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[wazoo]

I was going to say, I thought 32MB of RAM for a GPU back in the 90s was almost too much... and it turns out that card came out in October '99. So you just scrape in there, buddy!

It was the beginning of Nvidia empire. Funny at that time 3DFX was so strong, how could they fail ... It was also the time where NASA-like configs and SLI started to appear. Before that, there was not much difference between PC.

Quake 2, Voodoo 2 SLI and Voodoo 5 5500 AGP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97rpCG7dds

And for fun, the unreleased dual GPU 128MB Voodoo 5 6000 with 4xFSAA in 2000 !! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa-aWbuDafc

 

[Fallout-NL]

Love this thread. Forced me to pop open my collection of floppy disks and relive a few moments. Yes, messing around with endless IRQ/DMA settings, memory managers, boot disks, etc was a royal pain in the ass. But this was mostly pre-Internet, pre-Google and I was often forced to figure it out on my own. But god damn did it feel good when I had things working perfectly.

Yup, total rush. Not even sure how I managed to get some things working without the help of Google. Guess I had a lot of time on my hands.

 

[coughlanio]

I don't believe I've seen anyone mention Another World yet? Probably one of the more impressive DOS games, considering it shipped on a single 1.44MB floppy disk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6MwEu2bbPw

As a software engineer, I would probably call it a technical masterpiece, not just in gaming, but in software as a whole.

There's also a really interesting code review of the game here, by Fabian Sanglard (the guy behind the open source interpreter here.. Definitely recommended reading for any DOS gaming fan.

http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/

I spent two weeks reading and reverse engineering further the source code of Another World ("Out Of This World" in North America). I based my work on Gregory Montoir's "binary to C++" initial reverse engineering from the DOS executable.

I was amazed to discover an elegant system based on a virtual machine interpreting bytecode in realtime and generating fullscreen vectorial cinematic in order to produce one of the best game of all time.

All this shipping on a 1.44MB floppy disk and running within 600KB of RAM: Not bad for 1991 ! As usual I cleaned up my notes, it may save a few hours to someone.

 

[Theognosis]

Oh man. Such awesome times. Golden age of PC gaming, imo.

Absolutely. At the very least it was the golden age of RTS, FPS and Flight Simulators. Noobies and casuals need not apply. You win because of skill, not because you have played for hundreds of hours clicking your mouse and leveling up your character. More importantly, there was no Youtube to teach you how to win. You were your own man.

Almost all popular PC and mobile games we have today are derivatives of the games in the 90's--and that's why I'm no longer as thrilled as before. The 90's produced Doom, Quake, Falcon 4, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Rainbow Six, Flight Simulator 2000, Jane's F-15, Diablo II, Warcraft II, SImCIty, Age of Empires II, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Civilization, and the best game of all-time IMHO, Starcraft: Brood War.

 

[MrCunningham]

It was the beginning of Nvidia empire. Funny at that time 3DFX was so strong, how could they fail ... It was also the time where NASA-like configs and SLI started to appear. Before that, there was not much difference between PC.

Quake 2, Voodoo 2 SLI and Voodoo 5 5500 AGP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97rpCG7dds

And for fun, the unreleased dual GPU 128MB Voodoo 5 6000 with 4xFSAA in 2000 !! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa-aWbuDafc

A Voodoo card was something that I always wanted back then, but by the time I was making my own money and I could afford my own things, 3DFX was on the verge of going out of business and Nvidia was just getting hot.

But no regrets with the GeForce 256. Here's a great performance video showing it up against two Voodoo 2's in SLI mode at 1024x768: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pnVllXI7vk&list=PLVBJIUM1tYuGKqW7fb86mpVZwyiSKX6zw&index=3, Of course I didn't have a Pentium III in my PC in 1999, I had a Celeron 566Mhz machine with 128MB of SDRAM. But I still got great performance out of it. It was an amazing experience getting more that 70-80FPS at 1024x768 on a zero latency CRT monitor.



