/vr/ - Retro Games

warm apple pie

>>9686778
Getting a virus because you downloaded what you thought was a Mechwarrior 4 mod.

Rodent's Revenge

New games were actually good and innovative, reasonable hardware prices, every game getting cracked.

>>9686778
fun

>>9686813
ya like early days of torrenting and shitter p2p programs was a shitshow until you realized you cant just start blindly clicking on .exes from anywhere. you at least had to look through a torrents comment section briefly to see if people were screeching or use private trackers that had some sort of vetting process for uploaders

>>9686778
>What was Retro PC gaming like?
Build your own PCs and then have lan paries with ethernet cabling playing warcraft 2 and doom and duke nukem etc multiplayer while getting stoned. Only form of multiplayer I ever actually liked aside from PS1 fight games on projector screens.

NoCD patches.

>>9686828
>reasonable hardware prices
t. zoomer

hardware prices were fucking terrible across the board until the late 2000s when prices started to really come down because of the rise of production in china and competition in the market. every single time i built a PC was a painful experience on the wallet.

>>9686850
What happened to LAN in modern games?

>>9686778
Really cheap pirated games. You could build a cheap potato PC from 4 year old PC parts and still enjoy a shit ton of games. Another fun memory I had was downloading emulators and ROMs at the internet cafe and storing them in my 64MB flash drive.

>>9686828
>reasonable hardware prices
They were more expensive, but the overall cost was still a lot lower than owning a console if you exclusively played pirated games on your garage built celeron potato PC.

shareware

>>9686874
Sharewares were garbage. Just pirate everything.

>>9686854
around 2010 every game started going with persistent online connection that required authentication and from their servers to do any sort of multiplayer gameplay because there was an uptick in 3rd party software that let you do private LANs over a network which let you play a ton of older multiplayer titles without needing a legit cd key.

this pretty much killed alot of big lan events because alot of organized lan parties i would go to wouldnt provide good access to exterior internet(if any) and just getting things coordinated on LAN through their services was really annoying when trying to host a tourney or something.

starcraft was the first one that was really bad for this.

it also killed alot of lan arcades(otherwise known as PC bangs in asia) because most of those businesses would just pirate/share copies because you didnt need to provide access to whatever server like steam/bnet/and other bullshit just to play locally.

fuck i miss driving into the city with my homies and playing games like dota and cs1.6 at greasy lan arcades, there was always shady shit going on at this one we went to. i remember sitting next to a kid and his friend was outside getting busted with like a shitton of extacy capsules in his car. the management was selling airsoft there too which was probably a front for selling real guns on the side lmfao.

>>9686778
sucked
bunch of boring nerd games you played with a keyboard and mouse

>>9686912
also they all had boring crappy music and stupid edgy stories made up by asshole pothead gen-x'ers with long "i'm a dickhead" hair

>>9686912
>>9686918
poor retard that couldnt afford a good PC

>>9686919
right here, buddy

DJGPP and DOS4GW. Downloading a RAR of Strife from an AOL warez room over your family's only phone line (overnight so nobody got mad). Microsoft Hearts Network. Masturbating to tiny grainy images of Pamela Anderson. Pirated Grand Theft Auto with no radio stations or whatever because that stuff took up too much file space for the warez groups.

>>9686778
Zsnes and diablo

>>9686921
>its a nintrannie
Figures.

>>9686918
>doesn't name a single game
kill yourself faggot

>>9686847
Watch out, onions-chugging zoomer tranny leeches of society will melt down over any mention of private torrent trackers since they feel that they are entitled to download every product in existence which they don’t have access to thanks to their distratrous single mother upbringing.

>>9686854
It got made redundant by everyone having decent internet connections.

>>9686778
There were some cool games, but it was about the same except with shittier internet.

>>9686778
Why don't you play the games from that era and find out for yourself?

>>9686979
The last time I had a LAN party was 2009. It was fun playing CS and l4d strictly with your friends like once or twice a week. Nowadays online games feel like mmo shit. Everything is a grind, and without 5000 hour at the aiming practice server you can't get anywhere.

>>9686970
Take your meds.

>>9686919
>poor retard that couldnt afford a good PC
These people were not even sperm in the 90s, the first time I played doom multiplayer it was on solaris

>>9686918
>>9686921
You always know you are dealing with a worthless dickhead who knows fuck all about old games or technology when you see that. What you get when you cross an apple fanboy with aids.

>>9687056
Any shitty PC could play Doom in the late 90s. You're way too old to be on this site.

>>9686921
>right here, buddy
yeah

>>9686918
Never forget

>>9687064
It was on solaris in 94. Doom had come out on the PC the year before but it went nuts when people started ftping it. .

>>9686778
it was ass
most of the time when you bought pc games as a kid you didn't know if that shit would even work with your toaster machine
>>9686825
so many hours spent on this kek
>skiifree

>>9687084
So you were a spoilt kid? Must have been to have had a PC and been out buying PC games. Oh no imagine the adults not making shit easy for little timmy the wining spoilt shit with the divorced parents. Quick buy him a nintendo.

