/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8130207
PC gaming in the 80s was not PC gaming of today. PCs were also ridiculously expensive compared to what you can get now.

>>8130207
pc had shit in terms of arcade style games back then, rather just run around outside than waste time on 80s pc shovelware

>>8130207
90's PC gaming was huge, dumbass. 80's PC gaming was nothing to write home about.

>>8130227
>80's PC gaming was nothing to write home about.
Cringe.

>>8130207
>why did burgers choose a machine with hardware optimized to 2d games instead of playing alley cat or forbidden forest?
sneed

Bruh if I showed you the PC games I played as a kid you'd understand why consoles were superior.

Shit that a kid could get their hands on was just lame shareware shit for 386 era games well into the windows 98 era.

You should instead ask how PC gaming went from being huge in the 90s to being perpetually labeled as a dying platform in the following decade. Even worse since it was the 2000s when home computers really started entering the average household, you'd imagine they'd want to capitalize on this new market.

>>8130274
Microsoft put a lot of money into pushing the narrative. They made 0 dollars from the sale of PC games, and a lot of money from the sale of Xbox games.

except it did though? Apple II, C64, DOS PC shit were huge factor in shaping the US gaming industry. if you play a US-developed NES game like this one, it looks like a DOS game right down to the text font.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJqEWx9WtnY

Americans have higher standards when it comes to games than Yuroids.

Believe it or not, we wanted actual games, not shovelware made by some college student his 1 room apartment.

>>8130207
>80s-90s

I didn't enjoy the beep-boop. Adlib card sounded a bit off.

>>8130207
PC games had nothing until Doom came out.
NOTHING, you fucking hear me?

>>8130207
the apple 2 had a lot of games and was probably the most popular computer in america during the 1980s
in the early 1990s it was dos, before windows became the center of pc gaming, and a lot of the most popular games were originally made for dos
a lot of people played games on pc back then but i think the general public just wasn't used to using computers and a lot of times didn't own one, nowadays we take knowing how to use a computer for granted because it's part of elementary school
i think normies liked game consoles because they were easy to set up and use and pretty much guaranteed graphics and sound that were up to standard for the time, also by the late 1980s there were some really popular games that were exclusive to nintendo or sega machines
also, until the late 1980s, gaming was centered around arcades because the best graphics and sound were there (consoles wouldn't catch up until the late 1990s); arcades also remained the center of competitive gaming until the mid-2000s or so

>>8130318
Hey, Monkey Island exists, you shut the fuck up!

I hate to say it but even in Europe retro console gaming gets a lot more press these days and only aging Gen Xer nerds still gives a shit about ZX Spectrum and Amiga shit.

>>8130321
Everyone who had access to a computer played games on one. The issue was that not everyone had computers at home. If they didn't, they played games on computers they had access to at work or school.

>>8130260
what games did you play? tell us.

>>8130207
PCs weren't outright better than consoles until the start of 1998 for most gaming (you can make an argument for slightly earlier if you had a very fast CPU for the time).
PCs were also way more expensive than getting a console. For less than $500, often less than $200,

if you weren't big on simulation games, WRPGs, or strategy, PC gaming seemed like a barren wasteland full of sidescrollers with extremely choppy screen scrolling because no hardware sprites/tilemaps and later on, 3D games that needed a PC that was like 4x the price of a launch PS1 to play at more than 13fps

>>8130274
PC went from "woah, it's good" with a bunch of top name made-for-PC first releases in the late 90s to being eternally saddled with console ports by the mid 00s.

>>8130384
>PC gaming seemed like a barren wasteland full of sidescrollers with extremely choppy screen scrolling because no hardware sprites/tilemaps and later on
how is it ZX Spectrum games could have smooth scrolling with 3Mhz CPU and frame buffer graphics but giant hulking $3000 PC with 3x faster CPU can't do it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWwZLsMd9TY

>>8130384
PC wishes it had console ports, it did miss out on a ton of games and many PC publishers ditched PC entirely.

>>8130412
What actually actually really hurt PC gaming in the mid 2000s was not failing to get ports of shitty 7th gen garbage. It was every single PC developer chasing World of Warcraft and releasing knock off MMOs.

>>8130207
>why is it Americans never embraced PC master race in the 80s-90s and only play console games
OP is a lying piece of shit again

worst thread on /vr/

>>8130207
murricans did, the C64 was still selling into the late 80s, people had Ataris, Tandys, etc
MS-DOS machines? Those were pretty expensive. In 1987 you could get a Tandy from Radio Shack for about $1200 and that was the price coming down.