It's interesting how Nvidia turned themselves around with one card, the NV3 Rivia 128. The NV1 was built around the Sega Saturn, used quads and even had Sega Saturn controller ports for the deluxe models. The NV2 was a chip that was designed to be used in the Sega Saturn 2, and it would have also used quads. But quads (and working with Sega) proved not to be the right direction to go in and Nvidia jumped to Direct 3D 5.0.

Oddly enough, one of the downfalls of 3DFX was the money that they lost working with Sega on project Black Belt. Which was one of the proposed successors to the Saturn before they decided on project Katana which turned into the Dreamcast.

 

[petran79]

t.
As for the PS1, I never really got the impression that it did eat "PC gamers" lunches. Quite a few PS1 games were ported over to the PC (usually better too) and there were still a lot of cross platform releases. It didn't really take that long for half-way decent PS1 emulation to show up on the PC either.

PS1 used a very good 3D graphic card for its time that would have cost at least 400 $ if it was released on DOS/Windows PCs. For a while it was competing with PCs.
Of course it did lack SVGA resolutions.

 

[ChryZ]

My first PC was a 486DXII clocked at at amazing 66MHz (!), 4MB of ram (!) and 120 MB (!) HDD. Graphics card was pre-proper-3D acceleration, AFAIR VL Bus Cirrus Logic something something. Lots of DOS and I had Linux+FVWM running before Win3.1x

Fond memories of Day of the Tentacle and Doom.

 

[blast processed]

WTF at this OP not having Compaq and IBM listed among the PC manufacturers.

Seriously. What the hell.

 

[DownGrader]

I've got my first PC in the year 2000. It was a Pentium 166 MMX, and for several months, it didn't have HDD so using floppies was essential. Generally, living in Bumfuck, Egypt, I've seen plenty of MS-DOS machines, and even then I have preferred them over Windows ones for some reason... I don't know why. I think my affection for old computers and games grew back then.

While I obviously played Quake, Dune II and Jazz Jackrabbit back when they were somewhat relevant, I've dived deep DOS gaming much later, in mid-2000s, when I've got a PDA. That thing had an insane amount of great PC ports like Warlords II, King's Bounty and Ultima Underworld, as well as PocketSCUMM (later - ScummVM) interpreter which made me familiar with lots of point'n'click classics.

 

[mrklaw]

Half life was 1998!? We're coming up to the damn 20th anniversary of that. Insane

 

[KKRT00]

I don't believe I've seen anyone mention Another World yet? Probably one of the more impressive DOS games, considering it shipped on a single 1.44MB floppy disk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6MwEu2bbPw

As a software engineer, I would probably call it a technical masterpiece, not just in gaming, but in software as a whole.

There's also a really interesting code review of the game here, by Fabian Sanglard (the guy behind the open source interpreter here.. Definitely recommended reading for any DOS gaming fan.

http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/

Thats awesome blog. Thanks for that.

 

[Fallout-NL]

As a software engineer, I would probably call it a technical masterpiece, not just in gaming, but in software as a whole.

There's also a really interesting code review of the game here, by Fabian Sanglard (the guy behind the open source interpreter here.. Definitely recommended reading for any DOS gaming fan.

http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/

Makes me wish I was more of a beta person. Don't understand any of it, but it seems very interesting.

 

[Jonneh3003]

Man this is an area of PC gaming I can get behind. I love so many of those games in the OP. Truly the golden age where PC gaming was a different realm to consoles.

 

[wazoo]

I don't believe I've seen anyone mention Another World yet? Probably one of the more impressive DOS games, considering it shipped on a single 1.44MB floppy disk.

[/URL]. Definitely recommended reading for any DOS gaming fan.

Probably because this is an amiga game at heart, and the DOS version is not the best version to play.

 

[wazoo]

PS1 used a very good 3D graphic card for its time that would have cost at least 400 $ if it was released on DOS/Windows PCs. For a while it was competing with PCs.
Of course it did lack SVGA resolutions.

Lack of SVGA resolution was not a small bullet. When the ps1 launched, PC gaming switched to SVGA requiring much more power. And the ps1 card was pushing for VGA speed at the expense of features (z bugger, perspective correction, filtering ..)

When the 3DFX launched a bit later at 300$ the performance was way beyond.

