/vr/ - Retro Games

The new rig you built not being able to run anything past 5 fps 18 months later

>>8405483
There were downsides? Games were physically distributed, you could pirate all you want if buying games was not your style, plenty of sites had patches and stuff like Nocd exes to download and even shit like Securom and Starforce other insidious software was easily either prevented from installation, or had simple methods of purging from the filesystem. Inb4 Steam defense force shows up and causes a fuss over how bad things supposedly were before Steam ruined PC gaming.

>>8405483
Things crashing when you're a kid and don't really understand computers yet. When I stopped being a retard it was all good.

>>8405494
Steamfags are just consoletards who realized their game will look prettier on a computer. I wouldn't call them actual PC gamers. Most of them don't even know what an .ini file is

>>8405483
Compatibility.
You had to do a lot of research to make sure your computer would be stable. When you finally got your specific make of RAM fit into the motherboard, you then have to deal with games experiencing graphical shortcomings or not starting at all.

Same as today: inferior titles.

Why are you reposting this thread?
>>8340041

Computers were less stable, had worse build quality and became obsolete faster than they do now.

upgrades were necessary far more frequently due to tech developing at a more rapid pace. It's a far cry from the fact that nowadays you can still use mid-range stuff from a decade ago and while you won't be playing the latest games at max settings and high framerates, they'll still be playable.

Also before steam it was often a total pain in the ass to get your game up and running. Bullshit CD keys, DRM like securon or star-whatever-the-fuck. And that's without getting into older DOS stuff with those stupid decoder rings and shit. And then for stuff in the 2000s you'd need to manually look for game patches/updates and manually install those, and then of course you'd also need to get the correct No-CD crack for the exact version you were running, because fuck needing to keep a disc in the drive for no reason when the game is installed on your computer anyway.

Last point, there were a lot more super-dodgy ports. Worst examples I remember from back in the day are Konami's shit-tier ports of Silent Hill 2 and MGS2. Trying to get these games up and running, and god forbid using a controller, were an exercise in futility. But I didn't have a PS2 so it was my only option.

>>8405526
Name one 2021 release that runs on a GTX 560

>>8405531
I can't name one 2021 release, period

>>8405538
>nowadays you can still use mid-range stuff from a decade ago and while you won't be playing the latest games at max settings and high framerates, they'll still be playable
So completely out of your arse ay?

>>8405531
Not as extreme as a 560 but I bought a 7870 for my girlfriend's shitty no-GPU desktop. Runs Red Dead and Cyberpunk at 720/30 anyway. I think it's fair to say it'll run everything on low at least. Ran Psychonauts 2 fine.

>>8405572
The 7870 was a top of the line card not mid range

>>8405483
In the DOS days before 32-bit protected mode, you had to constantly fiddle with system memory configurations and batch files to get certain games to run.
You had to memorize your sound card’s configuration details so you could select them in config utilities if there was no autodetect.
PC speaker (piezo beeper) sound sucked ass.
Joystick port configuration and calibrating your joystick.
No good gamepad options for years.
Lots of games had pain in the ass copy protection schemes. Code wheels, code lookups in the manual, trivia questions, etc.
Windows 3.1 and even some Win95 games also had configuration hassles.

>>8405613
The mileage is respectable. That card has been chump change for a very long time.

As a kid, I had the most trouble figuring out how to install addons and mods for certain games, but learning how to do that stuff at a young age has made me more computer savvy.

>>8405483
None. It was glorious if you had brains and money to spend on it as a hobby.

>>8405512
that was in the DOS days. after that everything was basically like now

>>8405787
In Halo CE the active camouflage shader didn't work on some graphics cards (namely Nvidia), so it became very difficult to see a camouflaged biped. Left is the bug

>>8405497
Yeah this. I knew how to use a computer, but had no idea how a lot of it worked, so I had a lot of problems roughly until WinXP.