>>8130207
You underestimate on average how expensive PC's were to families and consumers until the mid to late '90s.

>>8130207
no one will ever care about the ZX Spectrum, guys

>>8130207
PC isn't really a brand, and americans can only follow and worship brands

>>8130207
>why is it Americans never embraced PC master race in the 80s-90s
I guess all those popular PC games made by american companies were for europeans

>>8130207
Because us yanks didn't have access to glorious European-developed Amiga videogames.

>>8130418
The stagnation of the PC game market can be summed up with the following.

-PS2 is by and far the most popular platform, so much so that other versions *combined* wouldn't even sell half as many games.
-Xbox was designed to be a DirectX machine to make game development easier, at least for PC devs, and thus unofficially filled in for PC.
-Most games were made for PS2 first and foremost, which utilized a proprietary framebuffer, which made porting much harder; it's why so many PC ports lack visual features.
-Game distribution was abysmal. For example, even though MGS2 for PC got an American release, it's nearly impossible to track down, you'll only find Euro copies. Because it was hard to get games legally, many people turned to piracy, which didn't help the huge piracy stigma.

All these combined are why so many games lacked PC versions, or if they did get them, they were shoddily made, lacked features, or were entirely different. What in hell possessed Activision to make Spiderman 2, and only Spiderman 2, an entirely different game for PC remains a mystery. At least Shrek 2 got the proper game ported as well as an obligatory 'shitty kids game' version. Wouldn't this be considered false advertising?

PC gaming was fucking shit. Just look how long it took before smooth scrolling was a thing while consoles could easily do it lmao

>>8131485
It makes me wonder, why weren't the Amiga and C64 as huge in the US as in Europe? They seemed to be orders of magnitude faster than DOS systems of the time and far more capable, yet it was business machines that were popular here.

>>8131872
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxKElA7Z97Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZvt2z-fBPc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfbzPiKF1J4

well this 1984 CGA shit scrolls pretty nicely so you tell me

>>8131884
Commodore 64s were popular here, I even played on one a bit when I was really little.

IIRC, Commodore's American branch had shitty management later on and bungled the Amiga.

>>8131884
C64 was plenty popular here, the Amiga not really.

>They seemed to be orders of magnitude faster than DOS systems of the time
One of them is 1.2Mhz and the other is 7.16Mhz and PCs were getting faster every six months. When the Amiga first came out in 85 you pretty much only had 8088 PCs and the first 286s which were just 6Mhz but by 1990 you had 16Mhz 386s and soon 20.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaiaL7zXZGE

what gave PCs a bad name in that time were shitty un-optimized crap written in Turbo C or something

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEb2tihJZm0

whereas Bubble Bobble is properly optimized and runs nicely

>>8131903
nevertheless the Amiga would've been more capable of playing arcade style games than any DOS system of the era, assuming of course they were competently programmed. NTSC C64 games tend to top the quality of the system, I feel like burger Amiger games would've been better as well. Assuming the 80s and 90's had the same console-port mania that we have today, at what year would PCs be able to surpass Amigers in power/features? Ya know, if Square wanted to port Chrono Trigger, would the Amiga still be better or would Windows PCs be able to handle a port?

>>8130207
>buy a PC in the 80s and 90s
Costs thousands of burgers and literally made useless in 18 months by moore’s law
>buy a game console
Cost pennies and lasted nearly a decade

now i've noticed that Atari ST and even some ZX Spectrum games have smooth scrolling and faster framerate than PC games although they don't have hardware scrolling at all

>>8132191
EGA and VGA cards do have scroll registers of a sort but most games didn't use them. This was because some clone cards didn't implement the vscroll feature and games also had to support CGA which lacked any hardware scrolling.

>>8131893
In the early CGA days PCs could more than hold their own at action games. There are plenty of titles like Cosmic Crusader, Digger, etc that play acceptably and in fact manage a higher framerate than some of the 8-bit machines because the 8086 was a comparative howitzer while the 6502 was a BB gun.

In the EGA era (late 80s) PCs had shitty action games like Robocop and Contra with 15 fps speeds. by the time of VGA then it became possible to do action stuff on PCs again that actually ran decently.

>>8130207
PCs in the 1980s were expensive, more difficult to use, and most gaming was done by kids.

If you think North Americans didn't play PC games in the '90s you are completely retarded.