 

[Dictator93]

This thread is very relevant to my interests: I shall see what I can muster up to post soon enough

 

[General Lee]

I've still got my Voodoo 3 2000 AGP card stored in a drawer. Theoretically it might still work, but I haven't had a working AGP system in over a decade to test it. It's a pity I've thrown all the old cardboard boxes away, some of them would make for nice memorabilia/decoration.

This thing ran all my games very well with a paired Celeron 466. Of course I think I only had a 17" CRT back then. But those were the golden days of PC exclusive single player games. BGII, Deus Ex, Half Life, Thief, Sacrifice...

 

[Star Falcon]

Who remembers this bad boy?

 

[Robottiimu2000]

I bought Quake over the phone using my mom's credit card. Some nice lady read me a cd-key that unlocked the full game (which was already on the demo disc!)

That's some major "on-disc" DLC!

 

[Englebert3rd]

Man, I'm so gonna love this thread. I've built a Win98 machine last month but the PSU died on me while I was replacing my Pentium 3.
I was really enjoying my time with it, playing Fallout 1, Resident Evil and a few big boxed PC games.
I need to get another PSU when I can.

 

[Krappadizzle]

I never considered myself a PC gamer back then, as I was definitely more into my NES/Genesis, but I did play a ton of Warcraft 2 and C&C, and even Spiderman Movie Maker and occasionally some of the LucasArts Adventure Games

 

[derExperte]

Man, this is some easymode shit. I wrote one that popped up a menu with five different configurations to support different features (mouse/no mouse, CD-ROM/no CD-ROM, etc.) and changed the DOS prompt text colors so you could see which one you loaded. :S

Didn't think of changing colors but had a menu too, one entry was for Ultima 7 alone thanks to its Voodoo Memory Manager.

 

[Accoun]

This thread makes me want to take my 486DX2 PS/ValuePoint (my first computer) and play all the things I never played back then. I got it hand-me-down from my aunt, but my dad already had a Pentium 2 by then and while I was happy to "have a computer", I never played many games on it since nobody I knew was into older games.
I know it's still at home, but it's at least partially disassembled.

Later my grandfather gave me his old ThinkPad 560 and I remember actually playing a lot of games on it. Mostly didn't run well, but still. And mostly demos. I remember playing Rollercoaster Tycoon, Jedi Knight and Virtua Fighter 2. Sadly, I remember the HDD died in it and I used it as a toy for a while, but I have no idea what happened to it later. Hopefully it's somewhere in the attic or something like that, and not thrown away as broken junk by my parents...

Then later my dad gave me his old PC - that with Pentium 2 (333Mhz) and a card with 3d acceleration! (4 MB, TNT - I think 2). That's where the real gaming started for me. I played a lot of Lego Racers, Unreal Tournament, Rollercoaster Tycoon (this time on full speed) and THPS 2. Plus other things, but those were THE games of that time to me.

 

[Nyx]

Great thread, lots of memories!

In those times I could go take a shit for an hour because I read a PC game manual while on the toilet.

 

[blast processed]

Man, this is some easymode shit. I wrote one that popped up a menu with five different configurations to support different features (mouse/no mouse, CD-ROM/no CD-ROM, etc.) and changed the DOS prompt text colors so you could see which one you loaded. :S

I would have loved to have seen the code for this. Didn't know you could change the colors lol

Great thread, lots of memories!

In those times I could go take a shit for an hour because I read a PC game manual while on the toilet.

The manuals were pretty big, like little books. I loved reading through the manual for Warcraft 2. Really any RTS for that matter.

 

[Steejee]

Who remembers this bad boy?

I played that game far more than I should have.

VE3D was my first job in the gaming industry, led to working at IGN for a few years afterwards and a chance to attend two E3s (the Santa Monica one, and the big and loud one the year prior). Fun times, even if I'm happy to work in standard software these days instead.

Probably one of my biggest 'holy crap' moments in 90s PC gaming was getting a Voodoo Banshee and firing up Quake 2 after having played it in software rendering until then. I was literally running up to walls point blank and admiring how smooth they were. Those were also the days of excessive colored lighting - everything was 80s neon, and it was glorious.