Well, there's a lot of things that improved over the years, but a couple things that bugged me were that controller support wasn't nearly as good before Microsoft made the 360 controller the defacto standard and started that "games for windows" line where you had to meet requirements to use the label. But also local multiplayer using two controllers on the same PC and playing splitscreen was pretty rare. There was games that had it in their console versions and they'd even just totally remove it for the PC release. Things like that just really bugged me back then, because I had my PC shooting a clone image to my TV and would use it for console-like gaming when friends came over. Nowadays, they are outstanding at living room gaming, but sadly I don't have any friends anymore for it to matter.

>>8406257
y dont u have friends anymore anon

>>8405483
MICROSHIT WINDAIDS

>>8405483
A lot of software (including Windows) was extremely buggy and hardware dependant. It wasn't very uncommon that you would install something out of the box and the install would fail or the game would just crash immediately. Or you would install some software / driver and all of a sudden something else wouldn't work anymore because DLL's were missing.

Nowadays this is much less common.

To be honest, this was also one of the reasons a lot of people would prefer playing games on a console, because it was generally much more reliable.

>>8406257
We were idiots and most met some pretty shitty fates, but then I moved to a city where I didn't know anyone and kinda never looked back.
(I've kind of been hoping that I would meet some friends online to try out some non-/vr/ stuff, but I really don't even know what I would be into. Besides FFXIV I haven't really played anything online since Xbox 360.)
PC gaming can be tons of fun and a great hobby if it's something that interests you though. I recently returned to it when all the lockdowns went into effect and it really is refreshing just how many options you have to do anything you want on it.

>>8406337
>>8406282
Whoops, somehow I responded to the wrong comment.

>>8405483
Elitist worshipers of Chinese plastic will be angry at you for inexpensively enjoying a hobby that they've spent thousands of dollars depressingly forcing themselves to enjoy.

>>8406337
better to meet friends irl breh, or through online clubs in ur city at least

>>8406192
The "bug" was Gearbox making it so that Nvidia cards all went under a blanket rule that they used a simple transparency filter instead of the more complicated effect because some Nvidia cards were absolute dogshit at the time. It was easier to see honestly as it wasn't even that intense of a transparency effect. I don't remember it looking at all like what your picture suggests.

Lack of homogeneous hardware to run games (lots of time tweaking settings and it still would have issues here and there).
Lack of japanese support.

>>8405787
Early DOS you had to dick with your config.sys and autoexec.bat to free up enough conventional memory to run things.
Later DOS was all 32bit protected mode and things were pretty much golden. Unless you had a non-soundblaster card then you had the joy of SB emulation TSRs. But don't be that guy and you had an easy time.
Early windows sucked, but then DirectX happened and things got super easy. You were unlikely to get a configuration problem preventing you from running mechwarrior 2 or whatever. Even your cheapass "Aztec" sound card could run native 44.1kHz 16bit stereo instead of the backwards sound channel SB Pro emulation it did in DOS.
But then 3D acceleration happened and the whole applecart got overturned. From the early days where it was a total scattershot approach to what games could be (manually) patched to support which cards, it turned into Direct3D hell where different cards would have a different set of driver bugs leading to total messes where a TNT2 would be 100% on some games, but a Voodoo3 would be better on others and you as a gamer could do nothing but beg for patches and driver updates that would never come because they were all going out of business fast.
And then nVidia and ATI outlasted the entire market and the cards and the APIs moved in lockstep so now bugs are all temporary and fixed in short order. But that collusion has created a dreadful lack of competition in the space.

