Does anyone miss the days of simple PC gaming?

All I remember was that anytime I needed to run a DOS game, such as Ultima, I spent hours editing the autoexec.bat file to free up conventional memory or make some boot disk that worked if lucky. It was a pain in the ass... I prefer to upgrade hardware than figure out how to free DOS memory and type the right commands so that i can play. Games that could run in my PC sometimes would not, or would run only without sound because of lack of DOS memory.
 
I don't really miss trying to play quake 2 (and then quake 3, yes I was that awesome) on a p166 with a voodoo 2 and external 56k ={ That was frustrating as hell !
 
Lok said:
I meant in a sentimental way lol
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Like many others mentioned here already, configuring INI's and BAT files to get memory and settings just right just wasn't a blast. In the old days, there was always AT LEAST one thing wrong with my computer. Doesn't make me one bit sentimental!
 
yfel said:
I don't really miss trying to play quake 2 (and then quake 3, yes I was that awesome) on a p166 with a voodoo 2 and external 56k ={ That was frustrating as hell !
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Course I guess that's later than the "simple days" of computer gaming. I can say I don't miss having to hack into my commodore just to get jumpman and where in the world is carmen sandiego to run either. Simpler times aren't always as simple as they seemed.
 
The biggest thing for me is the nostalgia of an era when things were much more exciting. To me '90-'00 were some exciting years in computing. I remember going as a child in the early 90s to computer swap/sell meets in Dallas, TX. I remember buying games that would have basic print labels and nothing more on the disks.

While we still continue to invent and further computing it is no where as exciting for me.
 
ahhhh cold sweats, bad memories....
There was nothing worse than buying a game and having to tweak for an hour just to get up an running, but nothing more satisfying than getting that game to run.
I started on a gateway with a p2 266, with mmx hooray, a voodoo 2, 64MB ram a 33.3 modem and an amazing 2.5GB hard drive. I was the shit at school too with one of the fastest things out.
 
bigbadgreen said:
ahhhh cold sweats, bad memories....
There was nothing worse than buying a game and having to tweak for an hour just to get up an running, but nothing more satisfying than getting that game to run.
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True. I guess that's part of the nostalgia, if you happened to be in the mood for playing around with those settings. If you weren't, it could be frustrating. Then again, around that time I was fascinated by pre-1.0 Linux, dual-booting, and recompiling kernels, too.
 
inotocracy said:
lol, I still remember playing Descent and hitting that turbo button, smoothed everything out ;)



Although, configuring the sound was never an easy task. Anyone remember..

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T2

:eek:
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lol turbo button. I remember that. It really did work with those high graphics dos games :)
 
Wow, i didn't expect this thread to go in this direction.. hmm.

I also don't think i phrased myself right when i said that i i miss the simple days. I wasn't talking about how simple it can be now, this was more.. hardware related. maybe i was one of the very few who used to play on a stock computer, not worrying about temps, or, fps, or even resolution. You could get *so* many games for the stock systems. Yes, there were those games that you did have to have a nice < higher end system, but I'm talking about the simple stuff. no watercooling, and you could play good racing games, and good FPS games. you didnt need a graphics card, you could use onboard video, and still play those games well. I guess, this could be more directed for those of us who use to play games on windows 98 -> ME -> even some XP. who played roller coaster tycoon, and those "backyard" games... maybe even 'medal of honor AA" or "black hawk down" just the games that don't require much graphics...


Heck, i dont even know if that was clear.. but maybe you get my point.


Injection of <3 said:
WTF is the OP's post talking about? So 2 years ago every game could run on a shitty pre-built PC? And games were only $10? Umm, no. Just no. There were always demanding games. It's not some new trend. But it was way worse in the 90s because games didnt have any graphical settings that you could adjust besides the resolution. Have fun playing Quake 2 at 320x240 or some shit.

Playing online was a bitch as well. Broadband was not readily available and you had to use 3rd party software just to find servers. Needless to say, I dont miss those days at all.
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Lol. I remember having to tweak the Config.sys, autoexec.bat to free up the base memory all the fucking time. Nothing brings back memories like playing king's quest 1 on a 8086 green monitor with the internal PC speaker. Anyone remember 300 Baud modems and BBS's?
 
Lol, PCs sucked a lot of shit in the late 80s/early 90s. For me it was all about the Amiga back then.
 
illuminate said:
Wow, i didn't expect this thread to go in this direction.. hmm.

I also don't think i phrased myself right when i said that i i miss the simple days. I wasn't talking about how simple it can be now, this was more.. hardware related. maybe i was one of the very few who used to play on a stock computer, not worrying about temps, or, fps, or even resolution. You could get *so* many games for the stock systems....
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Oh I see, yes you COULD get many games back then, but they weren't nearly as enjoyable as the games that came with new graphic cards and faster cpus. For me PC gaming was 100x better after I got my p166 + voodoo2 than my commodore 64, 386 or even 486 (though I loved me some red alert on that one). So when I think back on my pc gaming memories it's more like figuring out how to get to the top of the world with a grenade jump in quake 1, or staying up till 5am on a school night playing warcraft 2. I think you may be trying to equate console gaming (buy a system, never upgrade) to PC gaming, and you can't really do that.
 