>>8130260
>shareware

sharing gaming warez?!?!
sounds like communism or theft if you ask me

>>8130384
>PCs weren't outright better than consoles until the start of 1998 for most gaming

wrong. snes couldn't run doom so they had to butch the doom port to make it work

>>8132812
It's a kid trolling with /v/ tactics. He has no idea what PC gaming was like back then.

>>8130338
>Everyone who had access to a computer played games on one. The issue was that not everyone had computers at home.
The bigger issue is that most Nintendo games were just much more exciting and fun for kids than computer games, most of the time. Even as a kid I recognized that Harball! was a deeper and better game in most respects than RBI Baseball, but fuck if it wasn't more fun to just sit in the living room with 2 controllers playing Nintendo with my brother than sitting at the desk on the computer. And that's before you consider games like Super Mario Brothers, Zelda, and Mega Man that simply had no analog on home computer.

>>8130207
PCs cost $5000 in the 80s.

>>8133097
>posts a flight sim cleared aimed at boomers rather than kids
This shit was what your uncle who flew 10 combat missions over Nam played.

>>8133097
gee, Lucasboy spent most of his childhood playing hardball on C64 so you tell me

kek like you could play Total Annihilation on a PS1

>>8130207
Because even the high-end PCs of the 80s weren't good for gaming, since they were general purpose machines that spread their resources to whatever features they offered, while consoles and arcades were game-only, and could put everything into gaming and anything related to it. Even PCs back then couldn't do basic side-scrolling until the likes of Commander Keen (among others) came along.

>>8130229
You're a chronocentric retard.

>>8133097
That's purely an American problem that they weren't capable of anything but autistic simulators while European kids had Dizzy, Turrican, Creatures, Jack the Nipper, Jet Set Willy, Chuckie Egg, Giana Sisters, etc.

>>8130274
Console games always sold better and had higher profits

>>8130538
As far as gaming though, it was more the exception than the norm. 1200 was a lot of money, you could buy much more useful things (to the average person) than a computer with that kind of dough. If you really wanted games, you could buy a Nintendo for a fraction of that price. Computer was a work machine, and if you didn't need it, you didn't have it (meaning you had one pretty much only if your job demanded or greatly benefited from it).

>>8131287
Well another thing is that people at this point who played computer games in the 80s are probably not the people posting here.

>>8131832
Shit, you reminded me of that Spider-Man 2 version. Goddamn travesty by comparison.

>>8133204
>If you really wanted games, you could buy a Nintendo for a fraction of that price.
But then again the games were $50 a piece and you couldn't pirate them and give copies to your m8s at school. Or even to make your own game for that matter.

>>8132838
Doom was probably the first game that absolutely couldn't work on console hardware, note that the snes port came two years later and relied on super fx 2. Then again, there were multiple ports to beefier systems, some of which were fine. The main problem was the game has a fucking cursed legacy for porting. Either incompetence or outright sabotage were to blame for many of them.

good point. in Sweden Nintendo games were terribly expensive for the average family so you just buy your child C64 and games are cheap and copyable cassettes.

>>8133217
>Doom was probably the first game that absolutely couldn't work on console hardware
a decade before that, this wasn't working on any console.

>>8133214
Aside from having rentals and bargain bins, it wasn't considered that big a problem. Americans didn't see much issue with paying for games. Maybe you only got one game a year, but rentals filled the gap just fine. Incidentally, notice which industry gets strong support and development to this day, and which has had its old guard bought and sold by EA to rape their corpses. Piracy is hardly something to cheer about; It begats little but a dead industry and fandom who feel they deserve everything for nothing, like the special snowflakes on social media.

>>8133223
Needed to be stressed. I don't know what Americans did but in Europe the general consumer mindset was that the computer cost more out of the box but since you could have a nearly limitless supply of games that made up for it.

>>8133235
Doesn't really count if no one ever tried, does it?

PCs (as in PC compatibles) were not very consumer friendly back then, yet C64 was as simple and appliance-like as it could get. But still you had people who'd buy the things and put it in a closet and forget about it because they couldn't handle typing LOAD"*",8,1 to start a game. i figured that out when I was 6 years old but literal grown ass adult found it too much.

>>8133235
Genuinely curious but why wouldn't CW be possible on consoles?

>>8133198
>implying those games were fun

>>8133286
>stop having fun in a way I don't approve of

PC didn't get really good until the mid 90s

>>8133204
i don't think some anon get that back in that time people with computer usually had a dad who worked in IT. the average blue collar dad had no reason to have computer.

