What was PC gaming like in the 90s?

[Anonymous No.7007417]

Preferably anything before the Windows 2000 era. Being the zoomer I am, I've researched all the GPUs, sound cards, CPUs and their sockets, various video output settings and all the covoluted drivers in order to get things to function. It sounded like hell if for example you had a primitive intel i486 and wanted to play something like Doom. It'd be even more painstaking if you wanted to shove a voodoo GPU in order to play a true 3D game like Unreal Tournament or some hybrid like Starcraft or Fallout.

Why surprises me the most is how big in leap the memory requirement was. I think by the end of the 90s computers had on average around 512MB when at the start of the decade you could get away with 10 or 20MB. Also the whole debacle of hardware are software rendering once GPUs became a thing. Coupled with sound cards it all seems very hell-ish

We zoomers have it easy, No confusing ISA or SCSI ports, no more soundcards. All modern drivers can easily be located and downloaded, you can chuck in an Nvidia GPU and it'll work nicely with your intel or AMD, and Windows practically recognises every piece of hardware now.

So tell me, were you a PC gamer in the 90s and was it incredibly hard to setup?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9inhxsOcjk

TLDR: Was it hard to be a PC gamer in the 90s? Did you have to know quite a bit on the hardware side to make things functional?

[Anonymous No.7007426]

It was based, you missed out. Sucks for you man. Enjoy your homogenized garbage for normies and babies.

[Anonymous No.7007447]

>>7007417
>It sounded like hell if for example you had a primitive intel i486 and wanted to play something like Doom.
Since it still ran on a standard mode that every VGA card supported (it became a bit trickier with old graphics cards when games starting running on VESA modes), the biggest issue was sound card support. Since drivers came bundled with the game, if you had a card that wasn't either directly supported or at least Soundblaster-compatible in hardware, you could run into all kinds of problems.

>I think by the end of the 90s computers had on average around 512MB
Rather around 64. 128 became the norm at the start of the 2000's, 256 when XP arrived. I didn't see a PC with a gigabyte of RAM until 2003.
For reference, UT99 had a 32 MB RAM minimum, Half-Life could do with 16.

[Anonymous No.7007448]

>a true 3D game like Unreal Tournament or some hybrid like Starcraft or Fallout.
those games aren't hybrids, they're literally just 2D games.

[Anonymous No.7007450]

>>7007417
>the Windows 2000 era
?? lol well at least you admitted being a zoomer

[Anonymous No.7007458]

>>7007417
>at the start of the decade you could get away with 10 or 20MB.
1

[Anonymous No.7007469]

>>7007447
That seems to be the most fuck-y part. Every 90s battlestation I've seen always mentions how much of a bitch it was to get sound to work. They say the most popular of the day was the Soundblaster brand and you'd have minimal issues but yeah I guess it's highly dependent on the game dev with what drivers, hardware or configurations they wanna support. The video I linked above is a clusterfuck since it's a Japanese only computer that by the 90s, was inferior to western computers in every way so it has a lot of asterisks attached. I'd imagine if you had a good ol' Pentium with a soundblaster, VGA graphics and windows 95-2000, it'd at least be more straightforward for the day.

[Anonymous No.7007470]

>>7007458
based

[Anonymous No.7007492]

There were computer repair stores everywhere. Most people just got them to set the computer up desu.

[Anonymous No.7007495]

>>7007417
It was very privledged and comfy.

[Anonymous No.7007509]

>>7007492
Yeah but I guess if you were an enthusiast, you'd at least open it up to consider upgrades down the road. You're right though. My dad had a shitty Windows 98 IBM 300GL with a shitty intel celeron that could barely run Counter Strike. When he upgraded it he took it to a computer repair store so yeah you're right.

[Anonymous No.7007521]

I think Windows 98, late 1990s in general was really proto 2000s.

[Anonymous No.7007531]

no women
no niggers
no simps

only white males aged 15-35 with above average intellect engaged in that hobby and it was a marvellous time, now lost forever

[KiwiFag No.7007539]

>>7007417
To be honest it was the simple things that pissed me off the most, like plugging in new hard drives. Most the the rest of the PC would stay pretty much the same over a given year, but I would frequently swap out HDD's and change Optical drives (CD Writers would crap out very fast). Unlike today just dropping in an M2 or plugging in SATA, the different parts of the IDE cable would determine if a drive was a master or a slave, and you had to move around the HDD configuration shunts on the jumpers.. plus molex power cables were a pain in the dick, they would NEVER FUCKING ALIGN EVER.
I have most of my PC games still, the older ones aren't on shelf because they don't have as nice boxes (well the really old ones do, but they're somewhere in my parents basement).

[KiwiFag No.7007541]

>>7007539

[Anonymous No.7007543]

>>7007531
This is true I lived in a black neighborhood in the 90's and had plenty of friends and literally the ONLY people who had computers were the 2 other white males that lived in the same neighborhood. And maybe not simp but I remember one of my friends showing me shemale porn in like 1999, it was more for shock value with a surprise ending.

[Anonymous No.7007547]

>end of the 90s computers had on average around 512MB
>when at the start of the decade you could get away with 10 or 20MB.
This post would make more sense if you shifted the time period between 1995-2005. 10-20 MB in 1990 would be an unrealistically expensive amount of RAM for your average business or home user. Same thing can be said for 512 MB in 1999; that amount of RAM in your typical machine wasn't common until maybe two years after XP was released.

