PC gaming was hard in the 90s

Snoopimaru said:
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.
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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 :)
 
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.
Code: 
DEVICE=C:\Windows\HIMEM.SYS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\Windows\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
 
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
 
matt said:
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
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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!
 
Snoopimaru said:
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!
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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.
 
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.
 
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. :cry:
 
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.
 
Hagan said:
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.
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It's not worth it, you'll find the drive ridiculously slow and it will just frustrate you.
 
I just end up doing this to all hard drives I no longer use


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Because I worry about my data and what people can actually recover off an old disk
 
PsychoFish said:
I just end up doing this to all hard drives I no longer use


- - - - - - - - - - Double Post Merged - - - - - - - - - -

Because I worry about my data and what people can actually recover off an old disk
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Great. Hardware snuff.
I feel bad for that HDD.
 
Hagan said:
I used a Siemens ball mouse many years ago and it was a good mouse. Its tracking was quite remarkable for a ball mouse.
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When we discovered the Genius Netscroll+ there was no other mouse worth owning.

Graal said:
Does anyone remember how horrendous these mice were? You had to take the ball out every few months to clean it up and then it still wasn't a guarantee that it wouldn't randomly jerk around.

I still remembering getting my first optical mouse. I was so excited.
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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?

Eugene said:
And even back then people were claiming PC gaming was dead.
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I remember that only starting to happen at the turn of the century - around the time of the launch of the PS2, I believe.

PsychoFish said:
and...remember when graphics cards were PCI and not PCIe?
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PsyWulf said:
And ISA before that
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And AGP in-between PCI and PCIe!
 
Hmm, I remember overclocking my 166 with the jumpers on the motherboard...lol. Also remember trying to install Warcraft on a 486 when I was a keed, not really understanding that "my" PC didn't at all meet the required specs to even run the game xD.
 
I remember using Works way back when before Word.

We got a Pentium1 166MHz PC somewhere in 1999 (due to Y2K bug shenanigans). My mom was doing accounting at the time and we still had a 286 before the upgrade.
Somehow we got a hold of the Diablo1 demo; you could play the first 3 levels, but over and over. So you would reset at level3 to start at level1 again with all the gear and money you have acquired. I played that demo into oblivion :3
I can still hear the Windows95 startup sound.
 
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