What got you into PCs and PC gaming? What year and why?

jarablue said:
Then after 2000 it was pretty much me being an adult and working in tech up until now. Living through all the new stuff and old. I was glad I was part of a generation that still went outside AND grew up throughout all the life cycles of the internet until now.
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I'm only a couple of years older than you but your experience and mine are almost one in the same. I read a lot of myself in your post. The line here I quoted I have thought about over the years as well. Thanks for sharing.
 
started with a clone of the Sinclair ZX80 back in early 80's. then to a Vic20, apple 2+ clone, followed by Atari ST, and Amiga 500, then into the pc world..

game that first got me hooked into gaming was Wizardry on the apple 2+.
 
We got our first computer - 80386sx-25Mhz when I was 12. But I was hooked even before then.

I used to go to a friend's house and play on their 80286 setup and even before that there was a C64 where I went to school, which they eventually got rid of/gave to me when they got an Apple Macintosh Classic.
 
jarablue said:
If your rig could run Falcon 3.0 you were the rich kid. That game was crazy back then. The technical depth, for it's time.
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I wasn't by any means rich at the time, but my system could actually run Strike Commander decently. Not perfectly, but better than I had seen anywhere else at the time. (486DX50 (not DX2)) VLB Fahrenheit 1280 (2 or 4MB I think) 8MB of RAM. It didn't fly, but it was easily playable. I remember trying again around the Pentium 133-166 era. Night and day. I should pop it into DOSBox sometime and see what it looks like there. :D
 
jarablue said:
Isn't it crazy how we had such good times in the 80s and 90s? Well 90s for me is where gaming was at. 1993 was such a special year. I was 18 and software stores were all the rage. Shit was freaking good. 911 changed a lot of stuff and games are completely different now. But there is always good times to be had. I wonder if VR is going to open up a whole new era in gaming? It seems like it has the potential. I am glad I saw all the stuff I did. I am sure I speak for a good amount of people but just once I'd love to go back and spend a month or two again reliving the memories.

14.4 modems, when they came out we were like holy shit. Or when 16mb of memory cost 2k+. I remember when NT 3.5.1 listed it's memory requirements and I was like that is my entire summers wages to afford that. I chatted for the first time in windows terminal by dialing up to my buddies pc in the town over. I remember typing @ echo off to stop having two lines of text repeat in the terminal. Such good times. Fuck I even love you too AOL. Good memories with that...oh yea and bad ones! Anyone remember NeverWinterNights on AOL? Mindspring? I played UT so much in 1999 on my dialup ISP Mindspring that I knew when Earthlink took them over because the latency started going through the roof. Running Gamespy game browser, the really OLD version with the red, yellow and green icons to show ping. I think it was bundled with Baldurs Gate back in Cmas of 98. Or playing Starcraft for the first time. The menu music takes me right back. Diablo 1, the butcher scared me shitless when I first met him. So many countless memories. Such good ones.

They can all be re-created again, we just have our young ones enjoy the time and watch them go through what we went through.

Take care guys,
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Modems!!! That changed everything for me. My friend's dad brought home a Hayes 1200 baud modem, and told us to give it a try. We'd call up all the BBSes in the back of the Computer User paper. We eventually worked out way into some of the "good" BBSes. I got a 2400 and we thought that was cool since you didn't have to watch the text write itself a character at a time. :D I traded one of my two TG-16s to a friend for a 14.4K. That's where everything went crazy. We had some faculty shell accounts (not hacked but given) for the University, and could get on "certain" IRC channels. :cool:

A few years later I was working for the modem team at WHQL at MS certifying all the newest modems, ISDN, etc. devices. I got to be friends with the US Robotics rep, and he gave me a Courier V.Everything for helping him with their project. That thing just flew!! Just in time for the web to really start taking off beyond shell accounts.

Ah the good old days!

I still play all my old favorite games, and they take me back to the exact place where I was sitting when I played them the first time. There are some that didn't stand the test of time, but things like Ultima, System Shock, Wolfenstein and Doom, SSI RPGs, etc. are all still just as good now as they ever were. Some even surpass the games we have now, and not even through rose-colored-nostalgia-specks TM.

Just downloaded all of my Ultima games from GOG including the Underworlds, so I'm going to get them installed in a few minutes and play. (y)
 
I've been PC gaming for as long as I can remember; my father had some sorta custom-built rig running DOS/Win3.1. I don't remember much other than that it was a big, black full-tower and had the obligatory clock speed readout and a turbo button, with some kind of VGA and Sound Blaster-compatible card inside given what I played at the time. All the usual Apogee/Epic shareware, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake... yeah, those were the days back in the '90s.

