Support NeoGAF

[gelf]

My earliest PC memories were laughing at the DOS ports of games... Especially the music comparing my Amiga to some 386 compatible games. Mwahahaha.

Yeah pretty much in that age you where better off with an Amiga if you wanted a home computer. Thanks to GOG and emulation I've seen many old dos games don't compare to thier Amiga equivalents.

Post Windows 95 I had a good time on PC but I'm so glad minimum spec inflation isn't anywhere as bad as it used to be. It felt like you needed a new processor every year.

 

[Sparrowhawk]

There were plans for a DoTT SE after the Monkey Island remakes, but it got canned.

That's just terrible. I mean, maybe there's hope if Grim Fandango sells well.

 

[Auto_aim1]

So much nostalgia. There was a magazine in my country called CHIP which I used to buy every month. They used to give a CD filled with demos and stuff.

Also, I remember trying to download AoE: RoR demo which was about 23MB. Shit took forever on a dial-up and after 15 hours I got disconnected. Massive disappointment.

Remember Heat.net, Zone.com (MSN Gaming Zone), Mplayer.com/Gamespy?

Oh man, the lag was terrible on Zone.com. But I badly wanted to play AoE multiplayer so I persisted and tried to reconnect everytime.

 

[Protein]

I remember getting a 30gb HDD and feeling unstoppable then it was rendered obsolete when games started becoming 5gb. I feel that way now with my 128gb SSD.

Sometimes spending hours trying to get the absolute best performance for games. I checked TweakGuides every day for new patches or guides. The extra 10 FPS would be divine when most of my games like Battlefield 1942 would run at 20 FPS.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

If it was Day Of The Tentacle instead of The Dig, that would probably be the best bundle of all time. OF ALL TIME.

I think there was another version of that pack that was made that swapped in DOTT in place of one of the other games. Different parts of Europe got a slightly different bundle pack. Can't remember now what the game they swapped for it was, but I do remember testing an updated DOTT to make sure it ran fine natively in WinXP.

Ideally, they should have just swapped in this of course:

 

[Burai]

I don't even need to post what this is. You already know. The greatest video card ever.

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

I don't even need to post what this is. You already know. The greatest video card ever.

Thats not a TNT2 or a 3DFX Voodoo

 

[Tizoc]

I still think it's a shame this was never released in the US:

Still one of my favorite items I've gotten from my time at LucasArts.

I own that collection actually =3

 

[Valkyria]

I liked it more in 90s than now. It actually owned the games back then, the boxes were so much more awesome too.

I mean...look at this beauty:

THey don't make them like this anymore

Still, today is a great time to be a pc gamer. Maybe not 90s-like level of great, but still wesome. Steam, for all it's DRM, helped a lot to restore pc gaming after the dark ages of 2001-2004. It's not the only thing that did, but it played a huge part and loosing some of the old stuff was a worthy trade off

I'm an industrial Engineer and we have in my factory real machinery with thinner manuals XDD.

It's been years since I quitted PC gaming, and now days I like the idea of steam boxes but I'm not a real fan of Steam. In the 90's even the budget releases came in a big box, and me being a fool I toss them away a lot of years ago.

 

[derExperte]

I don't even need to post what this is. You already know. The greatest video card ever.

9700pro? Then you are correct. Though the first 3dfx Voodoo is on the same level.

I wish I still had and could post all my config.sys and autoexec.bat files, even had a simple menu system for when I wanted to play an 90s Origin game (the company, not youknowwhat) like Ultima 7 with their brutal memory requirements.

 

[Sober]

Might be a 9800?


Remember those times waiting in line in Fileplanet to download a hot new demo? I waited for like 4 hours to download the C&C Renegade demo because it was multiplayer. Good lord.

 

[bemusedchunk]

Who here remembers

Edit: How god-tier was Apogee as a publisher back then...

 

[Theonik]

I'm an industrial Engineer and we have in my factory real machinery with thinner manuals XDD.

500 odd pages!
Mind you it really was 'F-16 flight manual' rather than a simple game manual.

 

[wazoo]

Yeah pretty much in that age you where better off with an Amiga if you wanted a home computer. Thanks to GOG and emulation I've seen many old dos games don't compare to thier Amiga equivalents.

Post Windows 95 I had a good time on PC but I'm so glad minimum spec inflation isn't anywhere as bad as it used to be. It felt like you needed a new processor every year.

Amiga games were usuallly better than PC. Still, Adventure games had glorious MT32 compatibility than you can emulate easily now, then as a retro gamer, PC gamer are often better.