A p166 was when I first started overclocking...got that baby up to 233 ;) I remember tweaking it out to play Half Life 1, Unreal 1, Rainbow Six 1, etc. The only game it handled fine at stock speed was Starcraft. That all was with a Voodoo Banshee card, it was horrible but the first 'gaming' graphics card I ever got.

If anything, gaming has gotten a lot easier now. Things 'just work' a lot more often, its expected. Unless you are trying to play Crysis I guess. Now I just buy high-end hardware, and overclocking is kinda pointless for me now compared with the returns I got on the p166, or the old Celeron 333.

Reminds me of something funny...when Half Life 1 first came out, the first time I played through it my CRT monitor was going bad, and it was only showing green shades of color, no reds/blues. So I played through the whole game in basically monochrome (in a day).
 
I started on the 286/dx2. The first game I EVER had was WC1 and I loved it. The second was wolf3d. I loved it my Dad HATED it because of the content behind it lol.

I rememeber being told you'll NEVER fill up a 40mb hard drive EVER in a million years by my "computer" teacher and the place where we bought the pc.

Anyone remember Babbages?
 
Sorry, I went through the DOS glory days and was a master of the boot disk. Gaming on a PC is 100 times simplier than it was back then. You install the game now and you are away. The only non simple thing about it is that 300 dollar computers can't really play the games, they can but they sure look bad. You had the same thing back in the day as well. Many of those old sierra games had CGA & EGA versions and one sure looked better than the other. If you had the hardware, you got 16 colors over just 4!!!! Image that 4 COLORS! and 16 was like GOD
 
The who doesn't remember "loadhigh=" doesn't know how easy it is nowadays to play a game. try to load dos with 612kb of free memory (KILOBytes) in order to get a game to work. And that is WITH dos and WITH a 640KB memory limit in place. Yeah.....how easy it was back then.
 
and you know who was always the worst games to get working?? Any game by Dynamix because you needed at least 604kb free and you needed to load a soundcard and a mouse for most of them (aces or europe/pacific)

You had to know wtf you were doing make a boot disk.
 
Nothing like bombing in an Arado Ar 234 jet with no guns.
Miss the days of more thana few flyable aircraft (these games had everything)
 
This thread isn't going well for the OP. I hated making boot disks as well.

I am surprised there isn't more emm386.exe love in here.
 
Michaelius said:
Hmm at least we don't have to use radios to copy our games like we did in Atari/C64 times :)
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+1
Taking apart the old a810 disk drives, manually slowing down the motor RPM to write bad sectors so you could bypass copy protection
 
And ill never forget the first time I got Doom working on a serial cable with my buddy. We spend ALOT of money buying 50' rs232 extension cords and mucking with adapters, etc etc. But man, what fun!
 
illuminate said:
You could get *so* many games for the stock systems. Yes, there were those games that you did have to have a nice < higher end system, but I'm talking about the simple stuff. no watercooling, and you could play good racing games, and good FPS games. you didnt need a graphics card, you could use onboard video, and still play those games well. I guess, this could be more directed for those of us who use to play games on windows 98 -> ME -> even some XP. who played roller coaster tycoon, and those "backyard" games... maybe even 'medal of honor AA" or "black hawk down" just the games that don't require much graphics...
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You can still do that with many stock system, just buy a good vid card.
Vid cards have just jumped by almost 2x in the past year and a half alone.
But yeah, you can play a ton of games, Darwinia, Uplink, Audiosurf, all cool games.
Even Half Life 2 can be played very easily now with a modest card. The selection of games has grown, but so has the hype. Maybe youre just into the hype more now then before? You dont *need* a top end system to play a lot of really cool games, but i ask you, if you got to the store, would you pick up and year old game, or that brand new crysis game that everyone is talking about? (only to find out that crysis can't run on your stock system, where HL2 can)


p.s. Interrupt Request Query programming for the win! (and if you had a vid card, modem and sound card or any other devices, then programming it was a pain!)
Turbo was just sick, that lcd display went from 20 MHz to 40! wow! -> Scottie, i need warp power now...
 
riot8ap said:
This thread isn't going well for the OP. I hated making boot disks as well.

I am surprised there isn't more emm386.exe love in here.
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Oh I remember it, that bastard. Try installing Windows 3.1 without it, erk :mad:
 
I remember copying over the original civilization 1 onto 4 floppies and spending a whole lot of time on that as a kid.
 
My parents didn't get a PC until we sold the Sega Genesis we had & bought a Pentium 100Mhz, 512MB RAM, & Matrox Mystique (based) PC from my uncle. This is where my love for PC gaming flew with Mechwarrior 2 Matrox Mystique Edition, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake 1, the Doom series, & so forth. Before this, I played a lot of PC games at an (old or ex-) friend's house. His brother & he usually had the newest games. They introduced me to Half-Life 1 later & it became my favorite game at that time.

First real experiences with PC games was Alone in the Dark, Descent & Myst for me.
 