Look at the size of the US. In the big cities game copying culture could easily exist. I'm from a rural place. I encountered it at a young age when my dad bought a Tandy 1000 with a bunch of pirated games for $50 but it would be a long time before I had another brush with it. There were so many factors working against it being mainstream. You had to be into phone phreaking and computers or know people who were. Broadband internet finally opened up the floodgates in the 2000s and my family had a reason to buy a computer.

>>8131832
>Game distribution was abysmal
I feel this has one of the biggest problems. The early 2000s is when all the electronics stores started to bleed money. And once those were gone, all you really had left were the barebones selections at your Walmarts/Targets, Best buy, and if you were lucky a microcenter/frys

>>8133204
>replying to multiple posts
I sure hope you don't...

>>8133261
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaejwInoRPw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5h1smUA4lQ

how the fuck could PCfags think this was at all acceptable?

>>8133198
>Turrican
Turrican is a 1990 game and by this point the competition is 16-bit consoles so Super Mario World, Sonic the Hedgehog, etc. So again the home computers lose except in the specific genres it was good at (CRPGs, Simulators, Adventure games, etc.)

>>8133492
SMW and Sonic were still a year away yet in '90.

Well, the Amiga would probably have been more successful if it hadn't been tied to TV-frequencies even if it then had missed any video capabilities. The video stuff was something to brag about but few users actually made any use of.

The market just preferred the dominant format for business, didn't care if the Amiga had 4k colors and the PC had 16, they wanted a high res (640x400 minimum), a hard disk and the applications, that simply didn't exist on the Amiga. Seems the biggest problem was the lack of hard disk controller and a normal high res mode. The applications could be made in house in the end, but looks like Commodore didn't have a clue what they were doing.

>>8133498
Yeah, so Turrican had a very brief window where it was impressive, at the very tail end of the C64's era of relevance in the first place.

>>8130335
Click-and-watch-animation games were a coping mechanism.

>>8133556
>Click-and-watch-animation games were a coping mechanism.

Ain't falling for that again.

I never figured out if OP meant PC compatibles or just computer in general.

>>8133480
>shovelware arcade port made by known hacks Quicksilver
Do you do the same for US Gold Amiga ports?

i wonder if the Atari ST was the computer IBM originally wanted to build with a 68k and off the shelf parts.

>>8133492
>>8133553
isn't it unfair comparing aging hardware like C64 and Amiga with 16-bit consoles which were new stuff in 1990?

>>8133365
Yeah, the only people I knew who had computers in the 80s were accountants and computer programmers/teachers. Even office work was almost strictly done on typewriters and word processors before companies bothered to move to computers.

Only an 80s PC gamer would consider Commander Keen to be any more noteworthy than Alfred Chicken or Snaperazzi in the grand history of games. Any attempt to bring it into a historical narrative is history revisionism, as is any mention of Carmack’s scrolling technique.

>>8133759
It's always amusing when people try to back pedal and pretend they meant something completely different than what's really been said. Bonus points awarded for trying to be snarky and disingenuous at the same time.

Commander Keen is somewhat noteworthy in the history of PC gaming, but it's a very small-sized milestone. This is down to the fact you're strenuously trying to ignore: that PC has always had a different gaming audience then consoles, and partially home computers (mixed bag). there's more to vidya than just scrolling action games, and PCs strength has always been in the adventure/RPG/IF/sim/strategy genres, later 3D FPS. One glance at the post-CK PC gaming landscape should be enough to establish it did not really make such great waves outside of the PC-shareware market niche, and definitely is not a proof of the alleged uninventiveness of PC devs prior to its release .

>>8133765
>there's more to vidya than just scrolling action games
There is?
>and PCs strength has always been in the adventure/RPG/IF/sim/strategy genres
None of those are actual games though.

>>8130207
>80s
Nah, crusty but important RPG and sim prototypes on expensive, underspec'd machines. Action games not even worthy of mentioning compared to their arcade and console counterparts I still love playing shitty DOS games but I can see why most people slept on it
>90s
We did, though.

>>8133759
who the fuck ever cared about Alfred Chicken?

With CGA at least it was an issue that you had a fixed 16k of video RAM and so double buffering wasn't possible when even the Apple II could do that.

>>8130207
PCs didn't get a good price/performance balance until about 1992. In the 80s they were definitely licked by 8-bit machines and the Amiga.

>>8133778
>None of those are actual games though

Only if they're on a PC-98, we know.

IDK, I played lots of PC games as a kid and until I came to /vr/ I never knew I was suffering and not having any fun.

>>8134237
how old are you, anon? this is important.