[Anonymous No.7007550]

>>7007417
It was troublesome and expensive but highly-rewarding, in many ways the experiences you'd get on PC (particularly MMO's and online FPS's) were years and years ahead of what console games could do. Emulators at that time were novel and mind-blowing but not a great replacement for real hardware (yet).

My uncle bought a PS2 at launch and he sold it to my dad like a month later to upgrade his PC instead. I remember MDK2 on his PC looked and ran better than literally anything on the PS2.

[KiwiFag No.7007560]

>>7007550
I was playing SNES games on emulators back in the day (circa 98), they worked pretty well back then (SNES 9X and.. ZSNES, from memory). I never played some games like Chrono Trigger on original hardware, but that game is definitely part of my childhood/youth through emulation.

[Anonymous No.7007580]

>>7007539
Reading the PCgamingwiki wiki just makes me sad how almost all of that is unplayable due to DRM of the day. The only PC game I have in physical form is Sim City Societies and no fucking way that's gonna work on Windows 10

[Anonymous No.7007584]

>>7007417
>It'd be even more painstaking if you wanted to shove a voodoo GPU
The hardware side was the biggest hurdle, you either used the passthrough cable (or a VGA switch) which could make 2D graphics blurrier at higher resolution, or you had a Voodoo Rush which sucked at 2D performance.
On the software side, games with explicit Glide support worked just fine. Driver issues started with broken DirectX games where Nvidia already shipped with the most workarounds at the time to keep them chugging along, while aftermarket driver modifications were much more common with other vendors.

[Anonymous No.7007594]

>>7007550
I remember ecelebs and marketing brouchures and "news reports" saying that the PS2 was the most powerful game machine ever. It's hilarious how the Gamecube and Xbox completely kicked the shit out of it technically a year later.

I think during that era the reason PC gaming wasn't as popular as it is now is it was too fragmented. PC games were wildly different from console games and some anon told me that they rarely ever crossed paths. PC games were considered an entirely different industry

[KiwiFag No.7007598]

>>7007580
The large majority of my physical games are old enough that they don't have DRM, or the games that do, I have downloaded cracks for them from places like gamecopyworld and have them stored with the game. I can't really take a picture of most of my games, after I moved a while ago, most are still in boxes.

I basically stopped physically buying games when the boxes just started coming with an origin/steam key in them.

[Anonymous No.7007613]

If you didn't play a pc game that came free in a cereal box you aren't a gamer.

[Anonymous No.7007615]

>>7007598
Holy shit that's a goldmine anon. Once I started playing PC games steam was already in full effect. The only exception was Halo 1 which I played the shit out of using local LAN only with a CD my friend had.

[KiwiFag No.7007639]

>>7007615
Yeah my family was pretty poor when I was young, so when I started working I just started buying all the games and shit like a mad man. The only console I ever had when I was growing up was the PS1, but over the past few years have started playing my way through all the consoles too. Recently finished playing every game on the original xbox lol.

[Anonymous No.7007905]

>>7007417
I think it was a great experience. I went from a 286-16 to 486DX-40 and there were amazing games which were not on consoles with their own unique mechanics and personality. Pretty much you read the games requirements and recommendations on the game box and you'd have a good idea what it took to play a game.

Somehow it was not as confusing as you made it sound. Even a kid could understand enough to get going on them back then, since the software came with manuals which would walk you through. I remember some games like Wing Commander 2 needed expanded memory, while most wanted extended memory, then there are the rare few like Zone 66 or Ultima 7 which had their own unique memory management such that a nearly blank boot disk was necessary. Much like putting a computer is today, if it fits it sits, ISA slots were keyed and a specific size so you couldn't mess that up. SCSI required terminators. In addition to the manuals, you can always check the included readme file or whatever pirate nfo file.

TL;DR: it was not hard at all, just read the manual

[Anonymous No.7007910]

>>7007417
It just felt amazing. Like being a secret club.Better than pc gaming today.

[Anonymous No.7007919]

You didn't need special knowledge to play. Unless you consider being able to navigate a filesystem in DOS some sort of special skill or something. Soundblaster just worked. The 3d accelerators that were built into PCs my parents got in the late 90s worked fine, didn't need to buy after market cards. Only had one Joystick, but it had no trouble being recognized.

[Anonymous No.7008249]

>>7007417
>We zoomers have it easy, No
No one cares about your Reddit ID politics.

[Anonymous No.7008440]

Only difficulty was having enough base memory for some games in some configurations. For example some drivers that came with CD-ROM drives were utterly unoptimized and ate 5x what VIDE-CDD.SYS would use. Same with some mouse drivers. Those you could usually replace with those smaller variants, but many didn't know and used what came with the hardware. SCSI? Network card? Sound card needing a TSR for SB emulation? Stupid hardware like some network or video capture cards using 64KB of address space at HMA? You're fucked. Multiple boot menu configurations for different tasks or boot disks were not uncommon. QEMM, Memmaker etc. may have helped.

