VGCollect Forum
General and Gaming => Classic Video Games => Topic started by: oldgamerz on April 09, 2017, 03:32:59 am
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Lets take a time machine back to the PC gaming of the Mid 1990's and voice our opinon on a lot of the games that were 3D back then. Now I want you to remember your old PC and how it used to play those games.. not today but back in the 1990's and the 00's
Hi ,I happen to be an ancient PC gamer of the 1990's. 's I grew up only on PC games.and had not one single tv console at my home.
l I still love (to this day) games that worked fine with Windows back in the early 1990's like the Doom and the Duke Nukem 3D series. But when the early 3D polygon PC games first hit the market it for PC it was a nightmare in my opinion. most PCs companies manufactured and sold under $5000.00 at the time were utter junk with their Choppiness. If you were not rich enough to afford to upgrade your PC to the specs that all those early Polygon games required often most game would not work no matter how you tried
Most PC games of the 1990's stunk at least the ones I owned. however my life changed forever when I played Half Life 1 in 1999. and StarCraft in 2004. for some reason among all the crappy games of the 1990's those were a lot different. I did love roller coaster tycoon and Simcity 3000. but all the rest were utter junk and were not even the least compatible with windows 95 and windows 98 or even XP for instance in my luck.
my first computer that I had since it was new was a Packard Bell Pentinum 1. a computer that cost well over $1000 back in 1997 when I got it for Christmas. the game I used to play were decent Serria games like Bass Fishing, Nascar Racing, Indy Car Racing. But what upset me the most was yet no matter what PC you bought back in the day the computers would always need upgrades for the simplest things.
Nowadays you can get a gameing computer for well under $1000,00 that will play almost every single game out there, but in the 1990's you need to upgrade yearly in order to play any kind of game back then it seems.
So, what is your thoughts on playing a 1990's game on a computer made in the 1990's or early 00's? :)
or even if you were a console gamer back in the day and never had lag issues please tell your story here. :)
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It's as if 'Lordscott' never left
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It's as if 'Lordscott' never left
Lol
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It's as if 'Lordscott' never left
hahaha glad I'm not the only one who was thinking this
But to address the thread; I didn't get my first PC until around 1998 and even then it was below average in terms of specs for the time. I remember trying to run games like Myth The Fallen Lords and Starcraft, both modern games at the time, and both ran like shit for the most part. I remember trying to play The Sims and Everquest a couple years later and while both would install and technically run, they were pretty much unplayable due to terrible onboard graphics and insufficient RAM. Sadly, most of my PC gaming at the time was either me playing games from the early 90s on my PC (Doom, Doom II, Wolfenstein, and Warcraft II) or playing newer PC games on a friend's rig who had a much better PC than me. We used to play Everquest, Starcraft, AvP, and Half life a lot at his house. Those were good times.
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It's as if 'Lordscott' never left
At the very least with OP, I can read through it without deciphering it trying to make sense of it like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Nevertheless, I cant comment on this if only because I never had a PC until like age 14 in 2004. Anything involving computers for me growing up was at school either using Mavis Beacon, Mario Typing or this sound effect: https://youtu.be/5Ogsu51Gz60?t=8s
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It's as if 'Lordscott' never left
Seconded.
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It's as if 'Lordscott' never left
I looked him up in search, after reading this and read some of his or her posts, and no . I used to attend Retro Collect but I moved over to this site. retro collect, does not have a full database and I got fed up with that. some of the people on that site also. but mostly the database, and how little effort the admins put into the games information. I did hear from one of the few admins of that site they wanted to be more like VGcollect and have their members contribute to the database. But all they have last time I was there was 2 admins and one moderator running everything to my knowledge. And nothing was getting done.
I tried to contribute to the database but the admin told me that he or she was still working on spare time and he denied all the research I did for him or her. the admin told me he had coding in progress and that he or she was going to redo the entire database soon. VG collect is a everything I hoped for and retro collect is just to outdated for me.
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It really depends on the era. Yes there was a period of pain. This was the DOS games, and in the Windows 95/98 upgrades from DOS where it was possible to reboot into MS-DOS mode. There were definately crashing issues A LOT, as many people who played games back then will remember the DOS4GW prompt. It isn't important to know what DOS4GW is, but the reason why a lot of people remember it is because when you launched a game in DOS, if it used DOS4GW, it would do something behind the scenes. When the shell opened, it would print the DOS4GW text to the console, but you couldn't see it. You would only see this message if you either quit out of the game, or the game crashes and you returned to the prompt. A lot of people also falsely thought this was an error.
Another big pain of the mid 90s was sound card compatibility. The old process was you ran a setup program to select your soundcard, and the main problem was that a lot of people did not have the cards that the game supported. There were always options for Roland, AWE32, Soundblaster, Gravis, Adlib, Soundblaster compatible, etc. If you didn't have one of the cards specifically named in the sound setup, then you had to do a guess and test. Not only that, you needed to set other settings like IRQ and what not. It was common that some games had auto-detect, but most of the time this either didn't work (no/incorrect sound) or it would freeze the computer.
Upgrades were an interesting thing. The speed difference going between 2X and 4X and then 8X CD-ROM drives was amazing. Another thing that changed the game experience was upgrading a sound card to one with more voices. You would know if you had this issue because some sounds wouldn't play, or the sound would become garbled or worse when you tried to pass more voices through the card than it supported.
Games crashing and sound card issues are the ones I remember the most. The games themselves were fine. Games made specifically for Windows ended up being more reliable than the ones that ran in DOS.
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Granted I was still fairly young in the 90s, but my experiences were pretty good for the most part. I remember a couple of times where I picked up a game and it simply wouldn't work because the game required a sound card to play. Today this isn't an issue at all, as pretty much all motherboards have some kind of sound chipset on-board. There was another instance where my computer just simply didn't meet the minimum requirements to play so it wouldn't launch. That kind of thing still happens today, but at the time when I was like... ten, I didn't understand what was going on fully so I was kind of bummed.
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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.
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We had a Macintosh something or another and it couldn't handle anything worthwhile. Later on we had a Presario and it was also pretty lame. A lot of DOS games just wouldn't run correctly, and the newer games it struggled to play with choppy frame rates, like the very first Lego PC game. It seems like PCs in the 90s had obsolete hardware right out of the box, and as you say, unless you were willing to fork over thousands of dollars, you weren't going to get a PC that could play games very well. Not to mention if you installed maybe 3 or 4 substantial games on your PC, that HDD was full. Unlike today, where you can have a decent enough PC for well under a grand and you have nearly infinite disc space.
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I had no issue with PC games back in the day, even on a basic computer. I wish I could play Dark Earth again. I have so much nostalgia for it, but I would have no idea how to play it these days.
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My first PC was given to my by my brother in 1999. It had a Pentium I processor, with a 4GB graphics card, 32mb of RAM and a 4GB HD. I was so proud when I upgraded it with a Voodoo 3-3000 Graphics card, a 128MB stick of RAM, and a 10GB HD. All of this in order to play EverQuest easier. He also a download of Fallout II that I used as my buffer game when I needed a break from EQ. Before I had that PC, I played on my friend's PC, which was mostly Warcraft II, and Diablo. I also played a racing game on my Aunt's PC that ran Windows 3.1 called MegaRace. To anyone who ever played that game, I still hate Lance Boyle a little bit.
I never really had access to PC games until my 20s when PCs got cheaper to build, and the internet was more accessible. Of course, I owe that PC my life since it started me down the path of I.T.
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I also remember having a 1992 machitosh. I believe it had OS7, but I could be wrong. I played a lot of Chess Master 2000 on there. It also had backwards compatibility with Apple 2 software, on which I played the original Oregon Trail. I always had a hard time as a kid trying to figure out how to get it into that mode. I would just keep popping the diskette in and out until it booted the software. Retrospectively I'm not certain what I was doing wrong as that very machine works fine today.
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I also remember having a 1992 machitosh. I believe it had OS7, but I could be wrong. I played a lot of Chess Master 2000 on there. It also had backwards compatibility with Apple 2 software, on which I played the original Oregon Trail. I always had a hard time as a kid trying to figure out how to get it into that mode. I would just keep popping the diskette in and out until it booted the software. Retrospectively I'm not certain what I was doing wrong as that very machine works fine today.
My elementary school had Apple II PCs until I was in about 3rd grade. Played a ton of Oregon Trail on those. I actually installed an Apple II plugin in Firefox and was playing it via my browser several months ago. Still a pretty fun game!
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Of my top ten favorite games of all time at least two are PC games from the 90's. One is "Damage Incorporated" and the other is "Terminator : Future Shock" absolutely top end shooters that rival any shooters of its time. I still enjoy playing them. If you have never played these two and love shooters, then I suggest getting them both and playing them.
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IIRC Terminator: Future Shock was a buggy mess. I never got that game to work properly.
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IIRC Terminator: Future Shock was a buggy mess. I never got that game to work properly.
That's weird. As a kid I never had any trouble installing or running this game. However I did encounter a glitch during game play. I went to a location I wasn't supposed to yet and I was unable to progress further or go back. So I had to load a previous game save.
On another note, I recommend anyone who has never played Damage Incorporated to go buy it and play it. No problems at all and is easily a top game for me. It is also considered abandonware now so if you want to try it you can download it online. You can get it to work on windows 7 as well but requires ending the explorer.exe and dwm.exe processes in Task Manager for it to function. Most likely an aspect ratio or resolution problem with the game on todays PC's.
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IIRC Terminator: Future Shock was a buggy mess. I never got that game to work properly.
This game was the object of my desire in the mid-90s, but by the time I got a PC I could not find it anywhere :(
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Of my top ten favorite games of all time at least two are PC games from the 90's. One is "Damage Incorporated" and the other is "Terminator : Future Shock" absolutely top end shooters that rival any shooters of its time.
Oh this took me back! This, X-Wing, Duke Nuke'm and Shadow Warrior were my adolescent playhouses! I was young, but old enough to get these up and running on a DOS machine. I had to play them at my grand father's house. He had disabling back issues and the computer was his way of escaping.
They were a mess, but fun. I definitely transitioned to the 64 when it came out, but Diablo II and Starcraft were always my true loves. What was worse than getting them to run was trying to play online on your 56k dial-up, and your mom would interrupt the line to do god knows what and interrupt your Hell Diablo run...
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I remember not being able to play or figure out how to play multiplayer games in the dial-up days. But still I would download multiplayer maps for Doom or Duke Nukem 3D and explore them. I remember some pretty amazing Duke Nukem 3D maps. One was of a Star Trek ship, another was some castle.
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They weren't a pain at all (nor were they "early" PC games by the 90s, early 3D maybe) They were excuses to get the latest Rage 3D card or Sound Blaster. I loved figuring out new ways to get the most out of the hardware. DIP switches to individually set IRQ & DMA values, then feeding that information into each game. Running multiple config.sys and autoexec.bat configurations based on which programs and features I would want for that session. High Memory, Expanded Memory, RAM drives, TSRs and all that jazz. 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.
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I found PC games in the late 80's-early 90's to be more annoying. I didn't mind dealing with a DOS interface, but having to enter your sound card settings and installing from multiple floppies was time consuming and irritating, if you could get the game to work at all.
When I went to college in '94, my parents bought me a state-of-the-art computer with a new-fangled device called a CD-ROM drive, and it came with The 7th Guest. I used that computer more for gaming than for schoolwork, playing Doom I & II, Duke Nukem, Myst, Command & Conquer...
By that point, installation was pretty much automatic and I don't recall having any issues.
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They weren't a pain at all (nor were they "early" PC games by the 90s, early 3D maybe) They were excuses to get the latest Rage 3D card or Sound Blaster. I loved figuring out new ways to get the most out of the hardware. DIP switches to individually set IRQ & DMA values, then feeding that information into each game. Running multiple config.sys and autoexec.bat configurations based on which programs and features I would want for that session. High Memory, Expanded Memory, RAM drives, TSRs and all that jazz. 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.
I'm impressed if what you said is you. There are probably over a multiple billion different ways, or possible. how to operate any computer by now. there is even a way to make entire song, or music with code. and even movies too.
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I thought I bump this topic since, recent posts in the community have been about getting an old PC up and running. I think this topic has something worth looking over but that's just me.
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Had a ton of fun playing stuff like SimAnt, SimCity 2000, Lords of the Realm 1 and 2, edutainment stuff like Mischief Makers/Super Sleuths, the Trail games, a couple freeware games, etc. Not exactly graphics powerhouses and we had a Mac back in the day and thus couldn't play a lot of the stuff (and were perhaps a bit too young) but at least they were easy to install. That said, I think I came in right at the start of "modern" computer gaming, where you wouldn't have to figure out how to boot stuff up on DOS.
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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.
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I had no issue with PC games back in the day, even on a basic computer. I wish I could play Dark Earth again. I have so much nostalgia for it, but I would have no idea how to play it these days.
Well this should get you going: https://archive.org/download/Dark_Earth_1997_MicroProse (https://archive.org/download/Dark_Earth_1997_MicroProse)