizardry 7 the other day and it asked me for words out of the manual.

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

I wasn't allowed to play videogames Mondays to Thursdays because it was school time. I spent so much time playing games with the sound off, listening for the dreaded footsteps on the stairs that signaled one of my parents coming down.

A friend of mine insisted he got better accuracy on his old ball mouse, so he resisted switching for a long time. Do you remember your mouse cursor jumping around all over the place with early optical mice?

Yeah! A proper mousepad was a necessity back then. You couldn't go without it. Now I don't even remember what a mousepad feels like.

[Wlad]

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 remember that old school DRM all too well. I always secretly tried to play Leisure Suite Larry using my dad's stiffies and I had to make notes for all the answers I guessed correctly so I could get into the game.

[Tsar]

I had this thing:

That was my first gfx card. Needed it to play starwars phantom menace

[Ike_009]

I feel very young now

[battletoad]

I HAD to make an account just for this. Things I remember:

1. First pc, 286, 20MB hdd. Turbo button to push the usually 1.8MHz cpu to 8MHz! My dad got it for "work", but all I ever saw him do was play tetris and, funnily enough, pacman off a bootable floppy. He always had that floppy in his briefcase This was before multitasking, so no alt-tabbing to get to Lotus 1-2-3 or Wordperfect.
That pc rocked Montezuma where levels went dark (you needed an awesome memory for it, and time.... lots of time), another bootable DigDug floppy, Sab, Thexdur, Gauntlet with funny ascii sprites, Calgames, Lost Vikings and DeathTrack. Fun times indeed, until my brother decided formatting the drive would free up some space :/ When it got back after a fix, we made ramdrives for games in autoexec! Kids younger than 10, mind you, all before the internet! Now I see post grad students scratching their heads when you propose they do the same.

After upgrading to AMD 586 I think it was...

2. Serial cables for doom, duke nukem, need for speed, demolition derby when the damn networking decided to work.

3. R7 all weekend calls from Telkom. Just make sure your mom never picks up the other phone located in her room . And throw a blanket over modem to muffle sound lest you have a hiding coming your way.

Glorious days indeed!

[Graal]

3. R7 all weekend calls from Telkom. Just make sure your mom never picks up the other phone located in her room . And throw a blanket over modem to muffle sound lest you have a hiding coming your way.

Hahaha, I remember that. R7 if you connect after 7 and disconnect before 7 the next morning or something like that. I remember I once forgot to disconnect and only realised it the next afternoon when I came back from school. That was the end of the internet for me until we got ADSL with a full 1GB cap. My ass cheeks were never the same afterwards.

[Jan]

I HAD to make an account just for this.

Now that you're here you should check out the competitions we're currently running!

Sab... Calgames

California Games was the first game I ever had, shortly followed by Karateka. And Sab... Our first computer was IBM XT compatible with a Hercules monochrome graphics card and SAB required CGA. I remember only being able to play it at my aunt's house until we finally upgraded to a 486 many years later.

Only after that upgrade did we get Lost Vikings. Blizzard before they were Blizzard! What a game.

[ViperGTI]

This thread brings back memories.

Also started with a XT computer with hercules monitor that displayed everything in green. Had DOS 3.2 on it (with GWBasic), Turbo Pascal 3 or 4 and a menu system I created from batch files. After that broke, got a 386 DX 40 with DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1. I still remember Borland Office (Quattro Pro, Word Perfect, etc.) was over 50 stiffies. Eventually after Windows 95, I had a spare 80Gb hard drive not being used, so I translated Windows into Afrikaans (no idea why). But I renamed almost everything from results displayed by DOS commands to inside the Windows response dialogs. Guess I was just bored and discovered a hex editor.

I used to exclusively use arj. Knew all the commands to do anything. Eventually dropped it when I discovered RAR which had a UI similar to Norton Commander. Hated PKZip and WinZip. Always have and still do.

Bit later in the game, I also used ISDN at one stage... Connected to MWeb twice using the modem until they stopped it and only a single connection at a time (64kb).

And then finally the Microsoft Intellimouse and MS Internet keyboard. In fact, I'm still using my Internet keyboard to this day.

(Image source from 2012)

[Glordit]

And ISA before that

AFAIK

ISA -> PCI -> AGP -> PCIe?