Does anyone miss the days of simple PC gaming?

aeonrevolution said:
: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.
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Perhaps I should clarify. Video cards have gotten so ridiculously parallel, that overclocking them GPU core is useless. Yes, each thread gets processed a few nanoseconds faster, but when you have hundreds of threads in flight and it all has to be re-assembled at the end for the rasterization, overclocking the GPU core isn't going to provide much of a benefit, especially considering temperature and power consumption concerns. On modern video cards (which a 7900 GS is not), overclocking the memory will be more useful, but still not like it was "back in the day".
 
illuminate said:
Like the title says, does anything miss the days of picking up $10 PC games at wallmart, and playing them on your stock PC that you bought? no upgrades, no worrying about FPS or temperatures. You could play it on your Pentium 2, 3, or even 4 for us younger people.
I know that not everyone had this, but for me, i was playing medal of honor allied assault, and need for speed hot pursuit 2 just 2 years ago, on a stock HP system. Now, we try to get the best games, best hardware, trying to max our system. Now i try to get the most out of my 7600gt OC'd... trying to play need for speed carbon on high, or CoD4 on medium...

anyone else miss those days of simple gaming?
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2 years ago, hot pursuit 2 and MoH:AA were 6 years old....
 
Twisting the topic a litte, I miss the days when GAMES were simple when it comes to RTS games. Anyone else miss the simplicity of Red Alert or Warcraft II?
 
hfk said:
Twisting the topic a litte, I miss the days when GAMES were simple when it comes to RTS games. Anyone else miss the simplicity of Red Alert or Warcraft II?
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Love wc2... a few groups of bloodlusted ogres was madness!
 
I get some pretty large benefits from overclocking my 4870's in crossfire, the memory will happily go from 900Mhz to 1000Mhz on each card, thats x4 so from 3.6Ghz to 4Ghz which ups the memory bandwidth quite significantly.

I agree that the effect of overclocking is probably less than yesteryear, but still worth doing on a card which can be pushed quite far.
 
Dome said:
two words: turbo button
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Funny how few people remember this. :) Fun stuff. I used to make the LED display say weird things, like "NO" when you turned off turbo. (in the later days of turbosity... my XT had no such lights)
 
-Tetsuo- said:
2 years ago, hot pursuit 2 and MoH:AA were 6 years old....
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But both came out in 2002... 2 years ago... six years old...*head explodes*


Yeah, PC gaming was simple back when I was little. Mainly because my dad had already set up everything on the family computer (back when computers were still a bajillion dollars). If he didn't know how to set something up then it was "impossible".
 
Oh...the horror of the DOS boot disk pile...freeing up the last 2 or 3 kb of memory for that great DOS game...no thanks.

Play the great DOS games via DOSbox now, it's actually easier now :) Been playing Betrayal at Krondor and Pool of Radiance, rowdy games.
 
I love simple gaming...

I miss the days when I could pop in Jazz Jackrabbit into the super fast Quad Speed CD-ROM and play to my hearts content. DOS games were great.

And then Windows 95 hit and my Win 3.11 box couldn't play anything.

Then Windows 98 came can I needed a card that supported Direct X. Hmm...1 MB Cirrus Logic (upgradable to 2MB!!!) isn't gonna make the cut.

Wow I got Windows 98! But then I got it at the wrong time and then SE came out just after, along with Pentium 3's 2x the speed of my lowly Pentium 2 350MHz. Annoyingly most games refused to run well on the 8MB ATi xpert my dad overpaid for. (never buy a Dell from a generic catalog)

Grrrr...

No really, simple gaming is something I still have. That's why I have a console. Xbox 360 make things as easy as laying back, firing up the TV, and playing my game.
 
Seems like OP just misses being oblivious to eye candy and non bargain bin games that are less than 3 years old. If anything its simpler now than it has ever been in any sense. You get so much for your $$ now compared to before. Kinda hard to relate to your thread since you are just saying you miss when you didn't know about video settings in old games that your computer could run no problem. Medal of honor worked my video card pretty good when it came out. Just because 6 years later you see it in the bargain bin and you can run it easy doesn't mean it didn't require much graphics for its time. As with PC hardware, its a lot easier to just get all your clocks and settings down and stable in a couple days and then don't mess with or worry about it anymore. Its much nicer than looking at temps and adjusting clocks constantly.
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On the positive side. I love how this thread is going. I didn't even know what AA till I got a Geforce3. Things got so much prettier.
http://dlsvr.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/sock478/P4P8X/e1299_p4p8x.pdf
 
Bigbacon said:
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.
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I always had trouble with the SSI games. They were a PITA! I still have some old boot disks laying around...
 