PCXL was the perfect gaming magazine for my age and time, was introduced to it by my 40-something female english teacher, rather an odd way to be exposed to it... I'm still a little pissed that when it was cancelled and I asked for a refund (as they were trying to give me PC Gamer instead) that both refund checks bounced.

 

[score01]

No Geoff Crammond Grand Prix under racing makes me sad. That was iconic!

 

[blast processed]

Probably one of my biggest 'holy crap' moments in 90s PC gaming was getting a Voodoo Banshee and firing up Quake 2 after having played it in software rendering until then. I was literally running up to walls point blank and admiring how smooth they were. Those were also the days of excessive colored lighting - everything was 80s neon, and it was glorious.

Voodoo Banshee was my first 3D card and the first game I saw running accelerated was Terracide. Terrible game but it was real smooth. And yeah, I loved the colored lighting in Quake 2 and Forsaken.

 

[Malio]

This is where the true gaming goodness was in the '90s.

Doom on the BBS', LAN party Shadow Warrior, all those classic RPG's. It was the best!

 

[AaronMT86]

Some played Raptor, while others played Tyrian. I played Galactix.

• Pick up pumpkin
• Smash pumpkin
• Pick up key
• Unlock door
• Open door

Raise your hand if you played Monuments of Mars

My first platformer (1988), the Adventures of Captain Comic

 

[The 8-Bit Raider]

[*]Pick up pumpkin
[*]Smash pumpkin
[*]Pick up key
[*]Unlock door
[*]Open door
[/list]

Love me some Hugo's House of Horrors. Man, that brought me back. I used to play that and The Last Half of Darkness quite a bit.

 

[Jintor]

Wow pcpp mentioned in OP. Very glad.

First gaming memories - ski free, Tyrian, terminal velocity

 

[AaronMT86]

Apogee Fanfare & Intros (1991-1995)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSGfuxjjyxI

 

[patientx]

Back in '96 (or probably early '97) I was in middle school and our school had a computer lab which was using cyrix 486's at first and that year they upgraded them to pentium 60's (probably)

Internet was non-existent back than and I was reading computer and gaming magazines in which they were telling about hese "bbs" s where you can find information and around that time there was game they were talking about in the magazines "quake" I already played wolfenstein and both doom's by then and I was as a teenager mesmerised by the graphics of "this latest game form the makers of doom"

By the time they upgraded the computer lab at our school one of my friends was showing of of a computer magazine from germany -probably pc world - I can't remember- which I borrowed from him to look into in my computer. I found out that there was the shareware version of quake 1 in that cd-rom.

The game magazines of the time praised game of its multiplayer component mostly so of course I decided to try it in the new computer lab at our school. I was at 7th grade back then so we were allowed entry any time we want and the teacher -who was a new graduate from university- loved to teach us qbasic and let us code in our free time.

Anyway I tried the game and it really worked I had a 486 dx2-50 back at home and with no dedicated graphics card I haven't been able to run the game any good at that. With my best friend back then, we tried connecting together and playing mp for the first time. It was totally a blast and out of this world experience for us. Also know this, we lived in a country where computers and game consoles and other technological devices where not that common like the us for example. (Turkey) After a few days other students from my class and essentially seniors caught on that there is a game on the computer lab that can be played together with 16 people (it was 8 at first but you could raise it via console) People played so much and it got big so much in the lucnh time everyone rushed to the computer lab instead of the cafeteria and this got out of hand quickly there were some fights too. Teachers and the stuff heard aobut it soon and we were all banned from lab and I remember my teacher saying me : " patientx, I trusted you. Yet you are playing these stupid games after all." She was very dissapointed in me.

Internet cafes and such brought multiplayer gaming culture 2-3 years after this to my country so in a way we were amongst first to play computer games in a group back then

Just wanted to tell a story )

 

[DD]

Good times...

 

[DrFunk]

My first computer was a Compaq with a Cyrix 133. Ran Quake 2 at 22~ fps. Had to upgrade.