>>8134285
I'm 33. Why that?

>>8134295
not fair because by the time you were old enough to play vidya, it was the post-Doom era when PCs had been tamed and civilized. that's not the same thing as 80s PCs with shit EGA graphics, bleeper sound, and obtuse keyboard controls.

like seriously why the fuck would you think a 10 year old in the late 80s would find this more fun and dynamic than Ninja Gaiden?

>>8133105
The amount of digital jargon-diareah is almost too delicious in this.

>>8130207
PC was kind of garbage for gaming until 386 and VGA became standard, around 1990.
Before that though, we had Apple II and Commodore 64. NES was more popular for sure, but there were plenty of kids playing computer games.
After that, RTS and FPS games got really big. The late 90s were the golden age of LAN parties. Getting your friends together, everyone bringing their computer, at someone's house, setting up a network, and playing Warcraft 2 or Quake all night long...

>>8130229
>muh shitty inferior ports that *I* like because *I* played them as a kid and didn't know any better
Serious Speccy-tier cope, almost all those 80s PC games you like had a better version on a different computer.

>>8133759
When they're talking about Commander Keen being good they mean 4-6. Keen 1-3 are total PCjank. It's the type of crap you think of when you think old crappy Dos game with PC speaker beeps. You can't call those objectively good games, at best they're "good for PCjank"

>>8134298
Not him, but i'm around the same age (born late 88) and i started playing DOS games very early on when i was a literal toddler. I have memories of playing the first Commander Keen (EGA if i'm not mistaken) with the bleeper sound aka 'PC speaker', and also Budokan: The Martial Spirit. Later we got sharewares of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, which i wasn't allowed to play yet due to my age (but i usually sneaked in and spectated my dad and older brother play it). So i never actually played games from the CGA era, but i got a taste from the EGA/PC speaker era (which was still amazing to me as a kid). The very first DOS game i ever touched was the Snoopy game, but i was so young i had no clue what to do whatsoever. It had PC speaker sound, and a very early support for VGA cards but i believe we played it in EGA at the time.

>>8136103
>>8134320
>quit having fun in a way I don't approve of

>>8137226
Are you ESL?

>>8137226
Nobody said you couldn't have fun playing them. Only explaining why somebody who didn't grow up playing an ibm-compatible shitbox might not have the same appreciation for crappy ega graphics and pc speaker sound when every other console and computer at the time was better.

>>8133750
>isn't it unfair comparing aging hardware like C64 and Amiga with 16-bit consoles which were new stuff in 1990?
I'm not comparing hardware that is the point. The comparison is games and game libraries and what players at the time were likely to care about given any particular set of options. The delusion is that Americans were missing out on Turrican when in fact nobody cared because by the time it came out, the NES had already won that generation in a landslide. There might have been a brief window when the NES kids playing Mega Man 3 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might have been envious of Turrican if they'd known about it. But this would have been quickly replaced by envy of people playing F-Zero, Super Mario World, ActRaiser, and Super Castlevania IV. (Or Sonic and other Genesis games)

>>8130274
PC hardware/driver compatibility was still a clusterfuck until 32-bit Windows finally started dying off.

>>8130207
why is it that eurofags never made any games in the 90s that revolutionized an entire genre?

>>8138803
Eurofags who could make good games graduated to consoles.

Why is there so many nintendo vs [insert eurocomputer] shitposting? Just one guy samefagging or discord raid?

>>8138906
>posts one of the worst UK devs to instantly disprove his own argument

>>8138928
List 5 better Bri'ish devs than Rare. You can't.

>>8138928
How could you ever say Rare is bad? They are respected and were financially successful. Only maybe Psychosis can say the same, but they were a publisher.

>>8130207
>Cheap-ass Pentium 1 Packard-Bell piece of shite
$800 if you were lucky
>Nicer machine with high-end modern parts
$3000 or more, even if you built it yourself
>3DFX Voodoo Card
$400 at-least
>AOL Dialate-Up internet
$0.75 every hour, plus phone bill

Gee, I wonder why...?

>>8138969
[spiler]Holy fuck just realized this 27" GE TV is the same model my parents had while I was growing up, all the way until 2011. Anyone know what model of TV this is exactly so I know what to keep an eye out for?[/spoiler]

>>8133683
They're both cope but one of them has actually good art.

>>8133759
Yet faggots will say how great Jap PC games were like the horrible, jank as fuck Xanadu.

>>8138981
>27GT613
It says the model number right there, genius.