This thread makes me paranoid. Just try and juggle memory managers to get >600K conventional memory with a manager resident in conventional memory in order to also achieve >4Megs of extended memory (I think it was the flight sim Tornado wanting this kind of highway robbery memory). Aside from messing with the computer's guts which hasn't changed in all these years, the most complex parts of today's PC gaming are finding good drivers and downloading workarounds for the aggressive copy protection. You can do all of that without touching the keyboard.
 
I remember typing "N" to go north in Zork or playing The Red Baron on the Atari 400 ;):D

Now those games were Simple!
 
Tbird87 said:
Seems like OP just misses being oblivious to eye candy and non bargain bin games that are less than 3 years old. If anything its simpler now than it has ever been in any sense. You get so much for your $$ now compared to before. Kinda hard to relate to your thread since you are just saying you miss when you didn't know about video settings in old games that your computer could run no problem. Medal of honor worked my video card pretty good when it came out. Just because 6 years later you see it in the bargain bin and you can run it easy doesn't mean it didn't require much graphics for its time. As with PC hardware, its a lot easier to just get all your clocks and settings down and stable in a couple days and then don't mess with or worry about it anymore. Its much nicer than looking at temps and adjusting clocks constantly.
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On the positive side. I love how this thread is going. I didn't even know what AA till I got a Geforce3. Things got so much prettier.
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I see what you mean, and i somewhat agree. I just kinda guess that there arent as people that i thought that played PC games like i did at one point.

and yes, i like the directing this is going too.. lol.. intresting to see it being talked about abd brought back up (the older stuff)
 
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).[/QUOTE]

Only $100???


Ram used to be MAD expensive. I remember it being more so that that even. We upgraded our 486 from 4meg to 8 (or was it 2 to 4??) and my father spent like 800 dollars. Mad money since 800 dollars now a days gets you a darn good gaming PC.

All for the Duke3d!!! (not really but I can thnk that)

And I remember 14in monitors being HUGE! My first monitor was a 10in IBM..

I think my dad finally threw out all our old DOS games a few months ago. We still had piles on them in the box including all the old sierra games on 5-1/4s.

OH I love this thread because of the memories that keep popping into my head. Manuals, remember we used to get really nice manuals. Last game I can remember with a nice manual was starsiege. I still have a lot of the spiral bound manuals from the old dynamix games. They were the manual masters.
 
The best manuals I've seen in recent times are from the NWN series. I still keep all of the manuals from the games I own.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
The best manuals I've seen in recent times are from the NWN series. I still keep all of the manuals from the games I own.
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What is with all the crappy manuals now-a-days. Maybe its only here in the great white north (because of the required additional French manual) but the majority are either black and white or so tiny you have to go on-line to get info on the game ... cough ... Too Human ... cough.
 
Back in the day manuals were as much as art form as the games themselves. In fact some of the copy protection schemes were in the manual itself (ie. what is the word on page 5, line 2 word 8) lol.

I still remember how thick and exhaustive the manual was for the Falcon 3.0 flight sim... that was a manual!
 
Ah yes... going to Silo's (remember them?) to get a co-processor so I could run doom. Those were the days... good riddance!
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
The best manuals I've seen in recent times are from the NWN series. I still keep all of the manuals from the games I own.
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Someone should tell Valve to read this thread. As much as I like Steam, they could at least give us decent manuals for those of us that buy retail.
 
Wow... this thread has really made me feel old... lmao I just turned 31 too lmao

First "computer" was a Atari 400/800/1200 I remember sitting there as a kid with the basic programming book and catridge and making games, and then loading Zaxxon with the cassette tape drive....

Then my first PC was a Tandy 1000sx...wow, talk about some memories

Installation of games and useability has gotten sooooooo much easier the only downfall is playing current games with all the eye candy on and needing a good graphics card to play lol, but the cost of stuff now is no where near what it once was.

And also relating to the original cooncept of this post yeah I have been feeling liek games have been gettign too over complicated now, sometimes to the point of where I dont even want to play some of them. Crysis was a perfect example, soooo many freaking enemies, soooo many different things to configure (what suit power to use, how to modify the weapons, sub missions etc etc) and then having someone shoot at you and your super suit and kill you in three freaking shots yet I pop him in the chest 7 or 8 times to kill him or three times in the head...and he is wearing nothign but BDUs lmao

them somegames I feel are too open in thier maps and I feel like I wander around lost tryign to figure out where the hell to go, and then I play some games that feel too closed and one track. Which is odd that I dont like games that are on too much of a track considdering I like consolish type platformers a lot lmao

I still have a lot of my older games and go back and play them quite a bit, even showing them off to my kids saying this is what I played when I was a kid. Yeah I know that makes me sound even more like a crotchety old man but wtf ever lmao