>>9686778
I remember how XP was the last Windows that could natively run DOS programs, but without a sound and sometimes with minor bugs.
Dosbox was obviously the optimal tool to run them, however it was always interesting to see what was natively supported and what wasn't.
The latest game I got to run on it (mainly out of curiosity) without facing major bugs was Far Cry 3 (which isn't retro by any means).

>>9687097
it was my grandmas business pc
i got it to run final fantasy vii & 8
all of our family rigs before that couldnt run ANYTHING
commander keen, and activision titles mostly

>>9687103
All the shit from companies like blizzard ran fine and XP did not "natively run dos either". Sigh.

I won'[t be posting on this board. It sucks. If I want to talk about old games and systems I'll post on /v/ this boards a zone of retarded faggotry and needs new jannies

>>9687109
>and XP did not "natively run dos either"
It's true that NT kernel was entirely different from Dos, however 32 bit XP distributions could run many DOS programs natively (without compatibility layers or external emulation).
Some games didn't even require custom CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT to run.
Here is a demonstration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7hx1nwBfSo

>>9686828
>reasonable hardware prices
Nigger, if you had an top end PC in 94, it was complete fucking garbage in 96. Nowadays a PC lasts three times as long

>>9687103
>XP was the last Windows that could natively run DOS programs
NTVDM isnt native whatsoever. it's buggy as fuck because it's half-assed emulation based on SoftPC.
>>9686778
>windows XP desktop screenshot for retro gaming thread
zoomer

>>9687139
see >>9687154

>>9686778
Get a game, put it in computer, install it. It doesn't work for some reason and because you're a kid you can't troubleshoot it. The end.

>>9687154
Interesting to know, I'll read more about this, thank you.

>>9686778

I think, as a lot of people have said - equal parts wonder and frustration. There were a lot of interesting and boundary pushing games being made, with publishers seemingly more willing to take a risk on creative titles than they are nowadays. That said - the Indie scene was nowhere near as vibrant, as it just wasn't possible to create a good pro-level game on your own or with a couple of people. More easily accessible tools like Unity and the Unreal engine which make that possible now didn't really exist, or they claimed to and were utter shite.

The pre-plug and play days meant that each PC was like it's own ecosystem with drivers and chipsets that could cause any number of conflicts with carefully designed games. My all time favourite hardware conflict was when I installed the Sega Rally Championship demo, which screwed up our display drivers meaning our PC only displayed what I can only describe as a barcode. We had to take that sucker to get fixed.

For DOS games, it often meant spending a lot of time messing with config files on Windows (95-XP) to get things to work. If you were a kid and didn't quite understand it yet, that meant often playing games with no sound for instance. It's also worth noting that now, 9/10 if you have a problem with a game there is a solution online and a patch you can download. In the 90s, even the early 00s, this information wasn't easily Googleable (I mean, you'd Yahoo it if anything), but even then connections wouldn't normally be that great for some of the patches. This meant looking a lot to gaming magazines for game upates in my experience.

Also of interest, for a long time, FPSs were keyboard only - that's Wolfenstein right through to when I first started playing Quake. Mouse aim came a bit later (first introduced, weirdly in System Shock and the Terminator games) - and games would tend to be PC only, or console only, with only a few successful ports (Tomb Raider for instance). When FF7 came out on PC it was huge.

>>9686813
This happened to me in modern era once too. I was especially retarded that day and let my guard down when tried to find a patch for one of recent Sonic games.

A barrage of chink miners and adware contained in one single executable was so huge it simply could flush me away if I didn't manage to plug off the internet cable in time.

>>9687293
> it just wasn't possible to create a good pro-level game on your own or with a couple of people

I should add - this was possible in the C64 and Spectrum era, and the earlier DOS era but as the expectation of more and more detailed and interesting graphics became the norm, things became more difficult.

It's why outfits like Sensible Software and Bullfrog struggled to keep things going - they wanted to continue working like they were students in their mates bedroom when the expectation was for corporate-funded work.

constant upgrading parts because of how fast hardware was evolving.

>>9686778
I could spend a month just fiddling with stuff you got on disks that come with gaming magazines. They didn't just have demos but also packs of mods, I always tried all the Doom and Quake mods they carried.

Every game running at 15fps and lagging constantly because of slow internet, Intel Extreme Graphics, and 255mb of ram.

>>9686778
stop being underage you dumb faggot

>>9686778
Finally getting a game to load instead of crashing only for it to freeze before you even get to the main menu so you just go back to playing the games that came installed on the computer like g-nome or the motocross madness shareware version.

>>9686935
>DJGPP
True and honest nigga detected - Allegro was also kino

>>9686778
Astalavista.sk. Y'all remember that website?

>>9686778

>>9688102
you mean altavista

>>9686778
Watching long game installers while floppy/CD/DVD drive spun into hellish speeds and playing either cool, funny or WTF titles on lowest graphics.

