I used to spend my days optmized config.sys and autoexec.bat to have enough high memory to load certain games. I was making a living out of doing this.
#MeToo
I remember doing weekly disk defrags, running memmaker, tweaking the bios, whatever it took.
And the internet was in its infancy back then so you could search for stuff on Altavista but for the most part if you didn’t know what you were looking for already, forget about it.
I’d tweak a single bios setting at a time run Duke 3D or Doom with a stop watch. Make notes. Next setting.
I had a Cyrix 486 DX2 66mhz with 8mb of ram, a vesa local bus video card, and a Logitech soundman wave soundcard.
My friend had a 133hmz cyrix with a pci video card and 16mb of ram but I still smoked the hell out of him in Duke 3D over 28.8k landline.
He was so excited when he got his new computer but his excitement turned to frustration when I was still crushing him with my old cobbled together pc. We literally got it as part of one of those Sally Struthers “learn a carreer in your spare time” tv commercials.
Later I upgraded the motherboard and cpu to a dx4/100mhz and 16mb or ram and I was absolutely unstoppable. Until quake came out.
That game demanded an authentic Penguin with MMX or it would just crawl.
Anyway. Back to the original question. DOS games were a pain but I personally enjoyed figuring out how to get them to run more than actually playing the game sometimes.
This led to me fixing other folks computers, going to college for programming, building websites, and now full blown global data centers.
80’s console gaming got me into 90’s PC gaming which got me into what I do professionally.
Religion aside for the moment, I kinda owe everything I am and have to video games.
Being a PC gamer during that era lead to a career due to having to know virtually every aspect of each and every component in your machine and what worked and didn't work with what and why. No complaints here, it was the most fun, hands on, job skills training I could imagine.
We have this in common.
I miss Happy Puppy games. Anyone here remember Happy Puppy?
It was kinda the Steam of the 90’s for Shareware.