General PC Gaming Nostalgia Thread

[Anonymous No.1189938]

It seems like most people here have a lot of nostalgia for consoles and grew up playing them, hence the large number of threads about console gaming. That makes sense, as consoles were a lot more popular, and a lot less expensive than PCs at the time.

But I know that some of us here on /vr/ were still PC gamers back in the day.

So, to those of you who were PC gamers growing up, or just PC gamers in the 90s or before:
>When did you first get into PC gaming?
>What was your first computer, when did you get it, and what games did you play on it?
>Any good stories of early PC gaming you'd like to share?

My family got our first computer in 1996. It was a Cyrix 486DLC-33MHz machine, with 8MB of RAM, VGA graphics and a PC speaker (that was later upgraded to a SB16). I mostly played Apogee and Epic Megagames shareware games: Jazz Jackrabbit and Traffic Department 2192 were two of my favorite games, though the very first game I played was Commander Keen 1.

[Anonymous No.1189941]

>>1189938

[Anonymous No.1189959]

My family got its first PC in Summer 1994. A 486 66Mhz with 4MB RAM and a massive 450 MB hard drive (and a nifty internal CD-ROM drive) and a sexy VGA card, made by some long-forgotten company called Magitronics. It came with a couple of games on CD, many in demo versions, but mainly Return to Zork and King's Quest VI. I played the shit out of Return to Zork.

I'd been playing on my cousins' PCs for a couple years at that point, so I got a heap of shareware that I already loved, like Jetpack!, Crystal Caves, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, and Commander Keen IV. Jill of the Jungle and Lemmings were about my favorites.

[Anonymous No.1189973]

I had a PC since about 1991. First a Headstart Explorer then a 306 DX/40 but I didn't really play games on them I ran a BBS and played games on my consoles. If I had wanted to play games on a computer back then I would have gotten an Amiga.

Pic related was my favorite door game, though.

[Anonymous No.1189982]

Man, this game was the bee's knees.

[Anonymous No.1190006]

My family got a Windows 3 PC around 95. My first games on it were share-/freeware games like Keen 4 and Monkey Island. My first own game was Thor's Hammer though I barely played it until this year.
I got my sister's Windows 95 machien with a 486 DX with 75 Mhz and 12 MB RAM in 98.

[Anonymous No.1190047]

>This game with your new pc.

[Anonymous No.1190210]

>>1189938
MEGARACEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous No.1190229]

>>1189938
I had a 486 SLC, then a P166 with a voodoo card, then a celeron A with a riva TNT. I put together the last one myself, that was the machine I liked the most.

[Anonymous No.1190230]

I was a poorfag, so I didn't get a PC until there were some strange circumstances involved. My mom's boyfriend's best friend's dad owned a hardware company, so we got hooked up with some hand-me-downs. Win 95, 333 mhz Celeron. I don't remember much else. Anyway, the games I remember playing most are Duke 3D, Hexen, Revenant, Sanitarium and Thief. Of course it was the era of shareware and demo CDs, so I used to pick up PC magazines just to sample games.

[Anonymous No.1190231]

>>1190047
OH SHIT IS THAT SOME MOTHERFUCKING POD?

[Anonymous No.1190294]

>>1190229
I remember another reason I enjoyed the older machines significantly less, I just had one of these, and a gravis gamepad pro as opposed to a KICKASS MADCATZ CONTROLLER.

[Anonymous No.1190324]

Got a computer just around '95. We had one before that, but only for a few weeks.

Anyways, game came with Battle Beast:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlZDuxrPy48

That game was the fucking tits. We played it all the time, my brother and I. It was one of those fighting games that let each player use one side of the keyboard. I always light the wolf guy, and my brother always took the armadillo.

And Mechwarrior 2. Oh hell yes. My young brain was too weak to comprehend much of this game, although I recall getting decently far in it. Flash forward many years later to high school and I bought a copy of the game with the manual (absolutely a must have. They don't make manuals like this anymore) and played the absolute shit out of it for several years. I still play it now and again, along with Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries, and Mechwarrior 3 if I can stomach the crashing and other bugs associated with running it on modern hardware.