[Anonymous No.7008447]

>>7007417
>covoluted drivers
>sounded like hell
In that regard it was indeed.
>We zoomers have it easy
You do. Which is way many zoomers as so tech illiterate.
>were you a PC gamer in the 90s and was it incredibly hard to setup?
Not incredibly, but there were constantly issues of some sort. For example
>how much of a bitch it was to get sound to work
You had to select the right sound drivers every time you installed a game, and there were a zillion sound card manufacturers.
>I think during that era the reason PC gaming wasn't as popular as it is now is it was too fragmented.
Not just that, it was way more expensive than consoles, and especially it was indeed a pain to get everything running compared to console games.
>being able to navigate a filesystem in DOS
Yeah, that's exactly the same as installing a game from Steam or loading a CD in a PSX.
>didn't need to buy after market cards
> it had no trouble being recognized
Late 90s was already an easier time if you had standard hardware.

The worst part of the 90s-early 2000s was that you had to upgrade the PC every 6 months a year to keep up. On the other hand the technological progress was marvelous.

[Anonymous No.7008497]

I don't want to sound pompous but I do pity those who never witnessed the mid 90s in computer gaming. From stuff like Master of Orion to Homeworld in mere 5 years. What a ride that was. Too bad the 00s never proved what everybody had expected it to become.

[Anonymous No.7009103]

eat tidepods and die you worthless little faggot

[Anonymous No.7009108]

Funny remembering most of the noise from computers in the day came from the PSU fan, CDROM or HDDs

And yet it didnt bother me a bit

[Anonymous No.7009127]

>>7007417
The golden age of gaming.

[Anonymous No.7009130]

>>7009127
Unlike the modern shit all running on unity or unreal engine.

[Anonymous No.7009132]

>>7007417
TLDR. It sucked ass.
If you were not from wealthy family you are out of luck and stuck with obsolete games because its all hardware limited.
Game stores sucked, purchasing one or two games in year was norm for children.
Game magazines were cool i suppose. But without Internet you were stuck with games only available in
in local stores.

[Anonymous No.7009134]

>>7009108
Those tiny CPU fans that sounded like a buzzsaw were the worst, oh fucking hell that noise was awful. Many PSU fans at least had temperature control, or I would permanently wire them to 7V.

[Anonymous No.7009136]

>>7007417
When is the last time you played a good RTS?, or FPS, or any traditional PC game?

[Anonymous No.7009140]

>>7009132
Nobody bought games, only empty floppies.

[Anonymous No.7009158]

>>7009136
Modern shit doesn't even compare to the amount of original and creative games the 90's had.

[Anonymous No.7009164]

There were dip switches to set clock frequencies and jumpers for IRQ on some hardware. You still need to look at the motherboard manual today in order to connect case wires. It all comes down to RTFM.

[Anonymous No.7009210]

It was good when it worked. Getting shit to work was half the battle and difficult to research. The games were good but don't be fooled by the autists, old= good and new=bad is so fucking stupid

[Anonymous No.7009223]

>>7007417
>Why surprises me the most is how big in leap the memory requirement was. I think by the end of the 90s computers had on average around 512MB when at the start of the decade you could get away with 10 or 20MB. Also the whole debacle of hardware are software rendering once GPUs became a thing. Coupled with sound cards it all seems very hell-ish

Windows 95 made RAM a major requirement. I am in my late 30's. My parents had an old 386 when I was a kid, it ran in DOS. That machine had like... 4MB of memory. I bought my first PC in late 99, it was custom built from a PC shop. The system had a Celeron 533MHz CPU, 32MB of RAM and an ATi rage Pro 64 with 4MB of VRAM. I quickly updated the system to 64MB, given that I found 32 to be really inefficient with Windows 98. Though, ultimately, I upgraded the machine to 256MB and replaced the video card with a GeForce 256 with 32MB RAM. Windows XP really demanded like... 512 bare minimum to be useful. The minimum spec was 128MB, but 256-512MB was preferable. 90's computers didn't average out at 512MB. That would have been "high end" by 1999. But 512 was more of a requirement in 2001 with Windows XP. And even that would have still been like owning a PC with 32GB of RAM now.

>>7007417
>no more soundcards
Realtek Audio is generally fine for the masses. These days, discrete audio cars are really more tailored at audiophiles, or for musicians.

>>7007417
>So tell me, were you a PC gamer in the 90s and was it incredibly hard to setup?

Yes and No. Windows was always a pretty straight forward install. But drivers back then could be problematic. Also, we use to have this thing called "DLL hell". But that has been eradicated with the current SXS setup found in Windows since... Vista? I forget when SXS was added.

But Windows 95 did improve a lot of things that use to lead to mental frustration. MS Direct-plug-ins/ plug and play, etc, did make the experience easier than the DOS era.

[Anonymous No.7009251]

>>7007447
>Rather around 64. 128 became the norm at the start of the 2000's, 256 when XP arrived. I didn't see a PC with a gigabyte of RAM until 2003.
>For reference, UT99 had a 32 MB RAM minimum, Half-Life could do with 16.

Also, keep in mind that 32BIT architecture is hard limited to 4GB of RAM total. It was easy to hit up a wall in 2004-2005 if you had a video card with 512MB of Video RAM and 4GB of system RAM, as the OS would only read 3.5GB of RAM because the other 512 is in use by the video card. AMD was the first to deliver 64BIt CPU's. .

[Anonymous No.7009265]

>>7009140
If nobody bought games no one would make them.