>>8138969
Why do you factor in Internet? Internet was not a mandatory requirement to game until 2012 or so. PC games used to be bought in stores, digital distribution is a relatively new thing.

>>8138960
He's probably one of those fags who have an irrational hatred for rare's 3D platfrmers.

>>8130278
>Xbox
Yeah, but the original Xbox was designed to put game developers ONTO Windows. That was the whole point of DirectX support(which was also done to save Windows because game developers were already sick and tired of developing for Windows when 1995 was fast approaching) and using a heavily modified version of Windows NT kernel on lightly modified hardware.

>>8139640
I meant to say Windows 2000. The Windows NT kernel is pretty much unmodified outside of DirectX being directly incorporated into it.

>>8130278
It wasn't a narrative. Pc gaming genuinely was dying and even to this day has only barely recovered

>>8130397
The spectrum was updating the screen RAM directly whereas on PC the VRAM was separate and accessed across a surprisingly slow ISA bus. Doing load-modify-store on PC was straight death, you could double buffer in system ram then copy to the display which was only just slow as opposed to deathly slow. The problem is that the CPU is halted waiting on the bus, so you can neither do useful things in between pixels, nor can you fix it with a faster CPU. Other systems would have had some kind of DMA that could do the transfer in the background, but PC DMA was designed around sending a buffer to a port rather than moving blocks from one memory mapped segment to another.
Pretty much anything you can possibly think of that would be useful to a game developer the PC either didn't have it or it implemented it in a way that wasn't usable. It was built to process data in bulk and update screen regions to show results, it just wasn't designed for realtime graphics.

>>8130207
You're delusional and probably underage. PC gaming has always existed side by side with consoles in the states. Shit like Doom, Quake, Half-life, Baldur's Gate and a shit load of other classics were all widely played here.

>>8132197
They weren't useful. Like everything in the VGA spec they were to solve a very specific problem relating to either terminals or planar shenanigans and they were next to useless for full screen games.

>>8131921
Bubble Bobble is static backgrounds and sprites overlaid. Using "dirty rectangles" and similar techniques you can greatly reduce the amount of pixels you have to update per frame. Robocop is doing full screen scrolling and therefor can't take any shortcuts. You'll notice that bubble bobble also scrolls like shit between the level transitions.

80's PC's were extremely expensive and were not really capable of anything that involved even remotely smooth scrolling of images, so really only text or point and click adventure games were possible.

PC's couldn't compete with consoles until 1992 when i386 systems (by then a 7 year old processor) finally became affordable for home users - and such a system was still twice as expensive as any console.

>>8140037
>so really only text or point and click adventure games were possible.
>PC's couldn't compete with consoles until 1992
zoom zoom

>>8140043
Guy was saying straight facts. Here's Carmack, the god of x86 optimisation trying to get Mario 3 to run on a then current PC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YWD6Y9FUuw
At the tail end of 1990 the SNES would release which if nothing else would bring color combinations not possible in VGA from layer compositing and raster interrupts.
The PC couldn't actually bring a SNES game across in a pixel perfect fashion until Pentiums because only 16bit displays could equal the output of a SNES and only a Pentium (100? 120?) had the raw grunt to sluff all those pixels to the SVGA card at 60Hz. The 486 would have no CPU time left over if it tried.

>>8139080
Internet was still pretty important for the sake of acquiring game cracks to share with friends, assuming they didn't have their own internet and CD burner (which were far from cheap back then), and it was still borderline essential for getting driver patches and shit assuming they didn't come with the game you're playing (sometimes they did, but not always).

If you were lucky to live in a relatively nice town or neighborhood you might have access to the internet at a school, library, or internet cafe, but that wasn't always the case either. A major reason for investing in expensive PC hardware back then was getting your own online access, thus if you aren't going to get internet why the fuck else would you plunker down $3000+ on a machine that was less than two years away from being obsolete instead of just getting a console?

>>8140065
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YWD6Y9FUuw
SOVL

>>8140065
>Guy was saying straight facts
No, he was obviously lying
>>so really only text or point and click adventure games were possible.
RPGs, Sims, Strategy, Racing
>PC's couldn't compete with consoles until 1992
Wing Commander, SNES

>>8140065
>because only 16bit displays could equal the output of a SNES and only a Pentium (100? 120?) had the raw grunt to sluff all those pixels to the SVGA card at 60Hz. The 486 would have no CPU time left over if it tried

neither can a SNES for that matter. lyl.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjQ1_8hbp9I

>>8140119
I interpreted "Couldn't compete with consoles" as "couldn't have a 1:1 console-like or better experience." Where you appear to have interpreted it as "PCs don't have games as worth playing as consoles." PC to console ports were possible (until Doom) but they were usually botched rather than impossible. The reverse wasn't true though. Hard limits on screen transfers and sound hardware meant most SNES games were literally impossible on 90s PCs and almost all NES games were literally impossible on 80s PCs.