[Anonymous No.1190375]

Our first computer was a 200mhz AMD, with 32mb ram, which I much later upgraded to 64mb using ram salvaged from discarded pc's.
I remember playing a lot of Red Alert, a 20 minute Rollercoaster Tycoon demo, Dweep, commandos (with cheats), Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition, Baldur's Gate and at a friends' place we'd always play Raptor.
Oh! And some old game of which the name escapes me, you were a spaceship and had to find a boss monster on different planets, and could get upgrades from killing smaller enemies and little dome bunkers on the ground.

[Anonymous No.1190395]

>>1190294
I have a similar joystick with less buttons that I bought at a garage several years ago for one dollar. Too bad new computers don't have a game port, I wouldn't buy an adapter for a half broken $1 joystick, but at least it works on my old Windows 98 PC.

[Anonymous No.1190408]

>>1189938
OP here, I'll add a bit more:
During the 1999 holiday season, we got another computer, an HP 6640C. With a 500MHz AMD K6-2, this was a pretty big step up from the 486 machine, but I didn't have many games that could take advantage of it.

My dad had a friend at work who gave us 10 "backup disks", full of warez copies of popular software and games. Man, those had everything: Mechwarrior 3, Half-Life, Starcraft, GTA, Quake, Turok 2, Carmageddon 2, Simcity 2000/3000, Falcon 4.0, and all kinds of other good shit. I probably had over a hundred of the best late-90s games at my disposal.

I ended up spending a lot of time on Gamespy 3D, playing Quake II, Turok 2, and the South Park game online. Got to experience most of the great stuff from that era. Also pretty much got addicted to the original Sims, but that came a bit later.

Those times were awesome.

[Anonymous No.1190410]

>>1190395
But the gameport is the big feature of a cheap plasticky interact controller or such. I have one of these. But only one. I wish I could get more.

[Anonymous No.1190423]

>>1190410
I had this one, Gravis I think, with a fuckton of buttons, POV hats and switches.

[Anonymous No.1190434]

First PC was in 1991, and was gaming from the start. I had no consoles or anything before that.

386DX 25 MHz, 4 MB RAM, 80 MB HDD, Paradise VGA 1 MB card, dual floppies. No sound card until we got an SB16 in about 1995.

I lived in Saudi at the time so pretty much all the games we had were pirated. Played loads of stuff like Prince of Persia, Commander Keen, Monkey Island, Indianapolis 500, Space Quest IV, SC2000, Wolf3D, Doom 2, etc.

Pic related is Dyna Blaster - it seems to be less well-known on the PC, but Hudson actually made a pretty faithful port of the PC Engine Bomberman for DOS. It's one of my all-time favourite multiplayer games, probably since I had been playing it since the start of my gaming career, and I played so many other variations over the years thanks to emulation.

Not really a game, but I also played the Car & Driver simulation (1992) to death. It may have been my first experience with textured polygons.

We didn't get another PC until about 1998, so got behind the times for quite a while. It never had a CD-ROM drive! I still have the original PC now (upgraded to 12 MB RAM with some SIMMs I pulled out of a dumped Wang), and got it working again recently after a cap burnt out on the HDD.

>>1190423
I had that piece of shit for a while, probably around the time I first got into emulators in the early 2000s. The main six buttons crapped out pretty quickly.

[Anonymous No.1190443]

>>1190423
But that's a windows 95 controller, like the madcatz stick referred to a few posts back.

[Anonymous No.1190458]

>>1190408
Never played turok 2. I heard horrible things about south park. Quake 2 was already mentioned: >>1190229

[Anonymous No.1190462]

>>1190458
The FPS south park? Wasn't all that but I actually enjoyed it.

[Anonymous No.1190464]

>>1190462
Oh yeah? You enjoyed it, huh? Well, how much did you enjoy it?

[Anonymous No.1190468]

I can't remember what kind of computer we first had, nor any specifics aside from the OS. My first PC was in the early 90's running DOS, all I used it for was Doom and Wolfenstein. In 95 we got a Packard Bell with Windows 95, came with all sorts of free games too. It's how I discovered the Journey Man Project, which blew me away at the time. That's when I started getting into BBS and all of that, but it was like my previous computer and was used mostly for Doom and Quake.

I miss the days of getting demo disks out of PC Gamer and having to go through intricate interactive FMV backdrops to access the demos. I never did get to play Gravy Trader...

[Anonymous No.1190498]

>>1190468
Hah coconut monkey. i did play tapestry of injustice with the havoc bots from chaos, and I tried dry gulch or one of the levels with that style with gunsliger q2, see above.