PC gaming these days is easy mode. At least you don't have to tweak autoexec.bat/config.sys to not load stuff or load as much in high memory as you can (gotta free up that 640K conventional memory!), all while remembering your sound card address/IRQ/DMA for each and every single game.

He later built me my own box - AMD K6-2 350 (running at 366 MHz because it wasn't stable with a 100 MHz FSB), 128 MB PC-100 SDRAM, a godawful PC-Chips M598 mobo and AT case/PSU (what was he thinking?), Sound Blaster Live! Value and, briefly, an ATI Xpert98 for graphics beyond what the crappy SiS 530 could muster. Didn't even get me a 3dfx card, and I'm pretty sure it was already getting obsolete when he built it to keep costs down, but hey, I pushed that system with as much DOS/Win9x-era gaming as I could.

I didn't get to build my own system until late 2007, though. Jumped straight from a crappy Compaq with an Athlon XP 1800+, 512 MB DDR-266 and Radeon 9600 XT to a Core 2 Quad Q6600, 2 GB DDR2-667 and a GeForce 8800 GT. "Night and day" doesn't even begin to describe what kind of upgrade that was; I could MULTITASK now, and Alt-Tabbing in the middle of a game didn't grind it all to a halt! Oblivion went from unplayable on minimum settings to easily maxed-out and still smooth as butter!

CaptNumbNutz said:
Because, the "MouseStick" fixed what was one of the biggest problems of using a joystick on the Macintosh platform during that time period. An almost complete lack of joystick support both from the OS and the games themselves. Unlike the PC at the time which usually had a 15pin joystick port on many add-in cards or the 9pin serial port in some rare cases, the "Mousestick" actually plugged into the ADB serial mouse port on the Macintosh. It also had a pass-thru connector for your mouse.

The software emulated the mouse functions. So any game and/or flight sim that at least used the mouse and keyboard for functionality could be played using the stick. You could even navigate the OS using the stick. It's functionality was akin to an ancient version of Joy to Key.

After that ridiculousness, all I can say is thank fuck for USB and Windows HID devices.

I remember that after the Mousestick and the idiocy that was gaming on a Mac, I stepped up to an MS Sidewinder joystick on the PC. From there I went to a Logitech Force Feedback stick then have owned only Logitech 3D Pros since. I so desperately want a HOTAS setup, preferably something from Saitek or Thrustmaster.
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I feel your pain, because I'm getting to learn the mess that is Mac joystick support the hard way while decking out this Power Mac 6500 for some retrogaming.

Basically, early joysticks faked axis coordinates by using absolute mouse mapping across the stick's travel, much like a graphics tablet. Some ADB joystick manufacturers were not content with just that, though, so you have proprietary Thrustmaster and MacFly APIs, with CH Products joining in a bit later, and everything's a mess until InputSprocket became a thing.

I had to hunt down an ADB version of the Thrustmaster FCS just to get full control in Flying Nightmares and A-10 Attack!, simply because they don't support the CH Products API and mouse emulation sticks do not allow for proper analog throttle and rudder control. Fortunately, the Mac FCS is the master unit of the setup; you can easily rewire a PC WCS throttle or build your own from scratch to plug into the DB-15 on the back, and any PC gameport rudder pedal should work. Feel free to ask me for the pinout if you need it.

Before that, I was using an ADB version of the MS SideWinder 3D Pro. It tends to skip keystrokes while moving across throttle or rudder zones, most irritatingly, and of course, it doesn't support the proprietary Thrustmaster API for native throttle/rudder input in those pre-InputSprocket games. Some crafty developer made a wrapper for the Gravis Firebird 2 to support that Thrustmaster API so one could use rudder pedals properly in such titles, particularly WarBirds, but the download links I found were dead with no mirrors. I was hoping to figure out how it would work so a similar extension could be developed for the 3D Pro, as lack of native throttle and rudder axis input cripples its usefulness.

All in all, Mac joystick support really was a mess for those serious about their flight sims on bitten fruit hardware. GameSprockets as a whole should've happened sooner, but they didn't want the Macintosh to be a gaming platform at first.

Oh, and if you want a modern HOTAS, don't buy Saitek unless you're getting it for well under $100. The X-52 needs a magnet mod to fix the stick axis linearity, even the Pro model, and the gimbals are cheaply-manufactured, sloppy plastic crap either way. The X-55 and X-56 are as bad or maybe even worse in build quality terms.