I begged and pleaded with my folks and they relented and we upgraded to a Pentium 2 450...systemwith MMX. Great times

 

[ViolentP]

Soldier of Fortune:

Kingpin: Life of Crime:

Re-Volt:

 

[PantsuJo]

Soldier of Fortune:

Kingpin: Life of Crime:

Re-Volt:

Such beautiful games :3

 

[ViolentP]

Quake 2 released around the time I purchased my first video card. I remember the lighting effects alone blowing my mind. The next moment I felt that way was the first time I played Re-Volt.

 

[zephervack]

Anyone else spend hours upon hours creating tracks and testing them in Stunts?

 

[patientx]

Anyone else spend hours upon hours creating tracks and testing them in Stunts?

Good times.

 

[Viper3]

Ultimate Race Pro!

I loved that game. The 90's really were amazing if you were a PC gamer that was into arcade racers. You had Ultimate Race Pro, Screamer, NFS, NFS 2 (SE if you had Voodoo was amazing), MotoRacer and many more.

It just makes me wish more arcade racing games were being released today.

 

[blast processed]

Anyone else spend hours upon hours creating tracks and testing them in Stunts?

No but I spent a ton of time making rollercoasters with Disney's Coaster.

 

[Steejee]

Anyone else spend hours upon hours creating tracks and testing them in Stunts?

So many hours sharing the computer with my brother making courses. We didn't have a Soundblaster, just PC Speaker, so the ear splitting high pitched squeals from the intro are embedded in my brain.

Played a lot of Disney Coaster too, though not nearly as much.

 

[louiedog]

Anyone else spend hours upon hours creating tracks and testing them in Stunts?

I had Stunt Driver which is an almost identical game put out by Spectrum Holobyte in the same year. I was very confused when I got older and people were fondly remembering Stunts and I thought they had the name wrong.

 

[friday]

This thread makes me feel 9 again. What a great time. My favorites from that era were Doom I & II and Motocross Madness. I think in 2001 we got an entire new computer just so we could play Motocross Madness 2.

 

[FaintDeftone]

I remember buying a Voodoo 2 card for my 300mhz AMD Athlon Compaq computer and thinking I had the most advanced PC ever. I remember installing Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed and the graphics blowing my mind.

I have to thank that old Compaq for giving me this game though, which is still one of my top ten favorite games ever. Westwood was such a solid developer back then.

Anyone else spend hours upon hours creating tracks and testing them in Stunts?

Yes! I remember a buddy passing me the floppy disks for this game and I would spend hours building tracks.

 

[grandwizard]

Great thread. Honestly it's not just this forum but I feel like the majority of the modern games press ignores the history has little experience with 90s and prior PC gaming. You can tell 90% of them grew up on Sega and Nintendo and classic PC games aren't held in near the same esteem as the Mario or Final Fantasy games.

Speaking of 90s PC gaming though, I wish there was an easier way to get the classic Tomb Raider games running. Every time I try to play one of the old ones on Steam I run into a lot of issues, and from my searching I haven't found any modern ports or wrappers that make it easier. Anyone know of any?

 

[capitalCORN]

Great thread. Honestly it's not just this forum but I feel like the majority of the modern games press ignores the history has little experience with 90s and prior PC gaming. You can tell 90% of them grew up on Sega and Nintendo and classic PC games aren't held in near the same esteem as the Mario or Final Fantasy games.

Speaking of 90s PC gaming though, I wish there was an easier way to get the classic Tomb Raider games running. Every time I try to play one of the old ones on Steam I run into a lot of issues, and from my searching I haven't found any modern ports or wrappers that make it easier. Anyone know of any?

Maybe this will help?
http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide

Elsewise, anyone else complete the Dark Savant Trilogy (Wiz6, 7, 8)? Did anyone manage to do that with one consecutive save?

 

[Herne]

Cant remember what make mine was i bought it 2nd hand from a classifieds ad in the local Sunday paper (yes it was that long ago when they were still a thing)

Also does anyone remember these games.....

never gets enough mentions but remember loving them!!!

Thats the problem with Elite Force - the best part of the game is the starting mission. I still enjoyed it, don't get me wrong, in fact I still have it on my hard drive. Its just a shame that was it's high point.