[Anonymous No.1190501]

>>1190375
>some old game of which the name escapes me, you were a spaceship and had to find a boss monster on different planets, and could get upgrades from killing smaller enemies and little dome bunkers on the ground
FURY3
Goddamn that lingered at the back of my mind for almost an hour. I hate that feeling, I could hear the music and everything, but the name just wouldn't come.

[Anonymous No.1190649]

[Keeshi 0662-3017-4305 Floette[(...) No.1190702]

>>1190649
oh lord. WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS HOVER RACER GAME THING!

[Anonymous No.1190704]

>>1190501
>>1190649
Fuck microsoft. This board isn't about when they dumped a 4 billion dollar subsidy into gaming, and their shitty repackaging of terminal velocity was shitty.

[Anonymous No.1190712]

>>1190702
Boku no Google Reverse Search.

Hover!

[Keeshi 0662-3017-4305 Floette[(...) No.1190709]

>>1190468
Sounds allot like my childhood too. Same games and everything. lil creepy.

[Keeshi 0662-3017-4305 Floette[(...) No.1190739]

>>1190712
My god I'm stupid, thanks.

[Anonymous No.1190742]

I don't really remember much about it, but the first time I had my 'real' PC experiment was somewhere in 1995-7 when my cheap-ass dad upgraded to Windows 95 from DOS.
Installing and playing games become much easier with graphical interface because I'm not a native english speaker. My older brother brought me some games like GTA which was probably the game that got me into vidya.

My dad upgraded his computer again in 2003, he's still using that exact same computer till this day

[Anonymous No.1190757]

We bought our first computer from a group of guys who ran a little business out of an old appliance store (I think).

It ran on a DOS OS and had Windows 3.1, which wasn't good for much at the time. We eventually got a Sound Blaster card and CD-ROM when Alone in the Dark had no playback. That game gave me nightmares.

We then got Wing Commander 2 and Ultima Underworld -those games and every one after would required a bootdisk. Then when 95 came out low and behold, nothing fucking worked on it.

[Anonymous No.1190930]

>>1189938
>When did you first get into PC gaming?
Mid eighties roughly.
>What was your first computer, when did you get it, and what games did you play on it?
Commodore 64 and also followed by 128 as well.
>Any good stories of early PC gaming you'd like to share?
Not really, just loads of games for days.

>>1190229
As much as Action Quake 2 was my game back in the day. It's absurd how terrible it is on anything not a LAN. I jumped into AHL later when that came out as well, slowed the movement pace, but the balance and weapons were better. Then it went to shit with the newer version. TS was the best version of a semi-realistic action mod though.

I remember taking out an entire the entire enemy team after they wiped out all mine with stealth and knife only on I think the map name is ruins2. It's a shame that gl_modulate essentially ruined the mod.

[Anonymous No.1191198]

>>1190930
Really? Was fine on DSL. I never got how the weapon balance was all that horrible either.

[Anonymous No.1191218]

>>1191198
Though it did get a little absurd happing around like a gazelle with a sniper rifle.

[Anonymous No.1191270]

1987 my dad came home with a Tandy something or other. Took two days to set up because we somehow got one with no manual and in '87 nobody knew anything about PCs.

After that we picked up Mixed Up Mother Goose and King's Quest 2. I would sit in my dad's lap and tell him what to type because I couldn't read very well or spell just yet. Great times. I became a Sierra fan hardcore because of that.

[Anonymous No.1191362]

>>1190930
>It's absurd how terrible it is on anything not a LAN
Okay, fine, I'll give you one thing, the programmer of a somewhat obscure mod called Qmarines did tell me that the source for AQ2 was unbelievably messy. I had suggested to him, among many things, bringing over the jumpkick feature from AQ2, he did not deem that doable.

[Anonymous No.1192105]

>>1189938
Regrettably, on my first computer, I ran a lot of shitty games.

[Anonymous No.1192131]

QWTF every day, I was in the clan DJedi I think... I remember learning Quake C so I could try and convert the reaper bots to TF... I had no idea what I was getting into

[Anonymous No.1192154]

>>1189938
Showing my age here...

My first PC was a 286-16. The first "AT" computer. 40mb hard disk. I had a whopping 1mb of ram.