[Anonymous No.7009306]

>>7009265

Game creators didn't need mega sales back then to make game development worthwhile for them, I'd imagine. Lots of small dev teams with low overhead existed, when compared to today.

[Anonymous No.7009751]

>>7007417
It was an actual hobby with proper investment and proper reward/ ITS WAS FUCKING FUN.

[Anonymous No.7009769]

>>7009251
>It was easy to hit up a wall in 2004-2005 if you had a video card with 512MB of Video RAM and 4GB of system RAM, as the OS would only read 3.5GB of RAM because the other 512 is in use by the video card. AMD was the first to deliver 64BIt CPU's
No game at that time used that much RAM.
The Athlon 64 is from 2003 anyway, and some game like DOOM 3 could use up to 512MB of VRAM but was the exception.
And the 3.5GB limit has nothing to do with the VRAM, those are separate things.
System RAM is reserved for video only when using an IGP.

[Anonymous No.7009772]

>>7009210
>The games were good but don't be fooled by the autists, old= good and new=bad is so fucking stupid
It isn't autism, it is a fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPqwDGXxLhU

[Anonymous No.7009786]

>>7009132
>he didn't pirate the games
I'm so sorry for your loss.

[Anonymous No.7009820]

>>7007417
why not just pick up a pentium 2/3 machine and find out?

[Anonymous No.7009821]

>>7007417
>was it incredibly hard to setup?
No, mate. It was generally easier. Windows was a lot less retarded back then and didn't try being 'helpful' at you. Most games ran through DOS which obeyed your commands perfectly.
>I think by the end of the 90s computers had on average around 512MB
Holy shit, no. Your average joe would have 16 tops, 32 was ideal for the very end of the decade with games like Quake 3 and UT. 64 was far more than you'd ever need. At the start of the decade, 2 megs was extreme, more likely you'd just have onboard memory (which today is still 640 kilobytes) and no XMS/EMS.

>Did you have to know quite a bit on the hardware side to make things functional?
Not at all. Slot shit in, install drivers from disk, done. Nothing has changed there, has it? Except it all takes 50 times as long now.

[Anonymous No.7009968]

>>7009821
>64 was far more than you'd ever need

Don't get me wrong. In 1999 64MB was still quite a bit of RAM. That would be on the higher end. I was using a PC with 128MB of RAM in 1999. 64MB would have been enough for gaming. But that was changing very rapidly. But for me, when I bought my PC, I also purchased a flat bed scanner and was using my PC for high resolution image scans, which required a lot of memory (photo editing program as well). Windows 98 SE handles pretty well with 64MB of RAM. I think the OS caps at 512MB?

But by 2001, 128-256MB were the the new average. I remember switching to a PC with 128MB of RAM with Windows XP. Windows XP was painful to use after short periods of time. It would eat up memory. 256MB is the bare minimum for that OS, IMO.

[Anonymous No.7009983]

>>7009769
>And the 3.5GB limit has nothing to do with the VRAM, those are separate things.
>System RAM is reserved for video only when using an IGP.

Oh interesting. Why was there a 3.5GB limitation then? was 512MB just reserved as a buffer for the Video RAM, or something? Mirroring the RAM to VRAM?

[Anonymous No.7009997]

>>7009769
>The Athlon 64 is from 2003 anyway, and some game like DOOM 3 could use up to 512MB of VRAM but was the exception.

In 2003, I was still using an AMD Athlon XP 2700+ with the multiplayer unlocked (though the pencil trick, never worked for me) to 2.8GHz. But that was a 32bit CPU and was released in 2002.

[Anonymous No.7010052]

>>7009223
>Windows XP really demanded like... 512 bare minimum to be useful
The first time I tried to install XP it was all choppy. That shit was more demanding then games.
>>7009306
There was a whole bracket of "AA" games that is practically non-existent today.
>>7009786
Even pirating wasn't that easy. Unless you knew someone to copy the game from you couldn't download stuff. Even though this stuff >>7008447 was all over Europe.

[Anonymous No.7010065]

>>7010052
>>Windows XP really demanded like... 512 bare minimum to be useful

512MB would have been the recommended. I could get Windows XP to work well with 256MB. It wasn't perfect. But good enough. But using it with 128MB of RAM made me want to go back to Windows 98SE. I used Windows XP all the way up to 2005. By then I had a PC with 1GB of RAM.

[Anonymous No.7010086]

>>7007417
>I think by the end of the 90s computers had on average around 512MB
No. That kind of ram was not normal to have.

[Anonymous No.7010315]

>>7007469
This was why WASPI was introduced (Is Vista retro?) and Windows basically killed the soundcard for all intents and purposes after XP.

[Anonymous No.7010402]

>>7007417
It was really interesting because there were no standards back then. Direct3D wasn't a thing until half way through the decade.

3DFX was king of 3D at the time. So all of the late 90s games were compatible with their API; Glide.

[Anonymous No.7010428]

>>7007541
crikey

[Anonymous No.7010621]

>>7009983
Read up on AGP aperture. It's not just a mechanism to map some system RAM into the GPU's address space, but also the other way around.

>>7009968
>>7010065
In any way it was enough with RTM. 512 MB was only considered a minimum once SP2 (and .NET framework, and memory-hungry browsers) came around.