And then there's the Logitech G940... so close, yet so painfully far because Logitech's as bad as Saitek with build quality and internal engineering while also managing to forget how to do axis filtering correctly, leading to the axis reversal/hysteresis bug where you can't make fine adjustments in the opposite direction because the reading jumps a bit. It's a shame since it's the only force-feedback HOTAS, with far more functionality than the old MS SideWinder Force-Feedback 2, and FFB pays off big time if you like to fly old WWI/WWII aircraft or helicopters with force trim.

CH Products is still viable if you don't mind the less-than-optimal ergonomics of the Fighterstick and Pro Pedals, in part because they're cheap, like "under US$200 shipped for second-hand Fighterstick/Pro Throttle/Pro Pedals complete setup" cheap. Best software on the market by far, too.

Thrustmaster has a good setup overall in the Warthog, but the stick gimbal suffers from stiction problems and the throttle's unrealistic slew control has too little throw and too little resistance to be useful. The older Cougar has crappy pot metal gimbals, a grip with less refined ergonomics and no CMS center click despite being similar in design, and the whole thing just needs some mod work in general to perform like it should, but a modded Cougar is leagues ahead of a stock Warthog and pretty much anything short of VKB, Baur and military surplus controls.

...Yeah, I tend to get carried away with this stuff.
 
Started with a commodore 64, getting hooked on qubert & popeye. First "modern" build was a 486DX2-33MHz. Played Star Wars: Rebel Assault and the original Doom Shareware in '93. These two games got me hooked, and I upgraded the system with an additional 4MB of memory for $200+. Been building and playing games since.
 
I was in sixth grade back in 95-96.

We hadn't had a computer in the house since the OG IBM XT....

Somehow my Dad's friend suckered him into buying a (then) ridiculous machine: Micron - Pentium 90, 16mb RAM, 1.2GB hard drive, 28.8bps USRobotics modem, 4x CD-ROM drive, some sort of 2d video card and I believe a Soundblaster 16. Also, a then massive 17 inch CRT.

Since I was the only one with a decent sized desk at the house, it ended up in my room. Mwahahaha

Doom 2, Descent, and C&C were what I really cut my teeth on.

Thousands of hours were spent playing Doom 2 on DWANGO and creating wads with Deu2/DCK....
 
Oh my, 1986 a Tandy 4K color computer a 4hz blazer. Then went up to a 256k and boom exploded to a 512k ... With that got a ram update to 1meg and OS9 and a 5.25inch disk drive and I was hot stuff.. A bit later ran a os9 BBS in tucson, az. God those were the days.
 
Always played consoles, from pong, atari 2600, nes, snes....i didnt know anything about computers till i got my first machine, i wanna say was something like 333mhz, 1.2gb hard drive, 33K modem running win 95.. i didnt know anything about computers at the time. I didnt even know the difference between software and hardware. I year or so later, built my first system myself..
 
Back about 1998 the father of a girl I was dating built a PC for her. That is what made me eventually want to build one. So I went and bought a magazine at the book store and built my first PC. Then along came Call Of Duty and the game floored me. I was always a Playstation person but there was an excitement with PC that made me feel like I was part of something bigger. Been PC gaming only since that time.
 
My story doesn't date as far back as some here but I remember my dad getting Call of Duty 1 and a new PC in 2004, a Gateway P4 3.0Ghz and 1 Gig of ram. We played that game for hours and then eventually got high speed internet to try out the online. Basically played that game online until around COD4 and then moved to BF3, BF4, and now BF1. But that old Gateway still runs today and oddly enough you can still find people playing COD1 online.
 
There are less little kids. I remember playing in my 20s and little kids would start talking on socom 2 on ps2 and your ears would hurt from the high pitched voice
 
There was always a computer in my house. We started off with what I remember being some Commodore or Amiga variant (that took what looked like SNES cartridges, though those wouldn't exist for a number of years) on which I played Q-bert and also dabbled in a paint program. Later we moved into Macs and had an original SE, the dual floppy drive version so we could load the OS and program disk(ettes) simultaneously. On there I played such games as Apache Strike, Vette! (man I loved jumping off highway overpasses), Microsoft Flight Simulator, Star Trek, King's Quest...We eventually got a SCSI external hard drive and another hard drive and... Then I had my first personal (as in mine, not an IBM PC clone) computer, which was a Performa 575. This was right after it came out as a starting high school/ Christmas present. SimCity 2000 was my biggie and man getting to play it in color! Amazing. Later in high school I updated from the Performa 575 to a Power Computing PowerBase 180 (Mac Clone). I fell in love with Flying Nightmares - an AV-8/B simulator I was in awe of at CompUSA. It was also around this time that Wing Commander first made it's way to the Macintosh and I had Super Wing Commander finally (as well as eventually Wing Commander 3 and 4 later on). I also played Graphic Simulations' F/A-18 Hornet and A-10 Warthog II. I used a CH Products Flight Stick and Throttle. Never got the rudder pedals. Also during this time there was the Warcraft series, Myth, Command and Conquer...So many good games, man! College came and I moved finally over to Windows with a Compaq Presario with a Pentium (III? IV? I don't remember...It was a black minitower) and a DVD drive (Interview with the Vampire was my first DVD, and I still have it). At that point the world was my oyster. Half Life, Quake, the final few Wing Commander games...At this point in college I started building my own rigs with the help of a guy from the Computer Center at school and never really looked back.
 
