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[petran79]

No complaints regarding computer games and their quality,
I am referring to the brand hardware

I am relatively young but I lived the last era in the late-80s till early-90s when there was variety in computer brands and hardware. IBM PC clones and compatibles were on the rise, but not because of computer games. The edge belonged to other brands like Atari and Commodore. Also there were far more computer brands than console brands back then. In contrast to today, they featured different hardware and architecture.

Even in the 90s when Microsoft with DOS and later Windows became the dominant gaming force wordwide, there were hardware alternatives. CPUs by AMD and Cyrix, SVGA chipsets by dozens of companies, Soundblaster clones and unique chipsets sound cards, Motherboards, 3D Accelerators etc
There were also Macs and some Amiga computers, co-existing with different PC brand manufacturers.

Playing computer games went hand to hand with all this hardware. No PC was the same machine. You felt a sort of awe trying to configure or troubleshoot a computer game for all this different hardware.

But after 2000 this sort of magic was gone. Desktop brand bubble burst. Brandless Wintel PCs everywhere, just Nvidia/ATI GPUs, LQ onboard sound cards, the xth iteration of Windows OS etc
Computer brands exist now only for laptops. Desktop PCs did away with this concept alltogether since most companies saw it was not profitable to remain in the desktop PC business and maintain their quality and support. Only Dell remained.

While on consoles you can still choose between three brands, though only Nintendo has something of the old feeling, just like Apple computers.

For gamers who lived that era, how do you feel about this change in computer games? I feel like this has taken half the enjoyment somehow and made playing games more standardised. Got used to it over the years, but even now I feel something is missing. Even when playing on Linux.

 

[gdt]

So you basically need something you can fanboy over?

 

[Dio]

What about nVidia vs AMD?

Fermi wasn't too long ago.

 

[Phawx]

8 year old me wouldn't really call "which IRQ port do I need to use to make my sound card work?" magical.

 

[AJLma]

Less exciting? No.

Less accessible? sure.

 

[Kaydan]

I am relatively young but I lived the last era in the late-80s till early-90s

Define young OP.

 

[stuminus3]

You're asking for the days of 80s home computing? That's mental. I loved my Vic 20 and my Speccy and my ST as much as the next guy but there's a reason Windows desktops are king of the hill. The only thing that makes sense is a paradigm shift like mobile and tablet computing. Otherwise... why would anyone bother?

 

[djplaeskool]

Eh, it never really did much in the way of excitement.

The massive consumer branding is still there, or at least, was there a couple years ago when I put my most recent system together (LGA2011). I was buried in posters, stickers, and case badges.

If anything, standardization in hardware and APIs took a lot of frustration out of gaming.
Shit like IRQ hunting or having your soundblaster settings get jacked up every other boot wasn't exciting.

 

[jaundicejuice]

The days before the direct x api where you had to have a very specific set of hardware that you had to configure just to run a game were not magical. The 2000's is where PC gaming kind of stopped being batshit insane when it came to hardware.

 

[Durante]

I don't think so.

What really was exciting to me were the 90s and early 00s in 3D accelerator technology, where you were really getting entirely new possibilities in consumer hardware almost every year.

This is amazing.

 

[Skelter]

What about nVidia vs AMD?

Fermi wasn't too long ago.

Incredible

 

[Vuze]

What about nVidia vs AMD?

Fermi wasn't too long ago.

I never understood the "best color" thing for amd. Any reason behind it?

 

[SonyToo!™]

I think the one benefit of branded home computers would be the exclusives like Bayonetta2 & TLOU that console mfrs fund. Other than games that are inherently PC like MOBAs / MMOs PC exclusives are the naff kind with publishers keeping their games on their own distro platforms.

That said with not even Nintendo competing directly with PS/Xb, I'm not sure there is room for anyone else to duke it out in traditional gaming. And AAA's often can't be arsed to do solid PC ports with only one platform let alone several with smaller userbases.

 

[Ashura_MX]

I dont even look at brands anymore:

• Is within my budget?
• Runs [game / games] I want to play
• The keyboard is not complete shit?

 

[Parallax]

What about nVidia vs AMD?

Fermi wasn't too long ago.

