Old people, what was DOS gaming like?
- Thread starter Chief Malik
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Make him say curse words and get the Parity Error lol.
The GOAT MS-DOS Game
OMG I remember this game!
haha was thinking about this too! My sister loved this game. I remember it was friggin hard.
Not sure what constitutes DOS but I very faintly remember playing Cannon Fodder and Lemmings from floppy disk when I was real young
Oh and Xenon 2, used to love that so much
I'm 31 now
OMG I remember this game!
haha was thinking about this too! My sister loved this game. I remember it was friggin hard.
I'm gonna field my own answers:
For me, it was cool because there was a lot of mystery about what awesome games might be out there. I was really lucky with what games I picked up. I walked into Wal Mart and bought games like Stunts and Wing Commander for $10-$20 each, not knowing what awesome awaited me. Every purchase was a complete crapshoot. These games came on 3.5 inch floppy disks (by the time I started). I only had one large floppy disk game and that was Jill of the Jungle shareware.
Sometimes I got a game like Doom or others which required me to edit my autoexec.cfg file and do arcane commands to free up memory so I could play certain games. What this meant was I had to reboot to play certain games. Some games had different requirements. RAM was managed REALLY weird back then. So maybe to play Tornado, the flight sim, I had one boot disk. I put in the disk and rebooted and finally I could play that game. If I got a new game it might not work right away. I'd try all my boot disks. Eventually I did get every game I bought to work.
This was partially because I only had 4MB of RAM, which was the minimum requirement for some games. But even if a game required 2MB of RAM, I might have to go through this shit.
Another scary thing was some games came on a LOT of disks. Usually it was just 1-5, but Star Wars Judgment Rites came on something like 22 disks. You'd buy the last copy of the game. Come home. I had to uninstall some games cuz I had a 210MB HDD. The game was something like 30 or 40MB. Took forever to install (maybe an hour?). I was worried one of the disks might be damaged (this never happened with a game I bought, thankfully).
Game installs off disks actually took forever until they were finally replaced with downloads (which may take forever depending on your Internet).
I actually used a tape drive to save my own games on the TI994a. This meant simply loading a game took maybe a couple minutes. What really sucked was how unreliable the tape drive was. You had to know the exact points on the tape where a game started and rewind / fast forward to that point. Then you waited and crossed your fingers.
I never built my own PC until the later 90's. But I did install sound cards and such. I didn't know WTF I was doing but I survived. My case was made of a lot of heavy duty metal. The thing you pulled off the PC was especially sucky. I large shell of rolled steel. Heavy and bendy.
I didn't get a sound card until I was PC gaming for about 6 months. This meant simple bleeps and boops in games. I got a Sound Blaster 16 with my paper route money. That was an awesome day. Those games sounded amazing! Basically, PC game music sounded worse than SNES which I already had, but the sound samples were way way better (since the games were usually quite a bit larger).
In the DOS days circa 93 and 94, every game was 320x240 or worse. Every game was 256 colors or worse. The graphics looked blockier than SNES games because of how sharp the monitors were. My monitor could go as high as 1280x1024 but running a game anywhere near that was a non-starter. In late 94 there were some FMV games that ran in Windows 3.1 at 640x480. It wasn't until I got a 3dfx card in 1996 which ran in Windows 95 that I played action games at 640x480.
Nvidia wasn't around. There were like 30 video card makers. Trident, Diamond, Matrox, all these companies eventually went out of business or started selling other companies' chipsets. Later you had the Diamond manufactured 3DFX voodoo1, the Diamond Riva128. That's pretty much like today (EVGA, Gigabyte, etc versions of Nvidia chipsets). I remember when Nvidia first showed up they were lame compared to 3DFX. My first Nvidia card was a Riva128 which I had along side my 3DFX. My 3DFX did the real gaming heavy lifting. I tried the Riva128 out of morbid curiosity in Quake 2 once. It wasn't great.
On my YouTube account I have some old gameplay and misc usage starting in 1997 when I got a Canopus Pure3D (Voodoo1) video card with video out:
I've made some edits to my post so if you liked what I wrote you may want to read again to catch the relevant edits.
For me, it was cool because there was a lot of mystery about what awesome games might be out there. I was really lucky with what games I picked up. I walked into Wal Mart and bought games like Stunts and Wing Commander for $10-$20 each, not knowing what awesome awaited me. Every purchase was a complete crapshoot. These games came on 3.5 inch floppy disks (by the time I started). I only had one large floppy disk game and that was Jill of the Jungle shareware.
Sometimes I got a game like Doom or others which required me to edit my autoexec.cfg file and do arcane commands to free up memory so I could play certain games. What this meant was I had to reboot to play certain games. Some games had different requirements. RAM was managed REALLY weird back then. So maybe to play Tornado, the flight sim, I had one boot disk. I put in the disk and rebooted and finally I could play that game. If I got a new game it might not work right away. I'd try all my boot disks. Eventually I did get every game I bought to work.