phobos512 said:
There was always a computer in my house. We started off with what I remember being some Commodore or Amiga variant (that took what looked like SNES cartridges, though those wouldn't exist for a number of years) on which I played Q-bert and also dabbled in a paint program. Later we moved into Macs and had an original SE, the dual floppy drive version so we could load the OS and program disk(ettes) simultaneously. On there I played such games as Apache Strike, Vette! (man I loved jumping off highway overpasses), Microsoft Flight Simulator, Star Trek, King's Quest...We eventually got a SCSI external hard drive and another hard drive and... Then I had my first personal (as in mine, not an IBM PC clone) computer, which was a Performa 575. This was right after it came out as a starting high school/ Christmas present. SimCity 2000 was my biggie and man getting to play it in color! Amazing. Later in high school I updated from the Performa 575 to a Power Computing PowerBase 180 (Mac Clone). I fell in love with Flying Nightmares - an AV-8/B simulator I was in awe of at CompUSA. It was also around this time that Wing Commander first made it's way to the Macintosh and I had Super Wing Commander finally (as well as eventually Wing Commander 3 and 4 later on). I also played Graphic Simulations' F/A-18 Hornet and A-10 Warthog II. I used a CH Products Flight Stick and Throttle. Never got the rudder pedals. Also during this time there was the Warcraft series, Myth, Command and Conquer...So many good games, man! College came and I moved finally over to Windows with a Compaq Presario with a Pentium (III? IV? I don't remember...It was a black minitower) and a DVD drive (Interview with the Vampire was my first DVD, and I still have it). At that point the world was my oyster. Half Life, Quake, the final few Wing Commander games...At this point in college I started building my own rigs with the help of a guy from the Computer Center at school and never really looked back.
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I'm not reading that sh*t.
 
Started with a SuperBrain 64k Basic computer in college, text games & card games. Moved to a C=64 after graduation, Impossible Mission, Raid on Bungling Bay, Zork, etc. Got my first PC 286 in late '80s. Been a PC user ever since.
 
Strike Commander with voice pack lol. 1993 according to wikipedia. Then some RTS's several years until some people at this internship turned me on to Half Life and that was it.
 
Dr Tuek said:
Started with a SuperBrain 64k Basic computer in college, text games & card games. Moved to a C=64 after graduation, Impossible Mission, Raid on Bungling Bay, Zork, etc. Got my first PC 286 in late '80s. Been a PC user ever since.
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Good games those! Impossible Mission and Raid on Bungling Bay were some of my favorites. Electronic Speech Systems (that did the speech synthesis for Impossible Mission) are actually ESS (later making sound card chips, and now they make high end DACs).
 
J3RK said:
Good games those! Impossible Mission and Raid on Bungling Bay were some of my favorites. Electronic Speech Systems (that did the speech synthesis for Impossible Mission) are actually ESS (later making sound card chips, and now they make high end DACs).
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Glad to see that someone had a workable business plan. Commodore never could figure it out, even after releasing the Amiga.
 
$600 for 64 megs of ram was my favorite memory paying for "upgrades" back in the day! :p
 
I was there at the birth of PC gaming. We would go over to a mutual school friend's place. He owned a boa constrictor snake ( which we would pet ); exotic for the UK and a nice change from stroking hedgehogs ( owned by a different friend )... His father was a programmer and they lived in a very large house. Both of his parents were Tai Chi teachers on the side. His parents were rich and we would eat chocolate croissants.

This was the first time that I had ever heard music come out of the PC:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_2_Megablast

I thought that the music quality was a bit raw due to limitations of the sound card, yet catchy and sophisticated for PC. I balked when my friend explained the cost of a dedicated sound card and video card, which seemed ridiculously prohibitive and the quality was sub par to an Amiga or even a Commodore 64, so it was a laughable concept. As a connoisseur of shoot em up games, I thought that the game was kind of average:




We played Speedball 2, which was a fun game.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedball_2:_Brutal_Deluxe


I thought that the PC had potential - I was interested to see what else it could do.
 
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