I got hooked after seeing my buddy's 286/monochrome with Police Quest.

At the last moment I got a VGA instead of monochrome, boy am I glad I did.

I loved all the Sierra games:

Police Quest series (adventure game as a cop, can you believe that? lol)
Leisure Suit Larry

My brother loved the Monkey Island 1 and 2.

I remember getting an "Adlib" card and fitting it. Wow, real sound instead of squeaks.


I do remember getting a Cyrix DX266 CPU and motherboard to go with it. Wow, I was blown away by the speed increase.

[Anonymous No.1193868]

>>1192105
A lot of the games in that picture look pretty good.

[Anonymous No.1194031]

>>1190501
Also sounds similar to Terminal Velocity

I swear, everyone who played shareware DOS games in the 90's MUST know this music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9auoXBUSRMQ&list=PL060A1169B9C12CA6

[Anonymous No.1194035]

>>1190229
AHL was more enjoyable than AQ2

[Anonymous No.1194041]

>>1190930
>AHL went to shit
>TS better than AHL
No way. AHLDC is just as fun as the old version, it's just a bit more skillful. It's still much more fast paced than TS is and has better jumping mechanics. AHL2 on the other hand...yeech. /opinions.

[Anonymous No.1194082]

[Anonymous No.1194124]

>>1194031
Thanks, I'd completely forgotten about that music. All 4 channel mods, sounds like an Amiga game. Very rare on the PC.

Game rip:
http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Terminal_Velocity_%28DOS%29#Game_Rip

And that website has a shitload of other good music from DOS games I used to play, eg:
http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Major_Stryker_%28DOS%29
Bad game, awesome music. I remember recording this to analog tape so I could listen to it on my personal tape player. Bobby Prince is famous for Doom but he wrote a lot of other good music.

[Anonymous No.1194282]

My first PC was the one on the pic, an Olivetti Envision P75. It was one of the first PCs to really try multimedia stuff, it had hardware to function as a CD player (including a remote control!) and you could hook it up to the TV. It also had RCA ports in the back to hook it up to an audio system or something.

I remember me and my dad going to a presentation where some dude showed the "awesome" multimedia capabilities of this thing. Neither of us knew much about PCs back then so naturally we were awed. Only as I learned more about PCs I realized that it had a crappy graphics card and a motherboard that didn't support anything over a P90 and 24MB RAM, both of which I learned the hard way trying to upgrade the damn thing.

Since it was outdated quite soon and we didn't get another PC for a while, it sort of got me into retro games like Indy Atlantis or Tie Fighter and emulation (ZSNES!) since most of 1998's new games already didn't run on it. Not that I had money to buy them anyway, so I mostly relied on demo and shareware CDs that came with the game magazines that I bought from time to time. We also had a guy who we bought bootlegs from time to time. I still remember getting Red Alert from him at Christmas and playing the shit out of it.

Around 2000 I scraped together enough money to buy a used Pentium Pro 200 which I then proceeded to overclock to 233 and later upgrade with a Voodoo2. Played Freespace, Half-Life, JA2 etc on it but it was still behind on the tech so all the new games like Deus Ex, Unreal Tournament or NFS Porsche I played on my friend's PC whenever he let me. Those were sweet times.

Later in university I got a student loan and as a first priority proceeded to buy my first new PC, with a 1,4GHz AMD cpu and a Radeon 9000. I remember playing Mafia on it and being super impressed. That PC served me well for three years until I went to study abroad and sold it piece by piece cause the motherboard was blown to get some extra spending money.

[Anonymous No.1194315]

>>1194031
>>1194124
Damn straight the similarities to terminal velocity went over your head! I had already pointed out that Fury 3 was just a bad port of TV, but the nanny-mods deleted my post because they were somehow scared that non-rosy mentions of microsoft would taint the the nostalgic bliss, or some equally mentally ill concern.

[Anonymous No.1194332]

>>1194031
Very sexy music, used to get a boner from that when I was 12 and heard that coming from my Sound Blaster, literally.

[Anonymous No.1194340]

>>1194282
Oh man, I don't know why, but the word "multimedia" really brings feelings of nostalgia. I remember around 1995 or so, that word was all the rage in advertisements and such, even in things like encyclopedia software. Once PCs started being bundled with CD-ROM drives, it was like a whole world opened up.