This was partially because I only had 4MB of RAM, which was the minimum requirement for some games. But even if a game required 2MB of RAM, I might have to go through this shit.
Another scary thing was some games came on a LOT of disks. Usually it was just 1-5, but Star Wars Judgment Rites came on something like 22 disks. You'd buy the last copy of the game. Come home. I had to uninstall some games cuz I had a 210MB HDD. The game was something like 30 or 40MB. Took forever to install (maybe an hour?). I was worried one of the disks might be damaged (this never happened with a game I bought, thankfully).
Game installs off disks actually took forever until they were finally replaced with downloads (which may take forever depending on your Internet).
I actually used a tape drive to save my own games on the TI994a. This meant simply loading a game took maybe a couple minutes. What really sucked was how unreliable the tape drive was. You had to know the exact points on the tape where a game started and rewind / fast forward to that point. Then you waited and crossed your fingers.
I never built my own PC until the later 90's. But I did install sound cards and such. I didn't know WTF I was doing but I survived. My case was made of a lot of heavy duty metal. The thing you pulled off the PC was especially sucky. I large shell of rolled steel. Heavy and bendy.
I didn't get a sound card until I was PC gaming for about 6 months. This meant simple bleeps and boops in games. I got a Sound Blaster 16 with my paper route money. That was an awesome day. Those games sounded amazing! Basically, PC game music sounded worse than SNES which I already had, but the sound samples were way way better (since the games were usually quite a bit larger).
In the DOS days circa 93 and 94, every game was 320x240 or worse. Every game was 256 colors or worse. The graphics looked blockier than SNES games because of how sharp the monitors were. My monitor could go as high as 1280x1024 but running a game anywhere near that was a non-starter. In late 94 there were some FMV games that ran in Windows 3.1 at 640x480. It wasn't until I got a 3dfx card in 1996 which ran in Windows 95 that I played action games at 640x480.
Nvidia wasn't around. There were like 30 video card makers. Trident, Diamond, Matrox, all these companies eventually went out of business or started selling other companies' chipsets. Later you had the Diamond manufactured 3DFX voodoo1, the Diamond Riva128. That's pretty much like today (EVGA, Gigabyte, etc versions of Nvidia chipsets). I remember when Nvidia first showed up they were lame compared to 3DFX. My first Nvidia card was a Riva128 which I had along side my 3DFX. My 3DFX did the real gaming heavy lifting. I tried the Riva128 out of morbid curiosity in Quake 2 once. It wasn't great.
On my YouTube account I have some old gameplay and misc usage starting in 1997 when I got a Canopus Pure3D (Voodoo1) video card with video out:
I've made some edits to my post so if you liked what I wrote you may want to read again to catch the relevant edits.
Last edited:
The first voice you heard from the Human Footman in WarCraft II was not "AWAITING ORDERS" but instead "YOUR SOUND CARD WORKS PERFECTLY!"
I loved me some Commander Keen and Jill of the Jungle. My sister and I would love to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.
Finding abandonware sites are a wonderful blast of nostalgia.
Finding abandonware sites are a wonderful blast of nostalgia.
You navigated the OS entirely through a series of text commands, at least until the Win 3.1 days, and even then there was a ton of stuff that wouldn't run in Windows mode so you'd have to exit to DOS to play games anyway.
You could go to retail stores and find racks of shareware disks for a buck that had to sell themselves to you on the name and label alone, or maybe a cardboard sleeve at most. Some of them were compilations of several games.
Shareware games always ended on cliffhangers, followed by a screen pushing you to mail a check to an address somewhere to get the full experience.
Sufficiently old games displayed just four colors, and they were fun anyway. The jumps to sixteen and two hundred fifty-six color displays were revelations, and a lot of those games still look beautiful today.
You got music and nice sound effects—if you were one of those kids who had a rig with a sound card. The rest of us got whatever the developer could tease out of the PC speaker.
CTRL, ALT, Space, Enter, Esc, and the arrows were all the controls you needed for a lot of games, if even that much. D-pads? Pfft. Unless you tried playing an RPG or a sim, and then you were in for the Full Keyboard Experience. Mouse controls were another revelation, and a somewhat contentious one in some genres.
We played typing tutors for fun.
You could go to retail stores and find racks of shareware disks for a buck that had to sell themselves to you on the name and label alone, or maybe a cardboard sleeve at most. Some of them were compilations of several games.
Shareware games always ended on cliffhangers, followed by a screen pushing you to mail a check to an address somewhere to get the full experience.