>>9688169
The one where you could download game cracks

>>9686935
>DJGPP
I only had a 486 running DOS in the early 2000s and DJGPP (with RHIDE) helped me finish some of my C++ university assignment at home. Yeah, some good stuff with Allegro >>9688095

Prices were a lot worse before 2005, when computer tech began to slow down. Prices from an average ad from 1996.

>>9686778
Almost impossible to get into as a young kid
>games receive no advertising
>insanely expensive hardware
>large degree of technical knowledge required
>incompatibilities likely
>no controller standard
>available controllers are poor quality
>reading the manual usually mandatory
>copy protection step just to start playing
If your dad was a nerd (ergo, computer-savvy & wealthy), then that circumvented most or all of these. All the PC gamers I knew as a young kid in the 90s had nerdy fathers, if not straight up programmers or computer engineers.

I played random shit I found on discount at K-Mart or shovelware on a "100 Games!" disk my stepdad brought home. Somehow, I found Tie Fighter, which was the best PC game I had ever played until Quake 2 was included with my Gateway PC in 1999.

roller coaster tycoon

>>9686852
>install german NoCD
>game censored
Danke schön

>>9688275
>censoring upgrades mediocre game into futuristic sci-fi with robots
Akzeptabel

sim city 2000

This game was genuinely scary for me as a kid, I remember playing it for the first time on a Windows 95 laptop dad got for his work.

>>9688002
My experience as well, we could play a stupid 20 minute demo forever and never see the full game because downloading (or even a download existing) at that time took forever on 56k and ISDN. I must've played the THPS2, Shogo and X-Wing Alliance demos for months on end.

>>9688264
this

>>9688237
I only bought PC games from Target. Nowhere else. It was hard to tell what was going to run and what wasn't, it always said you needed a pentium but sometimes a celeron was good enough.

Insaniquarium is a great game. I still play it sometimes.

>>9686778
I still have nightmares with the medal of honor loading times

games run

I remember nights playing colonization at a friends place on his parents 486. fond memories of constantly fucking up the dos commands then trying to get it to run in windows 3.1 but it wouldn't run because windows couldn't allocate enough ems memory. Got it to work in dos eventually though.

>>9686778
you were lucky if the game fuckin ran at all. random incompatibility was a real issue for different sound / video card vendors. ever try setting an IRQ boy?!
also if your computer was more than 2 years old, expect 14FPS and $3000 in 90s bucks for a new one lol.

>>9687084
As someone who was a kid too, yes it sucked until the late 2000's if you didn't have income to buy a decent computer, or the resources to build one. A lot of people(i.e.parents) would just buy a basic prebuilt computer and ride it out . I was still using an HP Pavillion from '98 in 2005. And then my family would just get Dells. On the bright side I did get into emulation since even a basic retail desktop could run emulation up through Playstation well. Contemporary PC gaming to me was this arcane cool kid's club I just had no way of entering.
I see people ask what the point of the Xbox was when a lot of the games were on PC, and the simple answer is most people did not have a decent gaming rig, or knew how to troubleshoot issues. There were games that were accessible at lowest settings, especially fairly basic games like The sims, but if you wanted to keep up to date with the most popular games you were probably fucked. And Steam idiot proofed alot.
>in b4 calling me poor or dumb
Yes, I was, and still am really

>>9687078
solaris in 1994? you're either a sun employee or a liar

>>9689624
>tfw you're too young to actually understand everything in a config.sys and just change numbers and reboot hoping it works this time
When Origin wrote their own memory manager and called it Voodoo, I wonder if anyone was actually surprised by the name.

>>9688237
Weird post. I'm 34, my dad bought a computer one day when I was about 7 and I've been playing games on PC ever since, had my own computer not too long after we had a family computer. It wasn't "insanely expensive", my family was lower middle class, games had plenty of advertising through gaming magazines, you absolutely did not need "a large degree of technical knowledge" to click on "setup.exe" and install the game, you used mainly the keyboard for controlling the game (and/or the mouse), I never even opened the manuals and there was fuck-all copy protection other than requiring the CD to be in the drive.

>>9686778
>game releases two months after the launch of Windows 98
>published by Microsoft
>only works on Windows 95

>>9686778
>shareware discs with stolen flash games and sometimes porn
>terrible internet that would make downloading/loading games take forever
>3D games were the absolute peak coolness, regardless of how good the gameplay actually was
>ZSNES
>emulating anything past the fourth generation was unthinkable
>playing DOS games was still socially acceptable
>every wallpaper was a shitty jpeg
>a game being 4GB was considered too much
>virus scares were for a good reason
>piracy in general was extremely risky

>>9686852
>game requires CD code activation
>look up a random serial online
>there is an entire domain dedicated to just generating random serial codes
>the layout was probably put together in 5 minutes
>first one works without issues
The cool thing about this era was the large amount of small domains dedicated to very specific things.

>>9687103
I remember playing a ton of DOS games natively and trying them out again with DOSbox years later. I was very confused that those games had audio to begin with.