 

[Spookie]

Might be a 9800?

90% sure it's a 9800.

 

[SDCowboy]

I remember back in the earlier days of PC gaming in the early-mid 90's I'd get games all the time that didn't work and I'd have to return them for another copy. I don't miss that at all. I do miss ShareWare games though.

 

[Bl@de]

Remember these pieces of shit?

I had this bad boy. Never knew there were official add-ons. It was fucking weird ... and bad yeah. But well Quake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMWxQ6tU8vw

 

[Auto_aim1]

That card looks like 9800 pro.

My last ATI card was X850XT. I've stuck to Nvidia since then.

 

[969]

Might be a 9800?

Yep looks like a 9800 pro to me. Had the saphire atlantis version of that card with 128 mb of vram. That card was a beast i remember playing everything on ultra for years to come. Good times.

 

[SDCowboy]

Remember back before CD keys, the installer would often ask you what a specific word in a paragraph in the manual was? Those were the days... lol

 

[Bl@de]

I don't even need to post what this is. You already know. The greatest video card ever.

A softmodded 9500? Unlocked to a 9700? Because that's what I had. Best investment ever. I don't know if that shit is possible today.

EDIT: Ah k a 9800 Pro. Didn't have that one^^ Too expensive as a kid

 

[jet1911]

wat

The shareware era experience was trading stuff on floppy disk!

I totally remember buying the first chapter of Doom on like 5 floppy disks when I was 8.

 

[spirity]

Great collection of big box games here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3w5wbSDQs4

 

[derExperte]

9800 was a nice improvement to the 9700 but that one was truly revolutionary in 2002, an unbelievable jump and NV needed years to catch up.

Now raise your hand if you were excited when this happened: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/article_27177

Was a massive event and 100MB were still huge. Then everyone finished the download....

Great collection of big box games here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3w5wbSDQs4

Great video, unfortunately many of the more fancy boxes never were released in Europe. Like that Gabriel Knight one.

 

[NEO0MJ]

Even though I was mostly a console kid I loved playing on the PC. Those old boxes were so cool, even if they were wasteful.

 

[Berto]

 

[Window]

I pretty much always played consoles when I was a kid but I remember going to my cousin's during the holidays in the late 90s and he had this CD titled 'Sega Gold' with a bunch of Sega games which he played on the PC. I remember playing Aladdin (spent a long escaping the prison), WWE, TMNT, Alien, Brian Lara Cricket, MK and a ton others. Games were usually loaded up using some sort of terminal interface. If they really were Sega games, I don't how it would be possible unless emulation was that good that early. Also remember some sort of Lode Runner esque game with jet packs and of course a lot of Doom.

 

[crazyrabbits]

Getting home from school to play this with a few friends with a laggy connection.
Some of my friends thought I was crazy for actually installing the cinematics.

I actually picked up a physical copy of this a few weeks back at a second-hand store. I'm ashamed to say I never played any of the Diablo games. Working to fix that.

I still think it's a shame this was never released in the US:

Don't know about that, but the Lucasarts Archives collections were way better. I received this as a gift from my aunt one Christmas back many years ago:

X-Wing and TIE Fighter CE's, Dark Forces, DFII/DFII Mysteries of the SIth samplers, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter demo, Yoda Stories and Making Magic, Still one of the best game collections I've ever had.

 

[_Ryo_]

I can confirm that CDs were not the essence of the shareware era.

It was disks. It was floppy tape, son. The 5.25 inch variety.

And they were used on these behemoths

That were placed inside or most often near one of these type of things

And your AAA games were

Where adventure games reigned supreme.

And you had to use MSDOS command lines

And then 3.5 inch came, and went, and zip drives and CD-ROM drives. Relics of days gone by. (except some of us still use them!)

 

[Just take it with you.]

See old versions of Scorched Earth as an example.

I'm glad I looked this up just now, because now I have the name of the game that I remember sometimes playing in the school computer lab.

 

[Stallion Free]

Wolfenstein was terrifying and stressful. Young me couldn't really handle it beyond the first level or so.

Multiplayer on dial up was dreadful too. I remember trying Delta Force 1 or 2 and the latency was crazy.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

X-Wing and TIE Fighter CE's, Dark Forces, DFII/DFII Mysteries of the SIth samplers, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter demo, Yoda Stories and Making Magic, Still one of the best game collections I've ever had.

The collection I listed was released several years after that one. And as I mentioned earlier, the older DOS games were updated to run natively in WinXP, so it wasn't just a lazy rebundle.