[Anonymous No.7010831]

>>7010315
It was an explicit goal even before Vista to make audio work out of the box by using the HD Audio, USB or Fireware standards. (Despite the standardization, every AC'97 implementation still needed its own driver.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Audio_Architecture
The only big loss of integration was the removal of hardware synthesizers (for a while, DirectMusic with custom soundfonts was preferred), mixing and accelerated audio effects (EAX made reverb in Half-Life bearable), but those things turned out to be manageable on the CPUs of the day and Creative came up with OpenAL instead.

[Anonymous No.7010852]

>>7007417
I was doing computer support in the 90's, and the vast majority of systems were old as fuck systems with barely enough RAM to live. Great new hardware existed, but it was still expensive as fuck. The most common situation in the late 90's was a 486 running dog slow with Windows 95, simply because Microsoft had released the "Active Desktop" update along with IE4 and later, which bloated RAM consumption.

[Anonymous No.7011110]

>>7007417
You just wouldn't get it. Even the XP era was based

[Anonymous No.7011118]

>>7009772
No click

[Anonymous No.7011136]

>>7007417
The PCs I had in the 90s had all the hard DOS shit configured for me. It wasn't til the 2000s, when I started doing hobbyist DOS-9x oriented builds that I figured out how much setting this shit up SUCKS FUCKING ASS especially regarding memory and sound card configuration in the autoexec/config files. One size does not fit all regarding both hardware selection and software configuration, let me tell you.

I had a lot of fun and learned a lot with my 90s computers (P75 + DOS-95 and P400 + Win98) but it objectively sucked ass and when you hit a game that wouldn't run well you'd need expensive hardware at best or a new computer at worst.

[Anonymous No.7011197]

>>7009821
>Windows was less retarded
Win9x was wildly unstable and itching to BSOD at you if you dared to actually multitask or if any game hit your hardware in a slightly unconventional way.
>DOS justwerked
Oh yeah, sure bro. EMM386, HIMEM, BUFFERS, FILES, and SMARTDRV and SB configuration were all just super intuitive to most people, especially without the internet, and didn't at all need rejiggering depending on what game you wanted to play.
>64 enough by 99
My normiefag Compaq came with 96mb in 98 and upper end Q2/3/Unreal/Lith engine games, especially if you multitasked. would use the shit out of it
>no knowledge necessary
Yeah okay, let's see any novice user install a video card in a 90s machine, then figure out that he should have gotten a Voodoo or a TNT/Geforce depending on the game.

weren't there/10

[Anonymous No.7011204]

>>7010831
>EAX made reverb in Half-Life bearable
If there is one thing that I find worse in modern gaming are the sound effects. Maybe it's nostalgia and how much I was blown away the first time I played with a Sound Blaster Live! but I don't find the same quality, like reverb, doppler, etc. Am I retarded or is it actually like that?

[Anonymous No.7011210]

>>7011204
There's no reason those effects can't be done now. Whether or not sound design is worse now, that's something else entirely.

[Anonymous No.7011226]

>>7011204
Sound Blaster Live's DSP algorithms were based on actual professional audio gear by E-MU and Ensoniq, and had that certain (musical?) character that more modern and "correct" implementations lack.

[Anonymous No.7011232]

>>7009821

Just wanted to boomerpost and call you a fucking retard. When you lived through this bug:

https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/26/amd_posts_windows_95_k62/

and had to troubleshoot and configure pic related, then you'll know the pain of gaming on a mid-to-late '90s computer.

[Anonymous No.7011245]

>>7011232
He wasn't there, lucked out with his OEM, and/or didn't play enough games or mess with it enough to really know what he's talking about.

[Anonymous No.7011269]

>>7009983
>Oh interesting. Why was there a 3.5GB limitation then? was 512MB just reserved as a buffer for the Video RAM, or something? Mirroring the RAM to VRAM?
Even though 32bit CPUs were limited to 4GB of RAM, Desktop OSs were limited to a range from 2.75 to 3.5GB to avoid using up all the RAM (not sure why though), this limitation wasnt present in server OSs because of PAE (an extension) so in that case all 4GBs could be used.
>>7009997
>In 2003, I was still using an AMD Athlon XP 2700+ with the multiplayer unlocked (though the pencil trick, never worked for me) to 2.8GHz. But that was a 32bit CPU and was released in 2002.
Yeah I know, I had a 2800+ Barton but much later, by 2003 I had a Pentium 150 lol.
>>7009772
Your loss, stay ignorant, the video isn't mine retard.
>>7010052
>Even pirating wasn't that easy. Unless you knew someone to copy the game from you couldn't download stuff.
Not as much as today. But in the 3rd world at least pirated games were almost all you could get, I had tons, even stores sold them for pennies.

[Anonymous No.7011272]

>>7007417
It was ultimate comfy, you missed out.

[Anonymous No.7011280]

>>7011232
Who the fuck used a high-speed cpu with win95 at the time, faggot? Only faggots did that.

[Anonymous No.7011309]

>>7009821
>32 was ideal for the very end of the decade with games like Quake 3 and UT. 64 was far more than you'd ever need
Nah, by 1999 32MB was standard for office computers with Windows 98, W98 required minimum 24MB to run.
To play high-end videogames at high res without frame-stuttering 64MB was standard, if you had only 32MB with a Voodoo 3/TNT2 you were a retard and had a hell of a bottleneck.