Please tell me you have the amd vs nvidia car race?

 

[petran79]

Thanks for the replies!

I think the one benefit of branded home computers would be the exclusives like Bayonetta2 & TLOU that console mfrs fund. Other than games that are inherently PC like MOBAs / MMOs PC exclusives are the naff kind with publishers keeping their games on their own distro platforms.

That said with not even Nintendo competing directly with PS/Xb, I'm not sure there is room for anyone else to duke it out in traditional gaming. And AAA's often can't be arsed to do solid PC ports with only one platform let alone several with smaller userbases.

There were exclusives for PC games during that era, even till the late-90s. Market for PC gaming was a little different though, since they targeted players who'd invest a lot in hardware and software. Since PCs were more expensive during that time, they'd also spend a lot in computer games.


After 2000 three main reasons made lead PC games to a slump, till the arrival of Steam.

1. Desktop hardware brands with high quality machines were slowly withdrawing from the PC market. From international brands like Compaq, Gateway and IBM to smaller regional companies that had high quality desktops. This lead to a slump in consumer power, since users bought spare parts instead of full manufactured computers.This devalued the PC market. Budget builds were a consequence. Big brands saw there was no point in pursuing this cheap model, since that would not bring them the profit they expected.

2. Windows XP. By dropping Windows 9x and DOS backwards compatibility, PC had fewer available games. There was not a proper way to play 2-3 year old games. DOS compatibility was abysmal. You had to use external utilities for sound, like VDMsound. Few years had to pass till this issue was sorted out. This lead a lot of PC gamers to switch to consoles.

3. OG Xbox. After the slump in PC gaming market, developers turned to the more lucrative console market, with Microsoft's blessing. This lead to a serious decrease in big budget exclusive titles.

The days before the direct x api where you had to have a very specific set of hardware that you had to configure just to run a game were not magical. The 2000's is where PC gaming kind of stopped being batshit insane when it came to hardware.

Not if you had an Amiga or AtariST. On the other hand it was this complexity that made a lot of gamers prefer the IBM PCs

So you basically need something you can fanboy over?

No reason. No one would know what a Cirrus Logic, 3D Labs Glint or Beethoven DSP was anyway...

Define young OP.

Below middle age

 

[Hazaro]

There's like 20 SKUs for every part made by each company (Looking at you ASUS), each possibly being OEM'd from like 6 companies (Looking at your modern Corsair). It's not wrong, but it sure is confusing.

Then you leverage your brand strength into high margin parts (still looking at Corsair). People do single brand computers (Pick one of the 6 facoties a PSU is made, or 4 from cooling solutions, etc.) and you can do a lot with just Corsair or Cooler Master.

Anyway, most importantly all the margins on computer hardware completely died and a lot of parts can be loss leaders for marketshare now.

 

[KHlover]

AMD vs NVIDIA is all the excitement we need, to bad that one is poised to end in a year ot two

 

[EdwardTeach]

I do miss amiga.

 

[Rocky]

Let's be honest here. Atari and Commodore computers were more like advanced game consoles that ran productivity applications. Yes they could be expanded with external peripherals but they were leagues different than PCs and Apple computers.

 

[PdotMichael]

PC brands are silly.

And not the same as console companies which try to provide an interesting product with all the first party games and third party deals.

Nvidia and AMD basically just trying to make a game to run like shit on the other platform.

 

[Krejlooc]

The "wild west" feeling of computing is back these days thanks to Virtual Reality. I do feel nostalgic for those days when you'd go into dirty cigarette shops in houston to buy yellow and beige computer parts that may or may not have worked. I remember browsing microcache for obscure video hardware. It had nothing to do with the brands - I always built my PC. And while commodore was indeed cool, it was more what everyone else did with the systems than commodore themselves that made their machines cool.

I wouldn't trade what is going on in PC gaming now, however, for those days. Not in a million years. The steam universe stuff and the birth of VR is way more exciting than what the 80's and 90's microcomputer age were like. I am still a huge fan of that era, however. I got myself a PAL C64C with jiffy dos installed and an SD Card reader, along with a CD32 with an SX-1 with a gotek floppy drive emulator, post-market PSU, and CF->IDE kit installed, along with a PAL A1200 with an indivision VGA adapter, CF->IDE kit, and a 030 processor. I've also put together a bunch of retro PC builds, from 486 to pentium 3s with voodoos inside.