Sufficiently old games displayed just four colors, and they were fun anyway. The jumps to sixteen and two hundred fifty-six color displays were revelations, and a lot of those games still look beautiful today.
You got music and nice sound effects—if you were one of those kids who had a rig with a sound card. The rest of us got whatever the developer could tease out of the PC speaker.
CTRL, ALT, Space, Enter, Esc, and the arrows were all the controls you needed for a lot of games, if even that much. D-pads? Pfft. Unless you tried playing an RPG or a sim, and then you were in for the Full Keyboard Experience. Mouse controls were another revelation, and a somewhat contentious one in some genres.
We played typing tutors for fun.
It was like console gaming, except generally less smooth until you got to the early-to-mid 1990s, thanks to how IBM's graphics modes worked. Single-screen could be smooth, but scrolling the entire screen was generally too costly to do quickly, until processing speeds got high enough that it was possible to brute-force. Some exceptions existed - John Carmack found a way to do it with EGA that led to Commander Keen being a thing - but generally, you had static screens (like adventure gamess with giant UIs taking up most of the screen and only a paltry amount for a non-interactive illustration of what you were looking at), single screens that abruptly changed when you reached the edges (e.g.: Prince of Persia), or games that scrolled but did so at low framerates and tended to do it in noticeably discrete steps (most of Apogee's pre-Keen library - hell, even some of their post-Keen library - where the game ran at around 16FPS and your character moved 8 pixels at a time, like Duke Nukem [1], Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure or Word Rescue).
Likewise, you had a lot of variation in graphics modes; the earliest was CGA, which only supported four colors from a palette of 16, generally being one of three stock palettes (the first being black, fuchsia, cyan and white; the second black, red, green and yellow; the third, rarer one being black, red, cyan and white), in both low- and high-intensity modes (how bright the colors were, essentially). Technically it supported a full 16 if you ran it over composite, though support for this grew extremely spotty once better graphics options came about (as the graphics cards supporting better video modes tended to not include a composite output, so that whole quirk became obscure knowledge). EGA supported the full 16 colors at once, and added a high-resolution mode that let you change the palette to any 16 from 64 (though use of this 640x350 mode wasn't extraordinarily common). VGA jumped all the way to a full 256 colors that could all be redefined as needed, and its introduction is around where PC gaming really got on-par with console gaming of the time; in fact, properly utilizing its quirks, you could make games superior to console games of the time (as the PC version of Doom was basically untouched by any contemporary port of it, though the PS1 port is probably the closest).
But really, it was just another thing I played games on. I didn't do too much console trickery; I tended to play DOS games right from Windows, only rebooting into pure DOS if the game really required me to. Likewise, I did a lot of Windows gaming, in the mid-90s, since I lived in England and only had NTSC-U consoles, while region lock-outs were a thing; that said, it's generally comparable to Windows gaming of today, but with less standardization.
Oh, and nobody minded the low resolutions all that much; while the higher resolutions were clearly better and sharper, one benefit of the CRT monitors we all used is that any resolution you threw at it looked nice and sharp. Modern computers tend to blur the shit out of these things, due to the nature of LCDs. CRTs are pretty cool, if super-cumbersome (hence why we moved on from them); worth a look if you still have any hardware that supports one.
Likewise, you had a lot of variation in graphics modes; the earliest was CGA, which only supported four colors from a palette of 16, generally being one of three stock palettes (the first being black, fuchsia, cyan and white; the second black, red, green and yellow; the third, rarer one being black, red, cyan and white), in both low- and high-intensity modes (how bright the colors were, essentially). Technically it supported a full 16 if you ran it over composite, though support for this grew extremely spotty once better graphics options came about (as the graphics cards supporting better video modes tended to not include a composite output, so that whole quirk became obscure knowledge). EGA supported the full 16 colors at once, and added a high-resolution mode that let you change the palette to any 16 from 64 (though use of this 640x350 mode wasn't extraordinarily common). VGA jumped all the way to a full 256 colors that could all be redefined as needed, and its introduction is around where PC gaming really got on-par with console gaming of the time; in fact, properly utilizing its quirks, you could make games superior to console games of the time (as the PC version of Doom was basically untouched by any contemporary port of it, though the PS1 port is probably the closest).
But really, it was just another thing I played games on. I didn't do too much console trickery; I tended to play DOS games right from Windows, only rebooting into pure DOS if the game really required me to. Likewise, I did a lot of Windows gaming, in the mid-90s, since I lived in England and only had NTSC-U consoles, while region lock-outs were a thing; that said, it's generally comparable to Windows gaming of today, but with less standardization.
Oh, and nobody minded the low resolutions all that much; while the higher resolutions were clearly better and sharper, one benefit of the CRT monitors we all used is that any resolution you threw at it looked nice and sharp. Modern computers tend to blur the shit out of these things, due to the nature of LCDs. CRTs are pretty cool, if super-cumbersome (hence why we moved on from them); worth a look if you still have any hardware that supports one.