Even by the Pentium 1 era it wasn't that uncommon, 430VX motherboards had 4 EDO66 slots generally and you could just save up and add 16MB modules from time to time.

It was the same later, just because OEM cheapfucks sold you Pentium 4 with 256MB of RAM for normans, doesnt mean the average power users normally didn't have from 512MB to 2GB in the DDR1 era.

[dreamcast mini No.7011326]

Both good and bad. Thing is was you were missing out if you didn't have a console. 16 bit consoles games seemed more polished than PC which wasn't really standardised where as on 16 bit you were almost guaranteed a smooth 60 fps experience with big arcade sprites. On pc you had stuff like system shock which was impressive in a different way.
Main advantage of pc was you could often edit the games files such as wav files or image files and use map editors.
It just moved too fast for me, in 1990 a 386 was pretty good, in 93 pentium 60 came out then a couple of years later you were suddenly at 300 mhz, it just went on and on.
Memory configuration and upgrades were no big deal, games would have instuctioins on how to deal with it.
Dos is simpler than windows in that you copy the folder and the game just works most of the time.

Another wierd thing to think about is that Core design went from making pretty basic looking games to Tomb raider within 4 years which was one of the best looking 3d games on pc.

>>7007417
It wasn't hell, most of the time you put the cd in then installed the game and it worked fine. I remember installing the sims on a p100 and I was puzzled how a 2d game could run so slow.

[Anonymous No.7011353]

>>7010621
>Read up on AGP aperture. It's not just a mechanism to map some system RAM into the GPU's address space, but also the other way around.

Interesting. I understand what you are saying.

The first time I came across this issue was when a friend of mind had a PC with 4GB of system memory, and a ATi Radeon x1900 AGP with 512MB of RAM. I think his CPU was a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 32Bit CPU, with Windows XP 32bit.

AGP was a pretty short lived thing. It was introduce in 1996? and replaced by PCIE by 2006? I have owned an ATi rage Pro AGP, Geforce 256 APG, Geforce 2 AGP, Geforce 3ti AGP, Geforce FX 5700 AGP, Geforce 6600 AGP, ATi Radeon 9700 Pro AGP.

>>7010621
>Before SP2, After SP2

Good point. 256MB of memory would have been fine before SP2. But after that release, 512MB really became the new minimum. SP2 was the reason for me upgrading from 512MB of RAM to 1GB.

[Anonymous No.7011359]

>>7010621
>Read up on AGP aperture. It's not just a mechanism to map some system RAM into the GPU's address space, but also the other way around.

Interesting. I understand what you are saying.

The first time I came across this issue was when a friend of mind had a PC with 4GB of system memory, and a ATi Radeon x1900 AGP with 512MB of RAM. I think his CPU was a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 32Bit CPU, with Windows XP 32bit. The system would register as 3.5GB with the videocard in place. I was clueless, until I started reading about how 32BIT memory could only access 4GB while 64bit CPUs/ OS's would solve this issue. AGP was a pretty short lived thing. It was introduce in 1996? and replaced by PCIE by 2006? I have owned an ATi rage Pro AGP, Geforce 256 APG, Geforce 2 AGP, Geforce 3ti AGP, Geforce FX 5700 AGP, Geforce 6600 AGP, ATi Radeon 9700 Pro AGP.

>>7010621
>Before SP2, After SP2

Good point. 256MB of memory would have been fine before SP2. But after that release, 512MB really became the new minimum. SP2 was the reason for me upgrading from 512MB of RAM to 1GB.

[Anonymous No.7011378]

>>7011226
That's because the DAC on a shitty Boost Mobile Android has higher audio clarity than the shit they had in the 90s.

[Anonymous No.7011383]

>>7007426
this

[Anonymous No.7011452]

>>7011280
A lot of people stayed on their version of Windows 95 (no matter if retail or OEM) until at least the new millennium, since the forced integration of Active Desktop in Win98 could make things slower and you didn't have a disadvantage in regard to API support (e.g. DirectX 8.1, the first version for Win98/Me only, would only ship in 2001). That said, Win98 was a nice way to get all that essential Win95 patches (K6-2 patch, dial-up networking patch, Winsock2 etc.) at once.
The issue didn't happen because AMD and Cyrix processors were that high-end compared to the minimum requirement of a 80386, but because the LOOP instruction took an unreasonable amount of clock cycles on Intel processors.

>>7011353
PCI(e) is a similar matter, the card is just responsible for negotiating memory mappings itself rather than leaving that to the GART controller.

[Anonymous No.7011462]

>>7007594
It was kinda fragmented even in the 2000's. Didn't help that most console ports were lazy trash

[Anonymous No.7011476]

>>7007417
I just always played whatever my computer's would run. I didn't ever upgrade a PC until like 3 years ago. Just used what my parents had then later what I bought. Been that way since 1989 for me.

[Anonymous No.7011487]

>>7007594
>It's hilarious how the Gamecube and Xbox completely kicked the shit out of it technically a year later
And yet the gamecube versions of games were almost always worse than the ps2 ones. Fucking hell.

[Anonymous No.7011573]

>>7011487
>And yet the gamecube versions of games were almost always worse than the ps2 ones.
This has to be sonygger fanboy bait.

[Anonymous No.7011589]

>>7007426
Yeah, i wish I could play old pc games again, but all my disks either magically disappeared or turned into identical copies of Black Ops 3.

[Anonymous No.7011598]

>>7011573
Not really. Had both, GC first and got a PS2 years later for that exact reason.

[Anonymous No.7011605]

>>7007417
It wasn't great, honestly. Computers were extremely expensive and good games were very hard to come by in my country. Some mid 90s games weren't even sold here until 2004.

[Anonymous No.7011641]

>>7011605
>thirdworldlet cope

[Anonymous No.7012387]

>>7007417
I was super young but I remember watching my brother play. Multiplayer (like Quake) the servers were dead and laggy as. It was pretty exciting eating a pizza waiting for someone to join the game, which may have happened a couple of times.

Games were more of a mystery in that you didn't know what they were going to be like, and you went to a lot of effort usually to get them to run so you appreciated them more. The games seemed more authentic and genuine rather than corporate focus group driven creation.

[Anonymous No.7012494]

As far as pc gaming. I remember my dad had a office in the basement.The walls were painted charcoal black and had no windows. Summer of 1996, after playing outside all day...or even in the middle of the day. When my dad was at work I would get on his computer and play doom, doom 2 and quake. It was so cool temp wise down there. I just remember it was a place to cool off between playing outside and play Quake or Doom. I think I only had a n64 or sega at the time

[Anonymous No.7012553]

>>7007417
I don't remember it being that hard and I was very young and didn't even know fuck all of english
some games I needed to do some special kind of boot for them to work. I think it freed up some memory whatever
others I needed someone to teach me how pkunzip worked so I could unzip them from floppy disks
after I got an ibm aptiva in 95 it was even easier. yea, there was that blue screen you had to setup shit but I could manage it by trial and error
I had more trouble finding drivers for shit printers in the late 90s / early 2000s

[Anonymous No.7012725]

Are most people in this thread literally retarded? I gamed through the late 80s & 90s and only ever encountered a handful of games that were "hard to set up".
In 99% of all cases you just had to type "NAME_OF_GAME.EXE" and that was literally it. Sound and everything just worked fine.

[Anonymous No.7012772]

>>7012725
>I didn't need to install games
>I played through the 90s
liar

[Anonymous No.7012805]

>>7009127
I love every Raven game I've played but I've never actually checked out Mageslayer for whatever reason
Worth checking out? Got a P1 with a Voodoo 2 laying around I could burn a disc and toss it in to.

[Anonymous No.7012815]

>>7012772

You retard, I didn't say I didn't need to install games, just that it wasn't a challenge for anyone with a working brain.

[Anonymous No.7012816]

building a pc in the 90s when you couldn't just google shit and there was all kinds of fiddly bullshit to deal it was actually impressive, now when i hear some zoomer guy talking about how he built his pc im like dude please

[Anonymous No.7012828]

>>7012725
bullshit. you never had to have different memory configurations? Remember the EMS memory shit you had to set up for some games like Doom or Ultima in your config.sys and shit? oh sorry you need 16k more EMS memory but guess what you only have 640k lower memory total and half the shit went to the OS and a drivers and shit, so what are you gonna do to get that last bit? sure, you have 4MB of ram, but guess what that doesn't count for this, it has to fit in the 640k register.

[Anonymous No.7014049]

>>7012828
>Remember the EMS memory shit you had to set up for some games like Doom
No. That late, DOS games were already protected mode programs that could use all available memory and mostly cut Windows out of the picture to save on RAM and, before DirectX, audiovisual overhead. EMS was from an era when that memory actually came on an expansion card.
How much free RAM under 1 MB you had was directly related to how much hardware you had to support under DOS. In particular, if you only had dialup instead of a network card and you didn't have ROM at retarded addresses, it was perfectly common to work with just one configuration, two if some old game actually needed that 64K EMS window segment.
Also, after Win95 most of this became obsolete when you could either allocate as many resources as needed to a DOS box or run DOS mode with a custom configuration on the fly.

[Anonymous No.7014090]

>>7014049
Doom came out before Windows 95. Windows 3.1 was just a lame file manager app that ran on top of DOS like a glorified Norton Commander with cute graphics to look like a sad Macintosh rip off. It didn't use any resources if you didn't load it.

[Anonymous No.7014114]

>>7009265
Exactly. It's the main reason why PC gaming pretty much died until Steam got there.

[Anonymous No.7014123]

>>7012816
More like
>these days when I hear someone say he paid someone to put his PC parts together im like dude please

[Anonymous No.7014138]

>>7014123
If I buy components in the city rather than order I'll most def pay the kid $30 bucks or whatever to put it all together while I get lunch, assembling pcs is a low wage waste of time

[Anonymous No.7014947]

>>7007417
>I think by the end of the 90s computers had on average around 512MB when at the start of the decade you could get away with 10 or 20MB.
That shit was nuts, technology advanced so quick it became a joke, so much it kinda still is, but back then it was 100% real.
Taking a look back I always thought "nah, it was just me being a kid/young teen and not being able to discern time properly" but if you take a look at the years and when shit was coming out it was just crazy.

>summer of 1996
>got a Pentium 120Mhz, 16MB RAM, 1GB HDD
>it was THE shit
>2 years later
>it was SHIT, like LITERALLY shit

Thank god for this bad boy in pic, kept the little guy on life-support for a few extra years.
Couldn't afford a new computer until much later on, around 2002 or so, when I got a job myself.
It was extremely painful, nowadays you can pretty much survive with a computer older than 10 years if not more, SSD was a blessing from heavens.

[Anonymous No.7015092]

>>7014090
>Windows 3.1 was just a lame file manager app that ran on top of DOS like a glorified Norton Commander with cute graphics to look like a sad Macintosh rip off. It didn't use any resources if you didn't load it.

There are a handful of games made for Windows 3.1, but it was never meant to be a gaming platform of anykind. Some DOS games could work within Windows 3.1, but many would not. You would have to reboot the system in DOS mode. It is basically just a file manager with a desktop-like function that works over top of DOS. The Windows 9X kernel is still layered on top of DOS, but added plug-and-play, a device manager and the DirectX API's. You can run DOS applications directly in Windows 95/98 , but even back in the day I would have issues with some games running too fast, or incorrectly. But games like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake (DOS), Doom, etc, ran well in Windows 9X with no issues.

[Anonymous No.7015429]

>>7007417
I got Shadows of the Empire as a Christmas gift but couldn't run it because my computer didn't have a 3D card.

[Anonymous No.7015820]

>>7007417
Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries was awesome.

[Anonymous No.7015858]

>>7007417
I was between 0-6 years old, though you could probaby stretch it to 8 as the family hunk o' junk stuck around past the 90s.
I managed as a kid, though there wasn't much to upgrade. Had an os switch and added a Turtle Beach soundcard to it with my tech illiterate dad making sure I didn't get electrocuted. I'm a retard, so if I could manage at that age it wasn't that hard.
The hardware was around 95-98 tier, so it was already getting easier then, but it wasn't as easy as it is now.
I ran 95 and 98, so I never dealt much with DOS. It's really not that hard and you'd probably have some sort of manual covering the basics anyways.

[Anonymous No.7016879]

https://youtu.be/IF_0W1cYPYo

[Anonymous No.7016967]

>>7007417
i might remember it worse than it actually was, but i have NO fond memories of fiddling around with all these setups just to play a fucking game. what was there..the soundblaster stuff, the 3DFX shit, the calibration of joysticks, the calibration of your mouse, all those settings concerning your graphics.. VGA, SVGA, SHIT-VGA, some stuff even required playing with the BIOS. i think it had something to do with the configuration of your drives? i don't know. it was total ass. i have particularly bad memories of playing (at the time) older games in WIN98 compatibility mode.

[Anonymous No.7016990]

>>7011197

Dude I was 12 and I figured all of that shit out without manuals. Hell, I figured out HIMEM and EMM386 so I could (barely) run DOOM on a 386 when I was 10.

>DOS=HIGH

woah man real hacker shit there

>setting a SB to a220 i5 d1

holy shit I'm Kevin Mitnick

It may be even easier to build a PC now, but it was still drop dead simple back then.

>smartdrv

lmao

[Anonymous No.7017715]

>>7016990
But that's because you are just that smart senpai, more than mere mortals.

[Anonymous No.7018747]

>>7007598
why did pc c uck s allow their games to become entirely digitial and ultimately worthless?

[Anonymous No.7018774]

>>7018747
The open nature of PC meant that copy protection was a fool's errand and as a consequence, 2nd hand PC game market was really weak. That and keeping track of cds and keys was a pain in the ass. Steam is such a godsend, you don't even know.

[Anonymous No.7019053]

>>7007417
It was great. Best part was no fucking niggers or shitskins of any kind online. Playing Ultima Online and knowing 99.9% of the playerbase was white was incredibly based.

[Anonymous No.7019157]

>>7019053
Nah I played Ultima online and it had the worst community I've ever experienced.

[Anonymous No.7019397]

>>7011309
>Nah, by 1999 32MB was standard for office computers with Windows 98, W98 required minimum 24MB to run.
>To play high-end videogames at high res without frame-stuttering 64MB was standard, if you had only 32MB with a Voodoo 3/TNT2 you were a retard and had a hell of a bottleneck.

I don't think it was uncommon to see PC's sold with 32-64MB of memory in 2000. But in 2001-2002; 128-256MB was a bit more the norm. But again, even in 199-2000, it was not impossible to see systems with 128MB of memory. Multi-tasking on windows 95+, and the event of the internet really pushed memory requirements higher in such a short period of time. Also, with the Xbox being released with 64MB of RAM, pushed the PC market into 128MB of ram territory.

[Anonymous No.7019619]

It was all about game types that weren't good on console.

Sim city and games like tropico etc
Baseball mogul and other sports management simulators
Star wars dogfight games
RTS games like starcraft
Flight simulators
First person shooters like doom and duke nukem were always better on PC

[Anonymous No.7020234]

It was all about DOS memory management, my daily life was about tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat mostly. Some games need UMB, other games need more conventional memory, etc.
But I think it went into singularity post DOS4GW introduction so you don't have to worry about these memory management crap anymore.
Hardware weren't quite a problem because you can still play with minimum setup like lower resolution, no sound or using pc speaker instead. But misconfigured memory won't let you run the games.

[Anonymous No.7020258]

>>7007417
It was fucking glorious. They call it the golden age for a reason.