>>8131921
i'm impressed at how well Double Dragon runs. most PC coders weren't as good as these guys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9u-58Aq0tg

>>8140150
I know you're just poking fun but I'm going to address it anyway. That slows down because the game logic doesn't get done before vblank as opposed to not being able to upgrade the graphics in time. It's the reverse of the PC problem I mentioned. That said, fuck knows why it's so slow anyway, did they write the enemy logic in some VM script language or some shit?

>>8130397
>>8139945
i never thought I'd see the day /vr/ acknowledged Spectrum was the master race platform all along

>>8140160
>and almost all NES games were literally impossible on 80s PCs

a lot of the early NROM stuff like Ice Climber et al is easily possible. you might be overmatched doing Ninja Gaiden though.

>>8140171
Nah Spectrum coders have it easy because the pixel and color data are separate so you only have to move the former around. Also everything runs at the same uniform speed (3.5Mhz). The ISA bus on PCs was hard locked to 8Mhz no matter how fast the CPU is. This wasn't overcome until VESA.

i'm sketchy about the emulator videos linked in here and how these games would run on real machine

I need to point out that x86 code optimisation would always be tricky because not everyone had the same PC unlike a ZX Spectrum, there could be widely differing CPU speeds and the internal architecture of each succeeding generation of x86 chip would change so optimisations that worked on a 286 might not work on a 386 and so on.

>>8140160
>were literally impossible on 80s PCs.
Not that it changes your point much but part of the problem when talking about computer vs console in the 80s is that PCs specifically tended to be complete shit for playing games. Games for home computer typically included PC ports, but most of the time people who played computer games played on some other home computer (Commodore 64, Amiga, Apple 2, Tandy CoCo, or the ZX Spectrum etc). It wasn't until the mid-90s that PCs really began to dominate the home computer market.

>>8140160
>literally impossible
literally shitposting

>>8140264
IDK, Sierra completely focused their efforts on PC compatibles early on and decided it had advantages the 8-bit machines did not.

>>8130207
The best PC gaming in the 80s had to offer was a different genre of video game than anything you'd see on consoles or arcades. More text and RPG based. The interest just didn't seem to be there. Americans preferred playing quick action games.

>all these Nintendo fanboyz who boast about how awesome SNES was at arcade action unlike PeeCee fags
>yfw the SNES was loaded down with RPGs because it wasn't fast enough to do action games well

>>8140305
>ore text and RPG based. The interest just didn't seem to be there. Americans preferred playing quick action games

Wait didn't you Euros brag about your shitty Zniggy jank platformers and why did Americans just play gay spreadsheets on their computers?

>>8140315
I'm not European. Anyone who brags about arcade style games being better on PC in the 80s is deluding themselves unless they're talking about the MSX2 or X68000.
Yes, C64 had some good arcade style games but the best console games are even better in that regard.

>>8140332
>Anyone who brags about arcade style games being better on PC in the 80s is deluding themselves unless they're talking about the MSX2 or
>MSX2
didn't that thing not even have horizontal scrolling?

Then again look at the NES King's Quest V if you want a laugh.

>>8140305
it's pretty funky but in theory you should have been able to design add on PC card with custom chips that do sprite and scrolling yet it never occurred to anybody to do so.

>>8140409
The PC hardware business was based 90% on enterprise sales so there was no motivation to do so. Yet even the diehard weebs on /vr/ would have to admit the kinds of games that JPCs had were stuff like RPGs and VNs that had mostly static images with very little animation. In Japan it was not really so different.

what i'm trying to say is SNES had 3 independent bg layers and it wouldn't be possible to do it on PC at full 60Hz speed until Pentium

>>8130207
Many people did not get their first home PC until the early 1990s. The caught the Pentium and AOL craze.

So many gamers back then did not have the skills or attention spans to operate computers or the more detailed computer games. They were happy with the arcade-style consoles.

>>8140494
even Euros since they all just played arcade shit on their Spectrums or whatever the hell they had

I do know that Garfield: Caught in the Act on the PC cuts some graphics effects from the Mega Drive though does have 2 layer scrolling. that game was targeted at 486 PCs.