>>9690195
pretty sure i played this on 98

>>9686778
It was great, but it had a lot of pains.
Your expensive PC got outdated two years later.
Nothing was plug and play.
Some games required tinkering to just make them run.
Never got a good gamepad, nor proper support for gamepads until Xbox360

But the games were amazing, expansive and quite different than the console experience.

Pirating was stupid easy or you could just pay 2 dollars for a copy (3rd worlder here)

>>9689840
>had two PCs
>lower middle class
ok anon
>uses CDs
we're talking about retro gaming itt

>>9686778
in 2000s it was flash games. That world was one of wonder. Most of the big phone app games like angry birds were copied from flash games.

in the 90s it was a bit more wild, but amazing too. 90s tech progress was your new computer build being outdated in six months. It was also watching games go from barely being able to scroll the screen to outperforming even arcade machines in visuals.
80s and earlier I can't really speak to as I wasn't really in computers then. My dad used one at work but otherwise we never saw them. Obviously people had them, so my experience doesn't speak to everybody.

>>9686854
the SEA anon was on the money. In the US it was always doomed to die just because the country is too big and spread out; People were ready to stay home and not drive however far to cram into one house. But overall it was companies making sure they got paid for every copy. Everybody took advantage of widely available internet as a tool to make sure you weren't pirating. That's why the 2000s was full of nightmarish DRM shit as companies figured out which shackles their buyers would put up with. I still think that Steam keeping PC gaming alive was a huge Faustian bargain.

>>9687004
you're right about time reqs. Even games without grinding require a lot of fucking practice to not feel like a retard when you go online. There are definitely games that I like but that I never play anymore, because I don't have the time needed to git gud. It's not worth it when you're an adult IMO, unless you're good enough to get paid for it I guess. I use it as an excuse to try out single player games I skipped before.

>>9690224
yeah, the consolidation of the net SUX!!!

>>9689041
Please tell me someone played pic related.

>>9690195
Didn't the Win 98 install disc have a demo of this on the disc? Pretty sure it did, if it wasn't 98 it was definitely 98 Second Edition.

>>9690320
CDs on computer are 30 years old now anon, 25 of you want to be generous about when they were absolutely ubiquitous. What other goalposts do you want to set, hmm?

>>9686847
> ya like early days of torrenting and shitter p2p programs was a shitshow
Limewire, the absolute worst. One friend destroyed his laptop completely with virus-laden porn from there. Napster was amazing while it lasted, though. Getting invited to a private tracker like demonoid was a godsend bitd.

>>9686879
The EV games were awesome and I gladly paid for Nova. Excellent classic game.

>>9686970
The last time I talked to zoomers about this, they didn’t even know what a torrent was. And that was at work last week.

>>9690639
>What other goalposts do you want to set, hmm?
Being able to buy multiple PCs at a time when they cost $2,000 (adjusted for inflation). I was actually lower middle class and we had a used circa-1994 486 PC in 1997.

>>9686778
You can emulate Windows 98 now, why not find out yourself?

>>9686778
>Hardware was less standardized and got outdated way faster
>Windows itself was way less stable and could arbitrarily blue screen for no reason (less so after the move to NT)
>It was much easier to get a virus since Windows didn't have a good built in antivirus and Internet Explorer was awful
>You had to manually hunt down game patches and install them yourself instead of having a launcher/store auto-update
>Digital distribution wasn't that big, you needed to have the game CD in the drive for authentication most of the time (hence NOCD cracks)
>Most games came on CD even after DVD became a thing meaning you had to sit and swap through like 5 discs during install
>Every multiplayer game had local LAN support

I would say the modern PC gaming experience is better for the most part

>>9686813
>downloaded GTA_VC.exe from Limewire
>it actually worked and wasnt a virus

Russian roulette whether anything would work on your system
Russian roulette whether it would work tomorrow
Entire franchises and genres withheld from pc
BSOD

>>9686828
>reasonable hardware prices
>$69 for £3 hour snes platformers

>>9686778
game boy and snes emulation
big pc game boxes and cds

>>9690630
I did

>>9686828
>new games were actually good and Innovative
You had iD games, and a whole industry around cloning them or half assed genesis games
>reasonable hardware prices
Nah
>cracks
Sorta

>>9686778
Seems like people here were jackasses, back in the day, but I also don't blame them for getting computer viruses due to inexperience.
I got my emulators and roms from websites like CoolRom (heard about it from classmates), on the school computer; save them on a CD or floppy and play them on my home computer, which didn't have internet access. The only old PC games I played were those I used to play at my grandparents' house, in the 90s - I ended up keeping them when they moved to a different house. I still have a couple of them today, but I haven't played them in 10 years.

It was something, alright.

>>9686778
>XP
>retro

>>9691785
It has been 21 years

Does anyone remember an old 2d game where you played as a blue helicopter shooting things? Like from the late 90s/early 2000s? I can't remember the name and it's been bothering me for years now.

>>9686778
Pretty cool

>>9691898
>the objective of the game is to stop playing

>>9691907

>>9686778
>WinXP
You have to be 18 to post here.