 

[Bleepey]

I recall the cereal box-sized game boxes, patches on discs, shareware, praying I could find a game that my 133mhz PC could run, wondering what games I could play without a soundcard cos my 133 MHz PC with <8mb graphics couldn't play shit, playing a lot of the Age of empires Gold collection, playing MDK cos it was one of the few games my pc could run, not playing MDK 2 cos my PC couldn't run it, not being able to play MDK 1 cos my shit PC somehow got shitter, somehow.

 

[Rikkun]

I kinda miss playing around with MS-DOS

 

[Deleted member 102362]

Jumping from shady site to shady site to get patch 1.01 > 1.02-1.07 > 1.08 > 1.09 just to play some multiplayer with friends.

I sincerely don't miss this shit.

 

[DryvBy]

My pre-steam PC gaming experience involved fiddling with things like this

Just to launch the game. I don't miss it.

Yeah, but I bet you didn't have a back catalog like you do with Steam! You were putting in those caveman slider codes to play a game, not sample it.

 

[Wyndstryker]

I kinda miss playing around with MS-DOS

Nowadays, whenever I'm in a DOS screen throwing commands out people think I'm a computer wizard...

Back in the day we needed DOS screens just to navigate around a computer.

 

[Hesemonni]

I remember copying Wing Commander with MS-DOS's backup and restore commads from my friend's computer. At that time I didn't even know there were different kinds of 3.5" floppy disks. Of course I had bought DD disks (720KB instead of 1.44MB). That evening ended up being a bit longer than I had estimated.

Grand times.

E: Also, config.sys and autoexec.bat wizardry were good times.

"DOS=HIGH, UMB"

 

[fluffydelusions]

 

[crazyrabbits]

The collection I listed was released several years after that one. And as I mentioned earlier, the older DOS games were updated to run natively in WinXP, so it wasn't just a lazy rebundle.

The third Lucasarts Archives release was similar to the bundle you quoted.

It had Afterlife, Dig, Full Throttle, Monkey Island I/II, Dark Forces and a bunch of demos (Curse of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones Desktop Adventures, Outlaws, Dark Forces II, Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, Yoda Stories).

 

[Big_Al]

Ah the memories of BBS, I remember rooting around BBS seeing what kinda cool shit they had back in the day.

 

[L Thammy]

Someone told me that there's a button you can use to speed past that damn yeti. I think it was F or spacebar? Can't remember. I should try it sometime.

 

[Vecks]

Pretty much all I played pre-steam were lucas arts stuff and blizzard stuff. While I enjoyed those earlier years, steam has been an amazing experience.

 

[drotahorror]

I pretty much always played consoles when I kid but I remember going to my cousin's during the holidays in the late 90s and he had this CD titled 'Sega Gold' with a bunch of Sega games which he played on the PC. I remember playing Aladdin (spent a long escaping the prison), WWE, TMNT, Alien, Brian Lara Cricket, MK and a ton others. Games were usually loaded up using some sort of terminal interface. If they really were Sega games, I don't how it would be possible unless emulation was that good that early. Also remember some sort of Lode Runner esque game with jet packs and of course a lot of Doom.

I'd say it was definitely an emulator. SNES and Genesis emulator's have been around since the late 90's.

 

[SonyToo!™]

Bugs that corrupted every save were a common occurrence, I don't miss that side of PC gaming one bit.

 

[Jarrod38]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wei0C21LBNM

 

[Stallion Free]

Yo that was nightmare fuel.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

The third Lucasarts Archives release was similar to the bundle you quoted.



It had Afterlife, Dig, Full Throttle, Monkey Island I/II, Dark Forces and a bunch of demos (Curse of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones Desktop Adventures, Outlaws, Dark Forces II, Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, Yoda Stories).

I know, but again those were the original DOS versions in many cases. And again, the packaging wasn't that great - they were a bunch of discs with no cases.

They were nice bundles at the time if you didn't already own the games. I'm just saying it's a shame the newer updated bundle was never released in the US when, at the time, those older bundles weren't really being sold anymore.

 

[crazyrabbits]

I know, but again those were the original DOS versions in many cases. And again, the packaging wasn't that great - they were a bunch of discs with no cases.

They were nice bundles at the time if you didn't already own the games.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. You had to see the packaging in person to appreciate it. Besides, most of the Lucasarts games I bought came in odd packaging - Behind the Magic had a cardboard case, for instance.

 

[Demigod Mac]

They got creative with the boxes sometimes: