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[XiaNaphryz]

You had to see the packaging in person to appreciate it.

I've seen that packaging several times, I was a huge LucasArts fanboy growing up - when they first came out, when I bought one as a gift for someone, and leftover stock sitting around during my time at LucasArts.

 

[lazygecko]

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

Been around since the mid 90's, even (I think there were NES and Game Boy emulators around as early as 1994).

The sound in early emulators was... interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo_MLmfpwzw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqfPbEwS-7Y

 

[Durante]

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.

I also had separate EMS, XMS and whatever configuration for different games.

Master of Magic was another picky one IIRC.

Those were the times. When you show these modern-day PC gamers a config file they run screaming

 

[crazyrabbits]

I've seen that packaging several times, I was a huge LucasArts fanboy growing up - when they first came out, when I bought one as a gift for someone, and leftover stock sitting around during my time at LucasArts.

Indeed, it was great stuff.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

I also had separate EMS, XMS and whatever configuration for different games.

Master of Magic was another picky one IIRC.

Those were the times. When you show these modern-day PC gamers a config file they run screaming

IRQ conflicts were the trickiest depending on your setup and how your motherboard handled it. The worst were the ones that had the IRQs set to specific slots, so you had to physically move cards around to make a switch.

 

[_Ryo_]

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

 

[jimmypop]

Falcon 3.0 put my poor 386SX into a world of hurt. Custom autoexec.bat, EMS and himem makes me glad to be a modern gamer. I'd spend an afternoon just getting a game to load.

 

[Rolodzeo]

Pre-Steam PC gaming era for GAF: Minesweeper, Sierra, Doom, 5 1/4" floppies, DOS...

 

[plainr_]

Those big ass floppy disks.

I don't really remember the name, but there was this one western typing game that was my go to game on the computer lab at school.

 

[eot]

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

It was also utterly broken at release and the developer was shut down before they could fix it luckily one of them leaked the source, but still.

 

[Armaros]

Old style manuals.

Homeworld is still one of best. Same for Ground Control.

They were the codex for games before wikis and ingame codex became popular.

 

[drotahorror]

Those big ass floppy disks.

I don't really remember the name, but there was this one western typing game that was my go to game on the computer lab at school.

5.25" floppy disks
five and a quarter
fun stuff. not.

 

[Wiktor]

And the early days of CDROm were so cool. I wanted to play Mad Dog McRee so badly But had no CD drive. So I went to local pirate and copied it into floppies.. AFAIR it was 112 floppies in total. Had only like 15, so with counting in bad copies I had to go like 10 times

 

[MrCunningham]

The shareware era experience was downloading at 14.4kbps

For me it was either making copies of disks from friends or buying them near the checkout line at the local grocery mart.

I have fond memories of buying Apogee and Epic shareware games:

 

[rockmanjoe]

That moment when I installed my first 3D video card and booted a Need for Speed 2 SE demo I wanted to play so badly... (3dfx voodoo 1 in my case) The thing was like sorcery, goddamnnn

On top of that, it came with Descent 2 and Mechwarrior 2, two of the greatest games ever. And a bunch of other games too. Best bundle ever.

 

[fantomena]

Using GamersHell and FilePlanet to get my patches and each 100MB patch used about 1-3 hours to download.

I don't miss those days at all.

 

[Daffy Duck]

I remember all the talk of Steam launching, was a right shit storm.

Such good memories of those late 90's gaming memories.

The 9800 Pro was godly. Such an awesome upgrade.

 

[Tu101uk]

Ah, the days of installing DOS games. What joy...

- Exit to DOS (Windows 3.11 and 95 didn't like running DOS games in a window)
- Install from floppy/CD
- Configure sound settings (Soundblaster Pro or 16, 220/5/1 or 220/7/1 depending on my computer's mood)
- Try running game. No luck? Check expanded memory (thankfully more games started using extended memory later on).
- Expanded memory too low? Run MEMMAKER. No dice? Edit autoexec.bat and config.sys until non-essential stuff stops loading.
- Try again... and (usually) success!

Seriously, running a computer with 8MB RAM, a 60Hz Pentium and 600MB hard disk space taught me so much about troubleshooting computer problems, I'd recommend anyone who spends more than two minutes with their PC to go through similar trauma. Was so much fun though...

PS - SimCity 2000's manual was nice and thick, loved the bits of general knowledge and humour dotted around. Maxis, where hath you gone...?

 

[MRORANGE]

PC ganging in late 90's early 00's had some amazing bo xart and extra content with games, that is probably the only thing I miss about pre-steam days.

What I hated:

- having to manually patch a game to get it working on MP
- reading the .txt file to see why my game wouldn't start
- having to wait a few good minutes to load some games
- trying to get midi gamepads to fucking show up at all on windows,, holy fuck this was shit.
-managing to fuck up drive letters and my games not load or booting from CD-ROM/Hard drive.
- having my shit stolen, one time I opened my UT99 CD case and seeing no disc because on of my family decided it was okay to take.

 

[Grayman]

Here is an oldie. If you had a joystick you had to configure it in each game each time you launched it. Leave the stick centred and hit a button, push to top left hit a button, bottom left hit a button. Watch the cursor or space craft drift around the screen because shit wasn't machined that well back then and the controller picked up movement before it reached its mechanical resistance.

So you bought a PC game.
Will it run on your computer?
Who the fuck knows?

For me they "ran" 99% of the time. Played sound 60% of the time. Crashed after half an hour 50% of the time.

 

[watership]

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

Ahh the glory days of manuals, flight sticks and space/flight sims. I miss that era. PC gaming is far easier to get into these days, but I feel the cost of the high end cards has gone up, while the rest of the PC cost has dropped. I think GPU makers take advantage of the PC enthusiasts who will always want the latest and greatest, while optimization/coding takes a back seat.

Now I'm having flashbacks of origin games memory requirements, expanded memory,irqs and games that required dongles for copy protection. Whew, a different world.

 

[Grayman]

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.

Seems really possible. The Gameboy was playable in DOS by the time pokemon was out. I know by 1999 there was a wrestling game mostly SNES rom community.

 

[WAR recon zero]

Shareware Games, lots of doom and duke, demos demos demos and thousand of hours in aoe.

Internet Gaming Zone, discovering emulators on irc, playing bleem! On PC without sound, and some gems i forgot

Mdk! Editing autoexec.bat for The weird soundblaster settings. Making scenarios and maps for doom and aoe.

 

[ipukespiders]

This got delivered Oct 31, 1996. Switching from software mode to 3D acceleration was mind blowing.

 

[lazygecko]

This got delivered Oct 31, 1996. Switching from software mode to 3D acceleration was mind blowing.

*click click*

 

[ipukespiders]

*click click*

Hearing that click sound for the first time that day... holy shit that don't sound right!!

 

[Asparagus]

Wiping Windows 95 from my second hand pc and installing my friends copy of 98SE when I didn't have any driver discs for my hardware... (it was my first PC and I didn't have a clue what the fuck I was doing, good learning experience though).

Doing a full install of Baldurs Gate on my 6.4GB HDD because I hated swapping discs.

Playing the Cossacks: European Wars demo that came with an issue of PC Zone and being amazed at how many Germans there were online.

Being really excited to play Star Wars Episode 1 Racer and then having the game refuse to boot because I only had 28MB of usable memory (still to this day not sure what this was about, I think my system was using 4MB for onboard video?). It was probably really easy to get around it but I was completely stumped at the time.

Playing C&C and being blown away by how high res everything was (compared to the PSX versions).

Buying Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines and being unable to get past the start screen because it was so buggy.

Hearing that click sound for the first time that day... holy shit that don't sound right!!

I thought something might be sparking inside my case when I heard it lol.

 

[Guy.brush]

games sometimes had unorthodox and really cool magazine ads back in the 80s/90s.

 

[KnightAttack]

I'm really shocked how many people are referencing only mid-90s and later games. My first memories of gaming were booting games like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Commander Keens in DoS. Heck, I remember booting into Windows 3.1 to start other games.

What a time to be alive!

Most importantly, I remember how many games I experienced at friends houses for the first time that just got put onto peoples PCs. Wolf 3D, Doom, Space Quest, random sports games, etc.

I still remember seeing Age of Empires and Half-Life for the first time. That was just insane.

 

[Luigi87]

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

The first video card I ever bought and popped into my own computer.
good times... until the day it could no longer run Half-Life 2 for me, after Source got updated when Episode One came out.

 

[uncredited male]

I remember excitedly picking up my first dedicated video card and taking it home to discover that my old ass Packard Bell had no PCI slots only ISA.

I miss the big boxes. Especially the pyramid cross-section Eidos ones. I don't miss the booklet copy protection schemes.

 

[disap.ed]

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

Reminds me of my first bought PC game: Jane's AH-64D Longbow
I bought it before I even had a PC.

 

[rtcn63]

Shareware Pac-Man clones on my cousin's Mac. Never again.

 

[basic_element]

I'm really shocked how many people are referencing only mid-90s and later games. My first memories of gaming were booting games like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , and Commander Keens in DoS. Heck, I remember booting into Windows 3.1 to start other games.

What a time to be alive!

Most importantly, I remember how many games I experienced at friends houses for the first time that just got put onto peoples PCs. Wolf 3D, Doom, Space Quest, random sports games, etc.

I still remember seeing Age of Empires and Half-Life for the first time. That was just insane.

Just shows you are much older than the average gaffer. lol. I'm probably even older as I started with DOS in the mid-80s before windows 3.1. Never used the windows 1.0 and 2.0 shells.

I remember awesome games on 5.25 disks like karateka, one on one: Dr J vs. Larry Bird, King's Quest 1, Wizardy 1, Test Drive, Thexder, etc.

 

[Krejlooc]

Does Workbench count?

This appears to be a thread where people are claiming early PC gaming sucked.

So absolutely not

 

[Krejlooc]

Thats not a TNT2 or a 3DFX Voodoo

3DFX Voodoo wasn't a video card, it was a 3D Accelerator card. You needed a separate video card in your box besides the Voodoo.

 

[Nyoro SF]

I remember launching games in DOS.

My elementary school actually let us play games during 1st grade computer class, they had floppies with Commander Keen on them.

 

[KDR_11k]

Oh damn, just when I had suppressed my memories of fiddling with the autostart configurations to get enough of that damn "conventional" memory freed up. Or deciding whether you really needed a mouse or sound for a game.

Also having only a 7MB partition of our 35MB harddrive, could only install 1-2 games at a time, especially bigger ones like Raptor required throwing everything away.

Back in those days it was hard to find full versions of games, everybody was selling shareware only. And well, ordering stuff from the USA in the early 90s? Not gonna happen. I still mourn the time when I finally saw a copy of Tyrian 2000 on a shelf, for 50 Deutsche Marks (about 25$) and I didn't have the money to buy it. Never got another chance to get that, only got to play it once it was released as freeware (opensource?) onto the modern internet.

To this day when I hear "8 bit" in relation to gaming I think "256 colors".

Also fuck IRQs.

(I assume this is only about IBM PCs, the C64 may have been weird in different ways but at least I never had to worry about conventional memory)

 

[Infinity]

IRQ conflicts were the trickiest depending on your setup and how your motherboard handled it. The worst were the ones that had the IRQs set to specific slots, so you had to physically move cards around to make a switch.

I really don't miss this, but it made me one helluva troubleshooter.

 

[ironmang]

Loved Rogue Spear on the Zone. The Zone in general was just awesome before they turned it into a pogo ripoff. Having the chat room and lobbies made it feel like an actual community.

 

[ipukespiders]

I remember launching games in DOS.

My elementary school actually let us play games during 1st grade computer class, they had floppies with Commander Keen on them.

I remember launching games on tape. It sucked.

 

[Window]

I remember launching games in DOS.

My elementary school actually let us play games during 1st grade computer class, they had floppies with Commander Keen on them.

Oh yeah this reminds me, my first adventure games were probably Pajama Sam and Freddi Fish which we played during some of our first computer classes in school.

As an EE though, all this troubleshooting talk sounds really interesting.

 

[NeoGarrison]

I really don't know if Steam was around when I started PC Gaming. But my 2 friends of mine were huge PC gamers and one of them built my first gaming PC. I remember the thing had a amd athlon processor with 2 gigs of ram and a pretty dope graphics card.

I had played PC games as a kid but the first game I got on my first actual gaming PC was F.E.A.R and holy crap that game blew me away completely. Had to change disks to install and wait for patches and this and that. The multiplayer was too good as well. Played for so long. Steam was something I found out about years later, but sadly I never went on to play some of PC's awesome backlog on account of F.E.A.R's amazing multiplayer and the Xbox 360/Ps3 Era starting out.

 

[Arzehn]

CDs? Pssh. 6 8-inch floppy disk to play wolf3d, take notes Square.

 

[whiteninja]

Had to boot out if windows 95 and in dos to get wing commander games running. I don't remember what I did but somehow I screwed something up and the PC wouldn't boot into windows again. Had to call Microsoft tech support(the only time I've ever done this) to figure out how to get back into windows.

 

[uncredited male]

More useless ruminations:

Flipping through a shareware catalog and ordering a couple dozen floppy games. Waiting each day for them to arrive and then they finally get there and are all complete garbage with the exception of Commander Keen and Moraff's World.

Picking up a Street Fighter II x Fatal Fury crossover on a 3.5 at some convention.

Getting my first sound card and playing X-Wing and Dune II first. Glorious.

Staying in school in the evenings so I could play the text adventure games on the Apple IIs.

Playing this beauty.

Making some great impulse buys with no prior knowledge. Lands of Lore, Betrayal at Krondor, Fallout, Deus Ex, the Kryandia Series, Diablo.

Speaking of Diablo I ran it on a computer that couldn't run it. I would actually take 1-2 seconds for each frame of animation to display. It would take around half a minute for a single weapon swing to complete. I got to floor 20 like this. Dedication. Got my new computer and the first thing I loaded was Diablo and I freaked out with the speed. The enemies were moving like someone stepped on an ant mound.

 

[ThaiGrocer]

this:

Still have this sitting around somewhere. Same model, same brand. It came with a screw-in joystick handle. I was excited to finally get to use the joystick port when I first got it.

 

[Data West]

Worst part was no kind of standards of box dimensions on PC retail boxes. So your collection was a mess.

Why does this need to be shaped this way?!

 

[disastermouse]

Those giant cardboard boxes that had a few floppy discs inside always puzzled me. Such a waste.

Shelf space domination.

 

[uncredited male]

Worst part was no kind of standards of box dimensions on PC retail boxes. So your collection was a mess.

Why does this need to be shaped this way?!

Cause that is awesome.

*Pets FFVII box*