>>9686778
It was trash but, it was also mysterious, every new game you found was a surprise, you never knew what you were going to get. Usually garbage but every now and then...there was some really cool shit.

>>9692029
Users who grew up wjth XP are 24-29 years of age now. None of them know what a FDD is.

This thread really makes it clear why we almost never have threads on retro PC games. Everyone here was kids on their parent's shitty prebuilt PCs back then.

>>9692140
I guess trying to play games on a toaster with no computer knowledge really filtered a lot of kids back then. I was 11 in 1996 when my family got PC and knew nothing about computers. But I thought computers where the coolest thing ever and taught myself how they worked and programming.

>>9686854
EA happened.

>>9692140
Unless you were a nerd (and I mean an actual nerd, as in no social life outside of usenet and irc and actually knew what those were before the age where everyone heard web URLs vocally said on TV, not just a poser Big Bang Theory "nerd" or even "the weird kid" for that matter) back in the day, you either were the kid on your parents shit box, or said parent with shit box, or just plain the person with shit box and that was your introduction to computers. You might have dabbled with Email, you might have played games other than the included microsoft ones on it.

When did computer rooms get phased out?
Game rooms and offices may still be around, but I'm under the impression that sometime in the 2000s, rooms specifically for using desktop computers went away.

>>9692241
Back in the 90s when I was a kid, we had a computer in the family room and one in the office that my dad worked on. We moved a few times, in the second house I was in the family room computer was moved to the basement rec room, there was a computer in the kitchen, and the best was in the office.
3rd house, the family room computer (which was a beyond obsolete 95 shitbox i had for old school games) was in my room after taking it out the attic, the kitchen computer which was not really powerful was in the bonus/rec room, the not so powerful but good enough office computer was in a room with a couch. Eventually got a decent xps for rct3 in that same room and then a decent hp pavilion desktop in 2009 for my room to replace my shit Compaq laptop.
4th house as far as contemporary computers go, my late father's hp all in one is in the living/dining room, my mother's as well, i have a thinkpad W in there. My room has a thinkpad yoga and unstable as shit custom built pc, sister has shitty hp laptop.
I don't exactly think we had a computer room.

>>9692490
Oh yeah, also those retro computers are gone, even the xps. The pavilion is sorta here, but not exactly usable. I'm not counting the many retro laptops I got and the power mac I randomly got as that was post childhood

>>9686828
>reasonable hardware prices
Thanks anon, I needed a good laugh from our resident retard zoomies

>>9686778
the games were great
getting them working was shit
typing in cd keys was shit

>>9690221
>ZSNES
it gets so much hate today, some of it deserved, but goddamn that thing fucking flew and was a miracle for the hardware it ran on. Buttery smooth 60FPS on a Pentium III 450 felt like a fucking miracle. and it was, damnit, it was....
you had to be there.

I grew up with Macs and the gaming situation on those was considerably simpler than on the PC, but one thing I remember that was VERY annoying is that a lot of games did not display system requirements on the box. Civilization II, for example, says precisely fuck all on the box, but the first page of the manual says that you need a 68030 running at 25 MHz. This didn't matter much in 1995 when everything was a 68k/PPC fat binary, but by late 1996 and early 1997, 68k software was a little bit harder to come by, and on more than one occasion my dad bought something that was PowerPC only, and wouldn't run on our 68k Mac. However, if you did find software that was explicitly compatible with your architecture, it would run 99.99% of the time because Macs were set up to be no bullshit idiot proof appliances. I always used to think my friends were retards because they talked about how their computers never worked or gave them a ton of trouble. My thoughts were "just put the CD in the drive dummies", but I had no clue how finicky Windows was at the time.

>>9692241
My house was too small (1,450 sqft above grade) to have a dedicated computer room. My dad set up the computer in a corner of the basement rec room. Sometime around 2006 or 2007, my parents gave up on having a dedicated spot for their computers at all, and just started buying Macbook laptops which moved around the house. I had my own gaming PC set up on a desk in my bedroom.

>>9692490
>>9692494
What kind of Power Mac do you have? My parents upgraded to a Power Mac 7300 in 1997, which felt amazing after coming from a 68k Performa, but it looks like outdated shit when the iMac dropped about a year later. Still have a soft spot for it though, mac software still feels comfy to me in a way Windows never could.

>>9692570
No one truly hates ZSNES. Yes it was basically the GOAT back during the 90s/2000s but it's a historical relic now.

>>9686778
Aside from technical issues, it was an exciting time spanning multiple eras it a sort of uncontrolled wild west. There were games tailored specifically to the expected mouse/keyboard controls and unique from console games such as RTS, MMORPG, space combat/flight simulation, FPS, and sexy games. Imagine stores with aisles of games stacked from the floor to above your height like a grocer's. You hunt for the latest 0-day warez, chat in IRC or MUD/MUCK, seek things out in newsgroups, or "share/lend" new games with your friends/family/classmates/strangers. A lot of file compression with PKzip to discs and virus scans were an unfortunate trade off to the cracks which came with .nfo text files with ascii art and maybe razor or whatever cool group had a demoscene-styled intro file with some banging music to cool effects. You can get together with your friends, classmates, and/or enthusiast club agree to a large space to bring computers for multiplayer-LAN where you coordinate the massive effort of transportation and food plans. With CD-burners, we'd start movements in trying to prop up Dreamcast sales by offering burned copies, introducing others to obscure and different music that would not be on radio stations, show off funny/weird/awesome videos found like "Tokyo Breakfast"/martial arts flicks/anime/fighting game combo videos to J-pop/J-rock. It was truly a wild west in our gaming enjoyment, but things are better now with parity to console releases, convenience through the internet, mature emulation, and comparatively lower cost to entry into the PC space now.