 

[Fractal]

Nah, can't say I care... I have my budget and I pick whatever fits best into it. For the last few years it was exclusively Intel and Nvidia, but brand loyalty doesn't have much to do with it.

 

[RealityCheque]

Awesome.

 

[Krejlooc]

The days before the direct x api where you had to have a very specific set of hardware that you had to configure just to run a game were not magical. The 2000's is where PC gaming kind of stopped being batshit insane when it came to hardware.

judging from OP, I'm guessing he is from europe. The C64, Atari 8-bit, Amiga 500, A1200, ZX Spectrum, etc were not immune to requiring additional ram or things of that sort, but the baseline specs for those machines meant, 9 times out of 10, you could play any amiga game on an a500 (or, if so needed, you might need a 1 mb memory expansion, which was basically standard).

You're describing a very particular time of 3D acceleration.

 

[Cronee]

Amiga was just as complex as the PC was. SCSI termination, DF configurations, component upgrades such as Denise and Agnus (plus fat agnus and fatter agnus), not to mention the Kickstart ROMs and various cpus. Many games had very specific hardware requirements and many of those pieces of hardware had to be configured manually.

 

[Hektor]

I pity everyone who thinks brands are important to like.... anything.

 

[diggmcbadass]

I don't get where OP is coming from at all. Everything was worse back then, and if big companies were still dominating the high tier market with pre built computers, they would probably be more expensive, less compatible and more locked down than high end hardware is today. The hardware that HP and Dell produces to this day is not even compatible with ATX to make sure you have to go to them to buy expensive spare parts instead of just using hardware that is standard for every other manufacturer in the world.

If incompatible non-standardized hardware is exciting, I vastly prefer to live in a boring world.

 

[pislit]

But why? The best part of PC gaming is cutting out the console brand fanboy mouthfroths and go straight to troubleshooting. Lol i kid.

 

[Krejlooc]

Amiga was just as complex as the PC was. SCSI termination, DF configurations, component upgrades such as Denise and Agnus (plus fat agnus and fatter agnus), not to mention the Kickstart ROMs and various cpus. Many games had very specific hardware requirements and many of those pieces of hardware had to be configured manually.

Well yes, you could use your amiga like that, but for playing games, most of the time it was just pop in the disk and you're good to go. Outside of doing crazy shit like running Quake or fucking with blizzard IV accelerators, of course. I have tons of the mainstream Amiga games, and most of the time the worst I'll run into is a 2mb ram upgrade requirement.

 

[Cronee]

Well yes, you could use your amiga like that, but for playing games, most of the time it was just pop in the disk and you're good to go. Outside of doing crazy shit like running Quake or fucking with blizzard IV accelerators, of course. I have tons of the mainstream Amiga games, and most of the time the worst I'll run into is a 2mb ram upgrade requirement.

True. However, many games also required the video upgrades the basic units didn't have. CGA, EGA, VGA, it was all developer dependant. Some offered lower compatibility while others didnt.

 

[Langdon Alger]

Playing computer games went hand to hand with all this hardware. No PC was the same machine. You felt a sort of awe trying to configure or troubleshoot a computer game for all this different hardware.

That sounds like a nightmare. Thank god PC gaming has gotten less complicated.

 

[Krejlooc]

True. However, many games also required the video upgrades the basic units didn't have. CGA, EGA, VGA, it was all developer dependant. Some offered lower compatibility while others didnt.

I remember when we went from CGA to EGA, the difference was light night and day lol.

Most of my old "IBM Dos compatible" software worked with both CGA and EGA, but then again I wouldn't have been buying non-cga compatible software.

SVGA was like the coolest shit ever when I built my 486DX.

 

[alekth]

Can't say I identify with any of that, gamed a bit at dad's workplace in the late 80s, at home in the 90s, but the only branding I remember being there was IBM, and the rest was similar to nowadays generic. Then again both the machines at the office and the one at home were meant for science/calculations, not for a hobby. Branded desktops were either something cheap and convenient for whoever couldn't get a custom one, or something very flashy, with a weird case and preferably a lot of LEDs.