Wow.... rememeber BBS's?
How about playing a game in a chat room and everyone lemming?
I remember my first experiences with 3D too and it wasn't a game :D I was in a drafting class and got in to I think it was 3D studio Max

god I feel old now..thanks... :)
 
nintari said:
Wow.... rememeber BBS's?
How about playing a game in a chat room and everyone lemming?
I remember my first experiences with 3D too and it wasn't a game :D I was in a drafting class and got in to I think it was 3D studio Max

god I feel old now..thanks... :)
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Oh hell yes, before the internet boomed I use to dial into the Temple of the Screaming Electron (TOTSE) in Oakland and download shareware and play various turn based ascii games. So many memories. :)
 
pigwalk said:
Someone should tell Valve to read this thread. As much as I like Steam, they could at least give us decent manuals for those of us that buy retail.
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That was one nice thing about old games. They usually came with a good instruction manual.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
The best manuals I've seen in recent times are from the NWN series. I still keep all of the manuals from the games I own.
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I've still got all my manuals, as well the games that they accompany. Robust manuals of yester-year were great! They looked and felt like there were actual thoughts poured into it. Its funny that that older manuals had memos in them to scribble down codes, cheats, stories, etc. You generally don't find that now. If you do receive a manual, and not a card insert, it's likely recycled toilet paper. Those old games and manuals are things that I will never part with.
 
lol yeah the Amiga version was best. I started a thread on here not too long ago remembering lemmings and I went back to play the PC version and was like ummm... wheres the voices? I want to hear the lemmings panic and say Oh No! before they explode in to little giblets :D
then found the amiga version and seen it was the one with all the sounds, voices, better music and way better graphics!
 
Alone in the Dark's copy protection was fun -- that little blue book with random items on the pages that came with the box and you had to tell the game what was on what page.
 
^ A lot of games had that type of protection, and it actually worked for the time. I remember my friend giving me a copy of Prince of Persia, and after the first level it would ask you what was on page X and would give you a selection of 4 or 5 items. I played the first level many, many times.
 
inotocracy said:
Oh hell yes, before the internet boomed I use to dial into the Temple of the Screaming Electron (TOTSE) in Oakland and download shareware and play various turn based ascii games. So many memories. :)
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&TOTSE was actually in Walnut Creek, I used to meet up with the sysops for "Coffee by the Creek" semi-annually.
 
F that noise! I am loving what we have now. I do not miss loading games off of a cassette drive... only to have the computer lock up 30 minutes into the load. *sigh* Yeah, the "good old days". Meh.
 
NOTHING....AND I MEAN NOTHING, has or ever will stun me gaming wise like GLquake....aka Quake on with the GL patch applied. :eek: Not even Crysis...although close.
 
Nostalgia overcame me a couple of months ago too!

I went to a site where you could get all the old DOS games for free and loaded up DosBox. I replayed all of the old games. Space Quest, Police Quest, King's Quest, Gold Rush, you name it.

Now I'm cured. The old games were good, but having re-played them 15 years later, I'm glad for the new stuff!
 
What, waiting to thirty minutes to download a jpeg at 9600?

What, constantly redialing your modem because the BBS is busy, then getting booted off after the 30 minute limit?

What, making a customized batch file in DOS to make audio work in your game?

What, try to disable mouse drivers to give you 100k more memory because your DOS game can't run (640k memory)?

Nah, not really.
 
Christopher said:
&TOTSE was actually in Walnut Creek, I used to meet up with the sysops for "Coffee by the Creek" semi-annually.
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What was the place in San Ramon called? Grand Central? L.O.R.D. ... ah the memories
By the way, I think &TOTSE still suvives in some form or another on the web.
 
nice thread, i have only 18 but this remind me the start, simple DOS games, i remember the first real time rendered games like Quake, Half-Life and other legends, average rendering speed was 20-30 FPS but no one took care of this, and the games didnt got the net graphs in that age, cause most of graphics cards were Riva TNT, Vanta, 3Dfx or integrated chips, monitor was 14" CRT with polarising filter mounted on it's screen, ball mouse, 9600 dial-up internet, Windows 95 operating system, browser IE 3.0, today im playing WoW, Half-Life 2, Crysis, and playing hard cause dont want be a "noob", in history was gaming meant as "play for fun" today is meaning "play hard go pro" and there is difference, ofc we can talk about larger and larger monitors, faster computers, gaming gear or other stuff
 
ShuttleLuv said:
NOTHING....AND I MEAN NOTHING, has or ever will stun me gaming wise like GLquake....aka Quake on with the GL patch applied. :eek: Not even Crysis...although close.
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Yep. I remember that very sweet moment in time very well.:) It basically turned gaming into a whole new experience after that.
 
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