1: Get Steam
2: Buy Darwinia.
3: ????
4: Profit.

Seriously, great big chunk of awesomely entertaining meta-nostalgic gaming right there.
 
TKD said:
Yup, I just turned 24 and still remember having to do that with my 386. That, and editing the FILES=XX, BUFFERS=YY, and STACKS=ZZZZ commands in config.sys.
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Sabrewulf165 said:
LOADING DOOM2.WAD.........................................................................................................................................................
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ryan_975 said:
I remember this about my early days of game:

Code: 
Music Device?
General MIDI <--
Sound Blaster
Sound Blaster Pro
Sound Blaster 16
Gravis Ultrasound
Adlib
Pro Audio Spectrum

Sound Device?
PC Speaker
Adlib
Sound Blaster
Gravis Ultrasound
No Sound Device

I/O Port?
220 <--
230
240
250
260

IRQ?
2
5 <--
7

DMA?
1 <--
2
3

High DMA?
5 <--
6 
7 

Channels?
1 <--
2 
3
4

Of course there were also games like SimCity 2000 (DOS) that you had to choose which video card you had and how much memory was on it. Chances were that your card wasn't listed and you'd have to use the generic VESA driver and hope to god it worked.
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rls669 said:
And before that, you needed to know how to make a boot disk or a batch file. And even in the pre-3d days some games sucked or were unplayable without having extra hardware mainstream machines didn't have. Like a sound card or a cd-rom drive :p
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BladeVenom said:
I know I miss the simple days of having to manage memory, and having to create a new boot disk when I got a new game.
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Draax said:
Ughh yup I remember that, and having to keep track of IRQs, making batch files, you name it,
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I tell you what, this takes me back to the time where people who used computers were nerds and those people playing games knew their shit, and when the internet came along those people browsing it were nerds etc.

Now you're a complete thickie if you dont know what google is...funny that.

Good memories
 
As said in previous post, keeping track of IRQs, INIs, ports, and batches was a pain. But it wasn’t so bad if you kept track of it. I greatly enjoyed that era of gaming and I think it was more rewarding once you got the games going because of the work you would have to put into it. My biggest computer pitfall came to me once I try to run Simply3D which required a math co-processor to run - and not having one. Talk about being frustrated!
 
illuminate said:
I also don't think i phrased myself right when i said that i i miss the simple days. I wasn't talking about how simple it can be now, this was more.. hardware related. maybe i was one of the very few who used to play on a stock computer, not worrying about temps, or, fps, or even resolution. You could get *so* many games for the stock systems. Yes, there were those games that you did have to have a nice < higher end system, but I'm talking about the simple stuff. no watercooling, and you could play good racing games, and good FPS games. you didnt need a graphics card, you could use onboard video, and still play those games well. I guess, this could be more directed for those of us who use to play games on windows 98 -> ME -> even some XP. who played roller coaster tycoon, and those "backyard" games... maybe even 'medal of honor AA" or "black hawk down" just the games that don't require much graphics...


Heck, i dont even know if that was clear.. but maybe you get my point.
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I don't know, I remember getting a voodoo2 and it making a huge difference to some racing game that I liked but can't remember the name of. Or playing on my original CGA PC, and lusting after those wondrous EGA graphics. Games may have run fine on a "stock" PC but there were always advantages to having a faster, or better-equipped machine. In fact now that (imo) PC gaming is largely held back by cross-format development, new games tend to stress decent PCs even less and are more likely to run well, out of the box, for more people. And it's not like overclocking and water cooling is mandatory by any means, although that might be heresy on a forum like this :)
 
Litfod said:
[ . . . ] And it's not like overclocking and water cooling is mandatory by any means, although that might be heresy on a forum like this :)
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My personal opinion is that overclocking video cards is a waste of time. CPUs are one thing, but overclocked GPUs rarely bring any meaningful change.
 
Mark_Warner said:
My personal opinion is that overclocking video cards is a waste of time. CPUs are one thing, but overclocked GPUs rarely bring any meaningful change.
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:confused::confused::confused::confused:

Coming from the Video Card Editor?

When I had my 7900GS KO I could knock the clock speed up 100mhz and gain an extra 10-15fps in the HL2 engine.
 
ScYcS said:
The who doesn't remember "loadhigh=" doesn't know how easy it is nowadays to play a game. try to load dos with 612kb of free memory (KILOBytes) in order to get a game to work. And that is WITH dos and WITH a 640KB memory limit in place. Yeah.....how easy it was back then.
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Actually, my best config.sys/autoexec.bat got 620kb free with ungodly stuff loaded including EMM386, Mouse driver, and a cdrom driver. Between loadhigh and some emm386 flags and two awesomely written drivers that barely touched any memory and could be pushed into the upper memory. It took me months to craft that bugger. All of it for Ultima 7.

I wish I knew where the floppy was that I backed it up on.

Pshaw. I definitely don't miss the prices. $100 per 1 MB of RAM. $300 for a 2x CDrom drive. $3000 for an average PC ($1500 PC and another $1500 for the monitor).
 
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