And I would certainly never want to have to choose. Along with other things that is one of the major points.

 

[kitsuneyo]

I think OP was on to something when talking about the pre-PC era.

In Europe we had Sinclair, Commodore, Amstrad and Atari all producing different computers with their own games libraries. There was a lot of competition between them and a lot of weird and wonderful games were made.

Then again, with the indie scene now, there are probably even more weird and wonderful games being put out, and they're accessible to more people.

 

[Cronee]

I remember when we went from CGA to EGA, the difference was light night and day lol.

Most of my old "IBM Dos compatible" software worked with both CGA and EGA, but then again I wouldn't have been buying non-cga compatible software.

SVGA was like the coolest shit ever when I built my 486DX.

I was very fortunate in those days as my dad was a huge computer nut. His best friend was a hardware engineer and he'd give us test samples when he was done with them so we'd always be on the cutting edge of technology. You are right though, witnessing the transitions between CGA, EGA, VGA, and SVGA was glorious. The move to 3D blew my mind and when I got that voodoo 2 sample, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

 

[Krejlooc]

I was very fortunate in those days as my dad was a huge computer nut. His best friend was a hardware engineer and he'd give us test samples when he was done with them so we'd always be on the cutting edge of technology. You are right though, witnessing the transitions between CGA, EGA, VGA, and SVGA was glorious. The move to 3D blew my mind and when I got that voodoo 2 sample, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

My dad was a computer nut and joined up with some PC Users groups and brought me along for the ride. In retrospect, I have no idea how he became so hardcore into PC using at the time, but he found his way onto the internet in 1988 and pretty much became a power user shortly after. Our first PC was an epson 8088 that he bought the year prior from the home shopping network. By 1990, he and I were building our first PC together from scratch.

It made getting new computer hardware very easy, because my dad would always be willing to buy new computer parts lol.

 

[LordOfChaos]

Remember all the boutique makers? Still hate HP so much for killing Voodoo. They seem to have a track record of buying and killing cool companies...

The Blackbird and Firebird were the two cool things to come of the aquisition, but then...Guess what...They killed them.

 

[JoJo UK]

8 year old me wouldn't really call "which IRQ port do I need to use to make my sound card work?" magical.

Ahh memories!

 

[Randomizer123454444]

Computer hardware is there to enable you to play the game. I get excitement from playing games, not from e-peen contests over hardware brands.

I don't really want the brand loyalty wars on PC side.

 

[bjork]

I am relatively young but I lived the last era in the late-80s till early-90s

Relative to that 105-year old runner?

It was a fun time to be a part of, for sure, but damn if it wasn't a pain in the ass sometimes. Also, ease of use was always the imagined goal, not a fight over branding.

 

[petran79]

Computer hardware is there to enable you to play the game. I get excitement from playing games, not from e-peen contests over hardware brands.

I don't really want the brand loyalty wars on PC side.

I mentioned brands not to brag but because they helped attracting developers to the computer gaming market. Eg Amiga was the #1 brand and without it computer games would not be where they are today.

I pity everyone who thinks brands are important to like.... anything.

Just like in game software companies, brands were (I dont mention "are") important in hardware too.

judging from OP, I'm guessing he is from europe. The C64, Atari 8-bit, Amiga 500, A1200, ZX Spectrum, etc were not immune to requiring additional ram or things of that sort, but the baseline specs for those machines meant, 9 times out of 10, you could play any amiga game on an a500 (or, if so needed, you might need a 1 mb memory expansion, which was basically standard).

Yes and I spent some time in Germany during the Amiga years. It took sometime for x86 computers to catch up with that machine, at triple the cost and 4x the RAM. I remember browsing in computer shops. Every system was different. From the demo of International Karate on Atari 800 XL to playing Gauntlet on a Commodore 64.

Can't say I identify with any of that, gamed a bit at dad's workplace in the late 80s, at home in the 90s, but the only branding I remember being there was IBM, and the rest was similar to nowadays generic. Then again both the machines at the office and the one at home were meant for science/calculations, not for a hobby. Branded desktops were either something cheap and convenient for whoever couldn't get a custom one, or something very flashy, with a weird case and preferably a lot of LEDs.