>>9692638
It's some mid to late 90s pre imac one.
I was never really a mac guy, but old mac games seem pretty comfy.

>>9692696
The interface is comfy.

>>9686778
Slow.

>>9692140
I thought about making a few but I suck at making threads, they never get any traction.

I remember buying more RAM just so that Fallout would load locations faster. And then it did load locations faster. Worth it

>>9686778
I miss old PC gaming so much

>>9686778

>>9687148
Can confirm. Bought my gaming rig in 2015 and still works like a charm, playing recently released games on high 1080p without issue. True next gen games will get me in trouble though so it's time to upgrade I guess. Need to find a job for fucks sake.

>>9686778
trying to remember how to use DOS as a 6 year old to get Treasure Mountain running

>>9686828
>reasonable hardware prices
lmao no

>>9694010
I remember getting these but not that they had IE on them. God, imagine wanting to install IE.

>>9691828
Choplifter?
Fort Apocalypse?
Raid on Bungeling Bay?
HeliJeep (itself a freeware DOS clone of Silkworm for the NES)?

Actually shit

Go online and and play some DOS games

We are currently in the best period of gaming. Anything good in the past can be played, better

>>9686778
frustrating but also fun.

>>9694023
Oh god, the speed
That really takes me back

>>9686828
>reasonable hardware prices
You paid top dollar for shiny new top of the line tech, and immediately after you pay for it, it's obsolete, worthless trash.

>>9686778
Retro PC gaming was blue screening every time you stepped off the boat in Morrowind because PC hardware drivers sucked ass.

>>9694846
>Anything good in the past can be played, better
Not if it was multiplayer. All the normies have been siphoned off into battle pass simulators. Can't just hop into a Tribes 2 server on a whim anymore.

>>9694741
Looking back it's crazy how short that era was. We've been stuck in current late HD era for over a decade now, with aesthetics in games and UIs barely changing since late 2000s.

>>9691787
>>9692078
Dumb argument, people did not use XP right at launch, that’s like saying when Windows 11 came out every single user switched from 10 on the spot. People back then were still on 98 and when they got XP it usually came bundled with a new PC.

>>9695130
>well I only played it recently so it's not retro
ok

>>9695092
Gaming's last leap was the 7th gen, if you showed me a 7th gen game and 8th gen game side by side, 8th or 9th side by side or even 7th and 9th, I probably couldn't tell the difference. There is a reason why the switch is still viable.

>>9695130
Counter point, we had a pirated copy of xp around 2001 running on our computers.

>>9695138
8 gen "leap" was PBR and if anything it ended up making games uglier, but it did make development easier and so larger scale was easier to achieve. 9 gen "leap" is RTX and nanite and so far RTX is barely noticeable because games still refuse to have physics and so dynamic lighting doesn't matter to them, nanite wasn't even used by any AAA yet as far as I can see.
But also aesthetics haven't changed at all, in games or real life. Windows Vista still kind of looks modern and it's from 2006. Iron Man 2 looks like it came out yesterday and it's from 2010. Mainstream culture is still that of late 2000s, except gayer I guess.

>>9687056
>not using dwango
bro...

>>9687293
>That said - the Indie scene was nowhere near as vibrant, as it just wasn't possible to create a good pro-level game on your own or with a couple of people.

The indie scene was very vibrant back then and did make pro level games, a lot of which are notable titles even today, but the indie scene was all video game modding back then as opposed to stand alone games because Unreal wasn't shovelware ready yet back then like it is now. Back then you knew that your indie game "made it" when a real developer like Valve or id bought it and made it into a retail product. Here is a small list of "indie" games back then that went pro:

>Final Doom (started off as a normal megawad by Team TNT then went retail at the last minute to great controversy in the community when id took notice of it.)
>Counterstrike (Bought by valve)
>Team Fortress (Bought by valve)
>Day of Defeat (Bought by valve. Valve even hired the original mod team to keep developing it so it technically stayed indie for a while too.)
>Gunman Chronicles (started off as a Quake mod, then a quake II mod, then they ported it to goldsource and made into a retail game after Sierra offered them a publishing deal.)
>HONORABLE MENTION: They Hunger was a Half Life mod that never went retail but was heavily promoted and even distributed for free by PC Gamer magazine, just as they had done with the groups earlier half life mod U.S.S. DarkStar.

Indie game development was arguably just as prominent in the 90's as it is today, it just took a different form back then due to the lack of stand alone engines available at the time. (Although the "Pie in the Sky" engine was free back then, but those games weren't pro level) This list is also only indie developed shooter games, I haven't even mentioned the other genres of games and their indie games during that time period.

>>9695165
>Mainstream culture is still that of late 2000s, except gayer I guess.
There is a good argument for the internet being the cause of a so-called "atomization of culture". Before the internet was really a thing, people in a nation or region of the world typically shared one culture, they listened to the same music, saw the same shows, read the same books, knew the same references, watched the same TV channels, wore the same clothes etc. This allowed the rise of "trends" and in-group memes. With the internet however everything is on-demand, there is no shared culture. It's this grey, amorphous, annoying, estranged, by the numbers, ultra-gay or ultra-conversative global culture to appeal the highest number possible.

This same thing is happening with movies, with music and of course with video games.

>>9694012
I don't even care anymore. I was actually thinking about this earlier today; I grew up in a period when hardware changed so much that you could basically get a brand new game and a brand new tech achievement every time you bought a new game (well it was possible anyway). You also probably needed a new box every year to stay current unless you just stuck to consoles. Then today I see a message about it being the 7th anniversary of Stardew Valley. If you had talked to me in the 1990s and said that people would be playing the same game 7 years later, or that a company would be supporting the same game 7 years later, then I would have been shocked. Now it seems as if the platforms are just so much more matured, and the technology growth so minimal, that there is little reason to push the envelope, because you will actually lose people rather than win accolades (probably also since not many people, beyond nerds like ourselves, wants to buy a PC anymore anyway, and would rather just play movie games on a console). It's so wild to think about. For me I guess it is a blessing; I don't care about new AAA games and so my computer from 2014 is still running everything I want to run and is now doing so at 4K/60FPS. I hope I can just keep this computer forever, or at least figure out how to keep this win7 install alive when I inevitably have to replace the motherboard again.

>>9695075
yeah, plus now we're entering the world in which the first generations of online consoles are being jettisoned. Fuck you if you wanted much of anything that was released on XBLA or PSN in 2006.

>>9695774
yeah, I'm not really sure how to move through this but to simply ignore the mass blob culture and do my own thing. It sucks though; Even here memes are just lifted from the blob now.

>>9695460
I think it's interesting how the visibility problem existed. The guy behind Spiderweb Software talked about it in a nice speech he gave once about being a solo indie dev for over 30 years. He said nobody today knew anything about visibility problems when compared to the 90s. In summary, 90s indie releases were:
>put your shareware demo online somewhere
>ask people to spend 90 minutes downloading a 1.2meg demo
>ask for 20-30 bucks to get the full experience
>get your shareware included on a 10 buck CD at a computer store somewhere
>get angry phone calls bitching about how they already paid 10 bucks for your shareware and now you want 20 more for the full game

and so on

>>9686778
PC was best until ps2 arrived (other than nes classic/genesis) then it was more or less tied

I still keep a copy of SkiFree on the desktop of my current computer. Always have done. Great classic freeware PC game.

>>9696980
>Now it seems as if the platforms are just so much more matured, and the technology growth so minimal,
What still gets me is how GPU's specifically have evolved in the last decade. That's where all the innovation seems to have been focused at.

>>9697116
Why can't I move my cursor away from the middle of this pic?

>>9697116
fun fact, microsoft ported skifree to the Game Boy Color. The game menu even had a windows based theme, but on the Game Boy Color...

>>9694023
I cant believe I used to patiently wait for everything to load, now I get restless even on fast internet or I just go to the bathroom if I know it's going to take longer than a minute. My brain is fucked.

>>9697156
and apparently that port was the absolute shits;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxB8WVvSrk8&t=258s
PC master race udnefeated.

>>9690630
I did. Pretty cute.

>>9697139
130w is more than some entire 90s computers drew lol. then again phones are crazy now too. The newest USB standard allows for 100w power if the cable is designed for it. Shit will basically replace all laptop power supplies (thanks EU for forcing that in a few years). Pretty cash I think, but damn we use a lot of power now. So much for energy efficiency, just make the phone bigger so it fits a bigger battery!

>>9697156
they did this on the GBA too, but for card and board games. Really weird using a mouse-driven GUI on a d-pad.

>>9695774
Not sure how true that is. Now more than ever it's a winner takes all world in terms of entertainment. Handful of movies a year make all the money, the rest make fuck all, same with games. Seems like everyone is watching the same movies and playing the same games now, more than ever before. Same shit when it comes to clothes and haircuts, now that subcultures died everyone just looks the same. And everyone seems to have the same opinions on everything, or rather one of the two options.

>>9696980
>platforms are just so much more matured, and the technology growth so minimal
I think everyone will be taken by surprise by this gen. Everyone assumes there won't be a leap and there totally will be a leap I think, just wait a couple of years. Or download UE5 and compare it to UE4, I'm playing around with UE5 now and it's blowing my mind. Everything can be done with real time lighting now, and it's actually good, it doesn't leak when you don't want it to, it doesn't create artifacts, I think baking is already dead and game dev pipeline is currently hugely changing, we'll see results in a couple of years I guess. Hopefully all of this will lead to more dynamic worlds with a lot of physics

>just want to play all of the dos games I never got to play as a kid
>dosbox is a fucking nightmare to navigate with zero support groups or tutorials available out there

I do not know what mounting a boot disk means. I do not know what MSXDC is short for. I do not understand why this requires any step beyond navigating to the game's exe and running it.

>>9697626
it's not even that simple. There are countless rabbit holes that exist in modern social interests. It's extremely easy for things to be "famous" to some people yet completely unknown to 99% of the people. The mechanisms of social disease make it simultaneously super easy to spread things around and yet super difficult for something to actually be known to everyone. That's why music and movies keep pulling back ancient actors from the 80s, because things that are "super famous and big" in social media aren't actually known to anyone. I've discussed this topic on some board before, and it is rather fascinating. Social media fame is ultimately a mirage; It has zero meaning to anyone who isn't constantly on it.

>>9697663
I'll have to check that out, I've been missing a lot of that since the only new game stuff I give a shit about is mobile VR. Oddity I know, but I accept it.

>>9697787
though to clarify, you are right that walls don't really exist between subcultures anymore. That's largely because you no longer have to go to certain stores or buy certain magazines or listen to certain albums in order to be part of stuff. There also doesn't seem to be as much of interest in segregating, at least not in social circles anyway. Not sure how I feel about that desu. I did read an article about this topic, written by some insufferable faggot who still made decent points. Ultimately, I think he had a good point, that the previous era was all about trying to be "the most" of a group and be "authentic", which ultimately mutated into hipsters, which ultimately became such a nonsense feud that the term itself became meaningless, and people ultimately gave up on "authenticity", in so far as this notion of how you maintain "honesty" or avoid "selling out" or similar things. Ultimately they argued that "authentic" was always an imaginary and unattainable goal, and that caring less about following the group standards for "authentic" means you don't have to be as performative about what you like or dislike.

>>9697301
I get that its a bad port but this guy is also annoying, doesn't like anything, and obviously goes out of his way to hit every obstacle in the GBC version of skifree just because.

>>9689041
>>9690630
Both of these games were tight

>>9686825
Holy shit. Completly forgot about this.

>>9697156
>>9697301
Absolutely fascinating.

>>9686778
>*whiirrr* clunk
>woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh
>windowless themed menu to run the installer, read the manual or install acrobat reader appears
soul

>>9697817
He's not wrong about it being zoomed way too close in though, defeating the entire purpose of the game compared to the Windows version.

>>9698442
Take me back

>>9686778
For me, it's

>>9686778
If you bought the game you owned it and could on sell it.

If your friend bought it you *also* owned it because copy protection was non-existent.

The mix of good vs bad games was honestly probably worse but the best seemed better than it does now. Maybe the nostalgia doing the thinking but it was a great time to be alive

>>9686825
My nigga

>>9695130
I was selling PCs at the time and, true many people felt burnt by Windows ME but Microsoft countered by pre releasing trial versions of XP that lasted well after the official release. Nearly anyone that tried it was on board because it initially ran quite fast and was infinitely more stable than even win98 se. With good drivers and software uptime was theoretically infinite. I kept media boxes running non stop for years without reboot. Plenty of shit drivers and apps didn't allow that, but smart techs knew what to do with it

>>9690224
I remember CD code websites. God, that was some radical shit.

>>9686778
My friends used to tongue my anus because i could run Far Cry 1 in max graphics

>>9686778
The Lion King, Rise of The Triad, (a horrible xmen game), Flight Simulator 95, Dark Forces, Full Throttle, Indy Racing 2, Civilization 2, SimCopter.
Those are the PC games I played from 1994 to 1999 in my family's 486 DX 2.
In 1999 I got a k6-2 500MHz with a Voodoo 3 3000 which blew my N64 away.

>>9697116
s o v l

slower and more aliased

Any games from this era we can play online?

>>9699184
I still play worms armageddon ocasionally

>>9699501
Oh nice. what do you guys play through? since it’s an older game do I need to worry about retards hacking into my pc or something?

>>9686825

>>9699184
The Quakes can all be played online with some work, Doom has a bunch of source ports that make playing the game online easy.

>downloading malware infected .exes off of morpheus and kazaa
>buying pirated games at the flea market
>stealing games from Walmart
>discovering and playing hundreds of 8bit/16bit roms that you never heard of
It was pretty comfy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwRR7-P-8fc

Fell in love with our class Macintosh back in 1998 when I was in Kindergarten. First computer I ever touched. Used to play (as much as a 5yo could) this or draw Crazy Bones in its Paint program

Hey, what is those midi things?

>>9686778
it was always a gamble for me when buying pc games because about a third of them just wouldnt launch and i had no idea how to fix it i bought myst after it got cheap it just wouldnt run never played it lol. but when the games worked wow so glad fallout and og warcraft were on clearence and worked great.