>>8140507
yes but the Mega Drive was also a bit older technology than SNES and couldn't do all the stuff it did such as 3 layer scrolling and background scaling

>>8140504
Partially true but RPGs and adventure games weren't desirable due to the language barrier. it made more sense to make arcade games that could be sold anywhere. like a German RPG could only be sold in FRG, Austria, and Switzerland.

To be fair the early 4 mbit Mega Drive games like Golden Axe don't look much better than the average DOS PC game of the time. Yes, late period stuff like Spot Goes To Hollywood looks impressive but that came out by the time you had Pentiums, it wasn't the plodding 286 ISA bus shit heaps you had when the Mega Drive was launched.

>>8140292
The main disadvantage being that most of the videogame market did not own IBM PCs at that time.

>>8140742
And most of the video game market did not own a Nintendo console at any time. Didn’t hurt them much.

>>8130213
>PCs were also ridiculously expensive
My dad bought his first pc in the mid 90s and he says even on sale it cost him roughly three months of salary. It was probably some crappy Win 95 basic ass shit too, not what was state of the art back at the time. Before that, in the 80s, they used macintosh in his line of work because they were the only computers at the time that could run the math/engineering programs they used. He's an army engineer and apparently the macintosh were so stupidly expensive in my country that the government subsidized the cost by "renting" them by the hour to employees. That's right, my dad had to pay out of his own pocket to use a software he needed just so he could do his fucking job.

>>8139606
Their boring, bloated, easy and poorly designed "platformers" are the worst things they did for the N64. Blast Corps shits on Kazooie, Tooie and Donkey Kong 64 from a great height.

>>8140305
>The interest just didn't seem to be there. Americans preferred playing quick action games.
It was more of an age thing I think. GenX who were teenagers by the mid-80s were more likely to play CRPGs. The late GenX and early Millennials who were <10 in the 80s probably played Nintendo.

>>8140756
The NES market was huge by the mid 80s. The PC market was virtually non-existant until the 90s. Kings Quest, etc. was ported to all the 8-bit computers.

>>8140801
>Kings Quest, etc. was ported to all the 8-bit computers
No it wasn't.

Hmm well I can't imagine you doing Roadwar: 2000 on a NES, at least not that it would be very good anyway.

>>8140819
Yes it was. C64 was the exception, notable because it was the platform people actually owned at the time.

>>8140801
>The NES market was huge by the late 80s.
ftfy
Still not most of the market

why are so many PC games made by UK devs from that time, so eerie? they have this creepy vibe about them. i don’t mean to say like the retarded “liminal spaces” bullshit that was trending a few months ago. it’s hard to explain. it’s like when a person is being nice but you get a creepy vibe at the same time.

>>8140819
The Apple II but you really wouldn't want to play that one anyway.

>>8140801
>Kings Quest, etc. was ported to all the 8-bit computers.
>>8140867
>Yes it was.
IBM PCjr, Tandy 1000, Apple IIe, Apple IIGS, Atari ST, Amiga, Macintosh, MS-DOS, Master System
missing the C64, spectrum, cpc, the 8bit ataris, the other apples, the other commodores, weeb shit. But sure the Sierra adventures were ported to all the 8bit computers

>>8140916
>why are so many PC games made by UK devs from that time
And by PC games you mean not MSDOS games

>>8133435
That, and combine the fact that PS2 games flew off shelves meant that few would bother buying and stocking PC games. That's precisely what Gabe Newell meant when he said that piracy was a service problem. However, PC gaming did in fact die, most games on PC are for consoles. When was the last time people wanted to play a PC game on a console? Now when was the last time people wanted to play a console game on PC? Consoles just have better games.

>>8140939
>Consoles just have better games.

>>8131832
MGS2 had a pc port? lol

>>8141141
A notoriously bad one. When it worked, it wasn't too bad, like the Xbox version it lacked minor effects like rain. But good luck actually getting it to work, even on time accurate hardware.

PCs were vastly more expensive than consoles back then. I didn't get my first PC until early 2000 because my parents never had the spare money to buy me one outright and their credit was too shitty to be able to finance one.

>>8140939
What bait, but I'll bite.
It's because exclusives are fucking cancer to the industry. Especially when your PS5 or Xbox Series X is just a hyped up PC in a custom box.

>>8141327
based

>>8132167
>Costs thousands of burgers
That's the point, parents were buying their kids consoles instead of PCs because "PCs are expensive" but if even poor families budgeted and didn't waste money on restaurants they could afford several computers.