And I would certainly never want to have to choose. Along with other things that is one of the major points.

Regarding custom desktops, each country had her own companies. It is just that you could choose among so many different hardware. A pity that a lot of those old regional companies that specialized in high quality custom computers have been replaced by others that do less than stellar work regarding build quality. There were far more computer companies back then with more competition. Now they're replaced by superstores.

I think OP was on to something when talking about the pre-PC era.

In Europe we had Sinclair, Commodore, Amstrad and Atari all producing different computers with their own games libraries. There was a lot of competition between them and a lot of weird and wonderful games were made.

Then again, with the indie scene now, there are probably even more weird and wonderful games being put out, and they're accessible to more people.

Indie scene of today closely resembles the 80s era in computer games. Microsoft unfortunately killed that scene, since everyone had to switch to Windows 95, dropping the current hardware and their userbase. Such a thing happened in Japan's computer scene. Fortunately those games made their comeback.

 

[Krejlooc]

Yes and I spent some time in Germany during the Amiga years. It took sometime for x86 computers to catch up with that machine, at triple the cost and 4x the RAM. I remember browsing in computer shops. Every system was different. From the demo of International Karate on Atari 800 XL to playing Gauntlet on a Commodore 64.

There is a point, pretty much when Doom and Quake started coming out, when the x86 platform overtook the Amiga, however. If you want to run quake, you're gonna need a Blizzard IV and a 040, and buying those types of accelerators is pretty expensive even today. By comparison, you can put together a decent 486 these days for quite cheap.

That has more to do with the eternally delayed AAA chip, the under-performance of AGA, and the demise of Commodore, however.

Microsoft unfortunately killed that scene, since everyone had to switch to Windows 95, dropping the current hardware and their userbase.

This is unfair. Microsoft didn't kill the scene, the rise of the x86 platform did. In the US, there was a pretty sizable x86 shareware (as in, not crippleware) software base. Microsoft didn't kill commodore, commodore killed commodore.

 

[AmFreak]

I think OP was on to something when talking about the pre-PC era.

In Europe we had Sinclair, Commodore, Amstrad and Atari all producing different computers with their own games libraries. There was a lot of competition between them and a lot of weird and wonderful games were made.

And these were only the biggest. I have a book called "home computer report '85" with like 20 different systems. In the early-mid 80s the home computer wars were happening (most overlooked reason for the "video game crash") anything today looks like a child's birthday party in comparison.
It was definitely more exciting back then - computers were something magical.
It wasn't like today were you buy a new one and all that changes is your game running with 200 fps. If you have seen one pc you have seen them all (simplified). Back then buying a new computer meant stepping into a new world (different hardware, different interface/os, different games/apps, different peripherals). The excitement didn't only come from knowing that you will get something faster, but also from knowing that you will discover/experience entirely different/new things.

 

[petran79]

This is unfair. Microsoft didn't kill the scene, the rise of the x86 platform did. In the US, there was a pretty sizable x86 shareware (as in, not crippleware) software base. Microsoft didn't kill commodore, commodore killed commodore.

Atari wasnt any better either.

It is just that the European market had to adjust much quicker to the new situation. Though for Japan, Windows 95 certainly had a negative effect initially

https://tekkie.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/a-history-of-the-atari-st-and-commodore-amiga/

In 1993 I had the opportunity to attend a Falcon 030 presentation given by David Small, the inventor of the Magic Sac and Spectre GCR/128 Macintosh emulators for the ST. The Falcon had started to ship a short while before. As I recall, and my memory’s fuzzy on this, he told a tale of how the Falcon development team was treated. One of the things I remember him saying is after promising to pay the engineers for their efforts, rather than paying them in cash, they were given company stock…which at the time was probably trading as a penny stock. I remember it hovered around $1 a share, often going under that amount, with really no hope of it getting any better. Small winced as he delivered the punch line, and drew audible sounds of disgust from the audience. We all knew what the situation was with Atari.