>>8405483
>very expensive (is once again a problem today but there was a glorious period from 2010-2018 or so where PC building was very affordable)
>hardware would go out of date much faster (Pentium 4's were dogshit, AMD Athlon's were better but still not great, most CPU's in general were shit until high-end Phenoms and Intel Core CPU's were introduced)
>egregious DRM like SecuROM and StarForce (worse than Denuvo if you can believe it) that made piracy essential for certain games
>driver, .dll, and compatibility faggotry was a lot more difficult to deal with without resources like PC Gaming Wiki
>viruses were much more prominent, deceptive, and destructive- had to be extra careful where you pirated shit from
>online gaming had limited appeal if you didn't have decent broadband internet
>console ports were (evem more) often of very poor quality and missing graphical effects and shaders from the console versions
>poor controller support/compatibility, you'd be stuck using mouse and keyboard for games that would normally benefit tremendously from being played on a gamepad

>>8406919
This is mostly accurate, except that Windows before 3d acceleration was like 1 year, and you still had to deal with Windows 95/98 being a buggy piece of shit that crashed very often.
3d acceleration wasn't that buggy initially because 3dfx support was huge. It only got buggy when you got companies like S3 and Intel releasing decelerator cards, and Nvidia and Ati making short-cuts in D3D/GL support so they can catch up in speed. I remember my Riva128 not supporting alpha textures in Oni, it looked all trippy.
Once 3dfx was done, Nvidia and to a lesser degree Ati cards followed Direct3d and OpenGL pretty good. Plus every other player was dead by the time the Radeon 9700 came out, so you were mostly fine, unless you used a Geforce 4 MX (it had no shader support AT ALL) or a Geforce FX (shader support was so slow it was a joke).

And things like card support problems still happen today, it's just that the industry is so much bigger that you don't see it. Like Road Redemption did not ever work on Vega cards for some reason. And older games all have support getting axed and needing workarounds like old versions of ddraw.dll, or dgVoodoo (a direct3d emulator), or Xidi so you can have xinput pads working correctly on games using DirectInput or Winmm.dll.

>>8406192
>>8406453
I remember playing it on a GF4MX, it was missing ton of effects, no bump mapping, and Chiefs visor was a solid black color.

>>8406926
Pre-broadband internet was so shit. I feel nostalgic about most old stuff but not that. Playing games online and having absolutely zero hit registration because someone is on a 56k modem half a world away turned games into lessons in frustration. Literally shooting a stationary guy for several seconds only for nothing to happen. LAN parties were outright mandatory for a good multiplayer game experience

>>8407004
Indeed. A lot of zoomers express envy over the "good ol' days" of playing Quake, UT, CS, etc. online but the reality is we were playing that shit at LAN parties which doesn't happen much anymore because of matchmaking server faggotry, GaaS faggotry, and now Covid faggotry.

>>8405504

>Most of them don't even know what an .ini file is

Black magic. Not as frightening as the cmd console but close.

>>8407021
Before the internet became commonplace, at least in my 2nd world country, gaming in the 90s early 00s was a pretty social thing. Everyone exchanged burned CDs with classmates, went to cybercafes and each other's apartments. That's something to be envious of. You actually interacted with your peers.
The very moment I got an internet connection I turned into a shut in and got hooked on of the cancerous MMOs.
Now imagine being a zoomer whose ever only friend was a tablet, and voice chatting on shitscord with similarly dejected spergs on a daily basis. You'd grow to hate your life as a husk of a person.

>>8405483
Being a brainlet who could only insert a cartridge and nothing else. That would have been a downside back then, Steam didn't exist.

>>8405497
Mostly this. Getting excited for a game, then getting the game, then having your bubble burst when it crashed for some inexplicable reason was the worst.

I have memories of perimeter crashing on my PC whenever a particular unit fired it's weapon, for example

>>8407238
Honestly what bothered me more (and still gives me ptsd) are the hardware components or the OS shitting itself.
Taking care of hardware fucking sucks. I never had to dust off my PSX and it still works 25 years later, let alone struggle with those goddamn plugs on the motherboard, changing heatsinks or whatever the fuck.

>>8405538
Based.

Reject modernity, embrace tradition.

>>8405538
Absolutely based.

>>8407209
That's what I'm saying though- Zoomers don't seem to understand that what they're missing out on is the whole in-person social experience of gaming back then. No games support LAN or splitscreen anymore most likely to uphold the globohomo agenda and keep these poor sad sacks hooked on their Web 3.0 garbage designed to make them dumber and easier to control.

>>8405526
>>8405628
>>8406919
>>8406980
The quality of PC games could vary a lot and some were designed better and easier to get up and running than others. Those games like X-COM that did hold up tended to be easy to run and require lower amounts of frustrating tinkering with settings.

>>8405486
In the 90s this was an awful problem. A new PC would have a lifespan of about 8 months before it was obsolete.

>>8407303
Yeah. I mean, I loved CS 1.6 because it was a social experience. When I started playing it on steam to death, I've had enough of it to never look back.

>>8406980
>and you still had to deal with Windows 95/98 being a buggy piece of shit that crashed very often.

So true. But on the plus side that lead to learning a lot about win and computers in general.
Pic related was your best friend which you sometimes met daily.

>>8407352
I didn't learn anything from 98SE other than how to paste a crack. It was stable. It was by the time W7 came around that I started looking into the registry shit.

>>8405483
>downsides
Never paying for a game
Not having to 'preserve' cartridges and hardware.
Knowing nothing will be rare and expensive.
Being able to emulate everything a few generations back.
Sounds more like advantages to me.

>>8406830
Japanese games are mediocre compared to what PC offers.

>>8405483
>What were the downsides to retro PC gaming?
I'd tell ya...but i would get banned.

>>8408735
Idgi

>>8405628
>Windows 3.1 and even some Win95 games also had configuration hassles.
My windows 95 was terrible at running most any game but doom95 was perfection out of the box. It was good to have games that were specifically configured for windows 95.

>>8406192
I don't recall having any problems and I'm pretty sure I was running one of those nvidia evga cards or whatever they were.

>>8405483
>figured out how to mod and download shit for the sims
>teach my siblings how to do it
>of fucking course they go on some retard websites and download malware
>have to reformat the PC
>all the siblings cried like we were putting the dog down
>tell them not to be so retarded and don't go to obvious virus sites
>they all end up more successful than me
>i'm just a retard posting on 4chan in my 30s
i wish i was dead

>>8407321
This was why I owned a copy of Doom II, but didn't have a computer that could play it as a kid.

>>8409215
kek except for the siblings crying part, I could have written that word for word. I'll do you one better though: not only are my siblings more successful, but I also ended up doing a prison stint. Still trying to get my shit together.

>>8409225
I remember getting a bunch of Win 95 games for Christmas that were completely incompatible with my Windows 98 machine, and that was within the same era.

>>8408463
ha ha.

>>8409215
sounds like my life

>>8405494
This.

>>8405483
>What were the downsides to retro PC gaming?
not being able to play the actual games.

>>8409215
based oniisama

>>8405483
It was the price/cost that was a huge downside which lead to more downsides. It was a downward spiral. Since hardware was so expensive, it forced me to the poverty AMD option which was a downgrade in performance. With the exceptionally high prices, I remember being forced into 0day warez which leads to all sorts of new viruses. Even saving some things to floppies had a chance of bad sectors just corrupting the data. Fortunately, things are better for a new generation now, but I was there for all the growing pains.

>>8405483
In early 90s, having to create a separate boot disk with custom CONFIG.SYS and autoexec.bat just to have enough free memory to run (Master of Magic specifically)

>>8405483
Pre-2K? Roughly a year, mayyybe 2, of cutting edge game compatibility at double digit framerates.

>>8413743
I remember needing to edit mouse.com out of the autoexec so Pinball Fantasies could run. Then I kept forgetting to re-run it when playing Dune.

>>8405483
Manually configuring the correct IRQ and etc ports for your audio card and other various devices

Load times were absolutely horrific.
I couldn't abuse save scum in Fallout, for example, to steal everything from the guards, because of how long I'd need to wait if I failed.