[Anonymous No.1194347]

>>1194340
Hah! I've just heard that word used recently! You're not the only one who finds it antiquated.

>>>>But newer generations of ebooks are being built with embedded multimedia capabilties
>>>Hopefully they're not talking about hooking the ereader up to a CD rom drive.
>>>Sounds very weird that they would still pitch it with a word like multimedia.
>> That was *my* choice of words, using a term that has meaning to non-geeks and is well understood. It simply refers to the fact that what we now know
>> as books will gradually be released from the constraints of paper, and that means that dedicated ereaders will need to keep up (and eventually fail)
>So basically you're talking about the gradual extinction of books? If you need to stick with words friendly to to the average consumer,
>you could also say that this will be
making books a lot more like powerpoint presentations.

[Anonymous No.1194359]

>>1194315
Oh, okay then. They do use the same engine, after all.

[Anonymous No.1194367]

>>1190210

I loved megarace.

Also had some duke Nukem 3D shadow warrior and a Blake stone:aliens of gold.

[Anonymous No.1194428]

>>1189938
Awwwwww CGW!

Could turn this into an "Ask a CGW editor anything," but my tenure there began just a year after the 1999 cut off for /vr/

CGW FTW, Jeff Green rules, and Scooter is old. Good times!

[Anonymous No.1194431]

>>1194031
Nostalgia-ing very hard.

[Anonymous No.1194456]

>>1194367
This guy, man.

[Anonymous No.1194839]

>>1194282
>Around 2000 I scraped together enough money to buy a used Pentium Pro 200

What the fuck are you doing?
300Mhz Celeron 300As were available for 30 dollars in 1998, they overclocked stock to 450Mhz. In later 1999 you could have gotten a 500Mhz Celeron for like 45-50 and they had boards that allowed two of them, perfect for 2K and later XP.
A Geforce 256 would have been the preferable move back then as well. Especially if you weren't doing SLI Voodoo 2.

The P75 if you got it when it came out, wouldn't have been too out of date processor wise, some boards I think could support up to 128, but be glad you didn't RAM costed a bitch as they were price fixing around those times. I blew 700 bucks on 768MB in early 2K. I think I spent 300 or so for 384 for my other machine in early 1999.

[Anonymous No.1196027]

>>1194839
Yeah, the Celeron was a great deal for years. I have a retro rig that ran a 300A, but couldn't overclock due to a 440LX board. I found a 400MHz Celeron-A on eBay, threw that in there, and it is still pretty fast for most games.

Still, I have to wonder what the hell you needed 384MB of RAM for in 1999. Most gaming computers at the time didn't even top 64MB.

[Anonymous No.1196405]

>>1196027
It came in handy for various shit like 3D Studio Max or PSP and occasionally ramdisking some stuff. Most gaming computers at the time weren't. Anything designated as a gaming computer was often under powered and overpriced.
Nowadays I have a relatively minimal stack of RAM, not nearly as much as I'd like. Only 6GGb, just enough for the OS and one hungry 64 bit process or one 32 bit and a 2GB ram-disk. I haven't really upgraded in some time though. I suppose when I do I'll attempt to give a bit more room for the ramdisk. I'd prefer more of an 8GB ramdisk, though it'd be nice to have an extra 4GB floating on that for a VM.
I haven't really been in any rush to upgrade. Machines a hybrid 6-7 year old and there's not much incentive to upgrade anything. It handles most things well enough.

[script writer kibe No.1196443]

I may or may not have told this story before, but I grew up with a father that was very technologically savvy. He worked on and repaired computers for a living and many Saturdays were spent at his place of employment.

He had a very decked out computer for the time, one that could watch cable and movies (he even had a VHS Player hooked up to it). Later on, he gave a custom built computer to me and my mom when we moved back to Alabama and it served us well until 2006 when we finally replaced it with an already somewhat outdated XP computer (my mom is INSANELY frugal that sometimes I wonder if I'm not half jewish)

[Anonymous No.1196518]

>>1189938
>When did you first get into PC gaming?
Not sure on the year off the top of my head, but my first owned pc was a PII 233 overclocked to 266, via jumpers lol.

>What was your first computer, when did you get it, and what games did you play on it?
My first computer was a spectrum +2, then a C64 then Amstrad 464 then Amiga 500.
My first game I ever bought was Thrust and Kings Keep.

>Any good stories of early PC gaming you'd like to share?
Nah, just that feel of looking at ads in mags for PCs while you saved up for one, because no internet as such back then.

[Anonymous No.1196556]

>When did you first get into PC gaming?
Mid 90s when I got my first computer
>What was your first computer, when did you get it, and what games did you play on it?
Pentium 100mhz, diamond stealth 64 graphics card, 8mb of RAM, SB16 and a 1 gig HD. Games I played on it where; Doom 2, Duke nukem 3d, Civilization 2, Leisure Suit Larry 7, Red alert and lots of demos from pc gaming magazines.

[Anonymous No.1196717]

cross-server groups when? just want to queue for some dungeons with competent players

[Anonymous No.1196796]

=1984-1986 : Amstrad CPC464
=1986-1992 : Amstrad CPC6128

=1991-1993 : AT286 PC 12mhz 640K colour EGA

next : can't really remember the exact dates...
=286AT 16mhz VGA
=486 Compaq DX 33mhz then 66mhz I guess (or 100mhz ?) (not sure)
and so on, then I switched to some Pentium2 at 233, then 350 mhz, then 500... and so on.

The good part with modern PC : you can often keep most of the computer, just change the motherboard, then CPU, then replace/addsome peripherals as it comes.


Of course I could test Atari ST and amiga500 a lot with friends having them.

[Anonymous No.1196915]

I kind of want to play a lot of the old PC games from like the early and mid 90s. Is it worth it trying to find an older machine from the era to play those games on, or can you play all those on a modern PC using things like DOSBox and virtual machines?

[Anonymous No.1196936]

>>1196915
For DOS games, DOSBox will work fine.

For anything Win95/Win98, you need an actual machine from the era.
Personally, I use the machine pictured, which has a 400MHz Celeron-A, 160MB RAM, a Voodoo3, and an Aureal Vortex sound card.

Your best bet would be to get a machine from the early 2000s; a lot of them are still absurdly cheap, parts are still plentiful, and they are obviously going to have better performance than period-accurate 90s machines.

Pair up a Pentium III, AMD K6-3, or early Athlon with a Geforce 3 and you'll be good to go. Additionally, throw in a Voodoo card or Aureal sound card to get 3DFX and A3D support.

[Anonymous No.1196941]

>>1196915
If they are DOS or Win 3.1 you'll be fine on a new machine with Dosbox. Early Windows 95 are a little trickier. Some will run fine on Win7, the rest you'll have to run through a VM. On the bright side you only have to set-up a VM once.
I don't think it's worth getting an older computer unless you are an authenticity fanatic.

[Anonymous No.1196946]

>>1196941
>gif
>little loading bar thingy isn't doing it's stuff

muh ocd

[Anonymous No.1196956]

>>1196941
If you want to run anything from around 1996-1999, you need an older computer.

1GHz+ machines with XP or above often have compatibility issues with Win9x games. Multi-core processors and modern video cards hurt compatibility even more, and Windows is becoming increasingly incompatible with older software.

It's pretty much impossible to get anything pre-DX9 running acceptably (or at all) on Windows 8. Microsoft has been tearing out DirectX legacy code for a while now.

I can't get any of the following to run on my current PC:
>Mechwarrior 3
>Imperium Galactica 2
>Sim Theme Park
>GTA 2
>Rogue Spear

I've tried pretty much everything, the games just complain about there not being any DirectDraw compatible video devices.

[Anonymous No.1196975]

>>1196956
>1GHz+ machines with XP or above often have compatibility issues with Win9x games. Multi-core processors and modern video cards hurt compatibility even more, and Windows is becoming increasingly incompatible with older software.

Modern virtual machines can emulate older harder.

[Anonymous No.1196984]

>>1196975
They don't emulate 3D hardware at all.

Even the VMs that support Direct3D only support DirectX 8 and above, and only with XP guests or above, making them useless for supporting older 3D games.

[Anonymous No.1196998]

>>1196984
>They don't emulate 3D hardware at all.

Sure they do.

[Anonymous No.1197002]

>>1196956
>If you want to run anything from around 1996-1999, you need an older computer.

I typically manage to find patches to run these games.

I can play Mechwarrior 3, for instance, on a Windows 7 64-bit machine. That's with a patch and quite a bit of messing with compatability setting.

But yes, anything using certain kinds of 3D have serious issues on Windows, although, as I said, you can sometimes find patches for them.

For your Mechwarrior 3 issues, try out this site, where I got my patches from:
http://www.mechwarrior3.org/wordpress/?page_id=35

[Anonymous No.1197013]

>>1196998
They don't.
I've tried with both Virtualbox and VMware. They can pass some limited 3D stuff to the host, but like I said, only DX8+, and only with XP guests or above.

I even tried DOSBox-SVN Daum with Windows 98 and Voodoo emulation. That's still very hackish, and doesn't work in the vast majority of cases.

>>1197002
Already tried it. I tried patches and fixes for all of the games that I mentioned. The MW3 patch doesn't fix the timing issues (bouncing ground units), or lack of hardware DirectDraw support in newer versions of Windows.

Avoid Windows 8 entirely if you want to play any older games. They broke fucking everything. Even games that were patched to work with Windows 7 x64 stopped working, and I'm not the only one to have this problem. The guy who does the Ancient DOS Games webshow agrees, posting on VOGONS that anything pre-DX9 refuses to work in Windows 8.

Microsoft doesn't really give a shit about backwards compatibility. The funny thing is, old OpenGL games work fine, and even 3DFX games work fine thanks to Glide wrappers.

[Anonymous No.1197031]

>>1197013
>Windows 8
Oh, yeah, that explains it. When I upgraded to 7 I was shitting my pants afraid that my older games wouldn't work.

Well, they work pretty fucking fine. In fact, I don't think I've had a single old game that worked on XP not work on 7, at least so far.

Thankfully, I have no plans whatsoever to "upgrade" to Windows 8. I just have no reason to do so.

> Ancient DOS Games
How is this? I think I've seen it mentioned before around here.

[Anonymous No.1197109]

>>1197031
ADG is a great webshow. There are over a hundred episodes, so odds are he's covered your favorite DOS game already. He's like LGR, but focuses a bit more on obscure games.

Also, you just inspired me to wipe Win 8.1 from my SSD and replace it with Win 7. Thank you.

[Anonymous No.1197108]

>>1197031
>Ancient DOS Games

Great review show. Devoid of bullshit. Covers a few hidden gems.
Reviews games in DOSBox as opposed to original hardware, though.

[Anonymous No.1197110]

>>1196936
>For anything Win95/Win98

There are considerable amount of windows 95/98 software that does run on 2K/XP/7.
One of the larger issues running old games is using palettestealersuspender for games that do odd coloring. But most games I find work so long as they're 32 bit. A few odd and ends have trouble. But a lot of stuff works.

>>1197013
W8 is garbage anyway. Has trouble with video and sound drivers. Losing sound intermittently, ignoring scaling and generally being a pain in the ass.

[Anonymous No.1197134]

>>1197108
Excellent. That's just what I've been wanting. These wannabe youtube comedians really, really get taxing after a while. Why can't a show just be informative instead of comedic? There's a lot of entertainment to be had in a purely informative show.

>>1197109
>Also, you just inspired me to wipe Win 8.1 from my SSD and replace it with Win 7. Thank you.

Glad to be of service.

[Anonymous No.1197474]

So do MMO teams actually hire professional pun writers and "meme experts" to come up with quest/achievement names these days?

[Anonymous No.1197491]

>>1197134
That's the M1A1 Carbine from CoD2
Odd choice for a sprite but okay

[Anonymous No.1197628]

>>1197134
>>1197031

It's been confirmed: installing Windows 7 fixed most of my old games. Sim Theme Park yeeeee

[Anonymous No.1197929]

>>1196956
>>1196936
Oh, that a weird set of reasons for those games not being run with wine.

[Anonymous No.1198426]

>>1197929
Wine isn't compatible with most of them, either.

[Anonymous No.1199046]

>>1198426
There's nothing stopping you from triple booting win2k, 98/ME and linux/reactOS.

[Anonymous No.1199150]

>>1199046

No win2k drivers for my hardware, nor 9x drivers.

Again, that's why I have a separate machine for that stuff.

[Anonymous No.1199586]

>>1189938
My first PC was the TI 99/4A. Got it in 1981. There wasn't a lot for it. Games I remember:
Parsec, TI invaders, Amazing, Car Wars, Munch Man, Jungle Hunt, Moon Patrol.