The impression I’ve gotten from listening to first hand accounts is that Jack Tramiel was a “penny wise, pound foolish” hard ass. I don’t get a sense that he had a creative spirit. His strategy, as it was when he was at the helm at Commodore, was to sell machines to a mass market. For whatever reason, it worked out for several years in Europe, where Atari was one of the dominant sellers of computers. In the U.S. it didn’t work out. I remember asking Darryl about this, and in his view Atari was just a tax write-off for the Tramiels. Jack Tramiel was set to retire, and just didn’t have the motivation to really make Atari do well. That was his theory anyway.

Giving credit where it’s due, in an interview I saw on a British computer TV show from the 1980s, Jack Tramiel revealed that one of his goals when he ran Commodore was to keep the Japanese out of the U.S. PC market. He did this by undercutting them on price. Maybe he succeeded, since I remember there was talk in the 80s about the Japanese working on low-end MSX machines to sell to the U.S. market. Somehow that never got off the ground. Incidentally, MSX was Microsoft’s attempt to do for low-end 8-bit computers what it did for IBM PCs and clones: create a standard OS. Apparently Tramiel was someone who fought to keep computer production in the U.S. We can thank him for that, though in hindsight he just delayed the inevitable. From what I remember, Atari shifted computer production to Asia, even under Tramiel’s management. Today a lot of the PC production lines are in Asia, though I’m sure there are still some here.

As I’ve mentioned before, Atari stopped producing computers in late 1993. The company continued on, trying to compete in the video game market, but dying a slow death, until it was finally “retired” in its sale to JTS (a disk drive manufacturer) in 1996.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/JPNcomputers/Japanesecomputers2.htm

But the primary reason for the death of the PC98 platform was Windows 95. As the first operating system that truly provided seamless support of both English and Japanese software, Windows 95 enjoyed the biggest launch of any software product in Japanese computing history. Moreover, games designed for Windows 95 would run in Windows 95, regardless of the underlying hardware, which meant that NEC's proprietary technology became completely irrelevant. By the end of 1996, the glorious era was over.

During this upheaval, game developers were faced with a choice: to continue with the computer platform, or switch to the larger and more lucrative console market. Most chose the console market, and many ports of Japanese computer games can be found on the Saturn and the PlayStation (at lowered resolution and censored, in most cases). On the other hand, developers committed to creating content unsuitable for consoles (such as eroge and complex military strategy games) stuck with the PC, where they remain to this day.

 

[ViolentP]

All I need is a company I find synonymous with quality.

 

[Mihos]

Coming from the 70s, PC gaming has never been more awesome. Sounds like you just hate that it is also more inclusive.

 

[Why would you do that?]

Computer hardware has really converged. Even if different companies made different computer systems, they would pretty much all have the exact same features and have very similar hardware.

I mean, look at Android devices, which is a different computer system than our (IBM compatible) PCs. It's not like those devices are computer systems with an FM Synthesis sound chip, 2D graphics based on a frame buffer, and a CPU with a floating point unit while PCs are computer systems with a traditional PSG and tile-based graphics with no FPU. In really, they are both hardware with very similar features. And even though yes, Android devices usually have one CPU architecture (ARM) and PCs have another (x86), we don't really code in assembly too much anymore, so the difference is really minimal.

I mean, it wasn't too challenging to port something like the entire Android operating system to the (IBM) PC. Take a look at Android-x86. It runs plenty of applications that were meant for Android devices out of the box, natively. There's no way you could port, say, the MSX operating system to a Commodore 64 and have it run MSX software, or Amiga OS to an X68000 and have the X68000 run Amiga software. The hardware was too different, and the operating systems couldn't abstract the hardware behind drivers because of the different hardware.

The point is, there isn't as much variation in hardware as there was in the past, so there's no real point to having different types of PCs nowadays.

 

[GeordieMark]

The lack of brands in terms of franchises has hurt the excitement of gaming for me.

E3 is mostly a procession of the same old games, with a lick of paint and a bit of polish. Even games I love become boring by the 4th instalment. My excitement for UC4, Gears 4, and Halo 5 is luke warm right now.

I think it is the reason I lose interest in so many games before they end. I've seen it all before and I'm becoming jaded and much harder to impress.

 

[Raist]

8 year old me wouldn't really call "which IRQ port do I need to use to make my sound card work?" magical.

Oh god the (bad) memories.