Yeah Old... I'm 33 lol
Commander Keen, Duke Nukem 1+2, Prince of Persa, Lemming, Lemmings 2, WOlf 3d, Doom, Hugo's house of Horrors.... etc All very early memoires for me, mainly shareware.
I still use CLI today and this was a skill I learnt due to DOS gaming... couldn't use CLI... no games for you.
Gorilla.bas, the first computer game I ever played.
Ha ha, I remember that. You could mess with the code too as it was just a text file.
My favorite part was hearing "your sound card works perfectly". My least favorite was not hearing anything. The most confusing part was that it felt at random whether it would work or not.
Diskettes or CDs, DOS prompt commands, setup.exe, choosing the right sound card and settings, it was great.
I mean, it was relatively primitive and time- and energy-consuming, but it has its charm, now, looking back.
I mean, it was relatively primitive and time- and energy-consuming, but it has its charm, now, looking back.
Almost 29 here... who you calling old??
But for real though DOS gaming was a blast. I started playing mostly the late 80's and early 90's stuff (Ultima Underworld, Star Wars Tie-fighter, Wing commander 2, Civilization, Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, Zack McKracken, Mega race, Epic Pinball, Mechwarrior 2, Armored Fist, etc, etc) and I remember when my father started building computers that wouldn't have compatible sound cards and replaced our DOS/win 3.11 PC(the worst part of DOS gaming...) But somehow I scrapped together parts and built my first own DOS pc in 2001 to relive those days (I still have a few DOS compatible Pcs at my parents place with Soundblaster Awe64 And Sound Blaster 16 cards)
Some of my best gaming memories growing up were on either DOS or the Windows 95/98 era. And most games back then either came on floppy or CD-ROM. (CD's were a 90's thing)
If you want to experience some of those gems gog.com has the best form to play them (Dosbox)and has a great collection.
Personally one day I hope to see glide gaming emulated correctly (late 90s videocard tech) so i can experince those titles the way they were meant to be played without having to dig out my old pc's. Some of the best 3D graphics of the 90s ran on those cards.
But for real though DOS gaming was a blast. I started playing mostly the late 80's and early 90's stuff (Ultima Underworld, Star Wars Tie-fighter, Wing commander 2, Civilization, Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, Zack McKracken, Mega race, Epic Pinball, Mechwarrior 2, Armored Fist, etc, etc) and I remember when my father started building computers that wouldn't have compatible sound cards and replaced our DOS/win 3.11 PC(the worst part of DOS gaming...) But somehow I scrapped together parts and built my first own DOS pc in 2001 to relive those days (I still have a few DOS compatible Pcs at my parents place with Soundblaster Awe64 And Sound Blaster 16 cards)
Some of my best gaming memories growing up were on either DOS or the Windows 95/98 era. And most games back then either came on floppy or CD-ROM. (CD's were a 90's thing)
If you want to experience some of those gems gog.com has the best form to play them (Dosbox)and has a great collection.
Personally one day I hope to see glide gaming emulated correctly (late 90s videocard tech) so i can experince those titles the way they were meant to be played without having to dig out my old pc's. Some of the best 3D graphics of the 90s ran on those cards.
The joys of sound configuration.
It drives me insane that I can never replicate the MIDI settings from when I played Doom for the first time. I don't know if it was the sound card or what but the music just never sounds the same :(
MY FUCKING MAN!
I just want to say that I resent the title of this topic.
I remember fiddling with IRQ settings to get my Sound Blaster to work so I could have actual music and sound effects.
Edit: I posted before reading the thread. It's hilarious to me how many posts mention this.
I remember fiddling with IRQ settings to get my Sound Blaster to work so I could have actual music and sound effects.
Edit: I posted before reading the thread. It's hilarious to me how many posts mention this.
BOOT DISKS
No, seriously. To get some of my DOS games to work, I had to use a boot disk, which was a just a floppy with a file written on it that would put the PC in a state to better handle some games. For example, my family's PC would constantly crash on SimCity 2000's newspaper screen and the boot disk was required to fix that. It was also necessary to play games like Masters of Magic.
Also, fun fact: When SimCity 2000 was first acting up, Mom called the Maxis support line to see what was wrong. The support rep said Mom needed to make a boot disk. Mom, not knowing what that meant, asked, "What's a boot disk."
That fucking support rep laughed at her, and I swear I will exact vengeance if I ever meet him.
No, seriously. To get some of my DOS games to work, I had to use a boot disk, which was a just a floppy with a file written on it that would put the PC in a state to better handle some games. For example, my family's PC would constantly crash on SimCity 2000's newspaper screen and the boot disk was required to fix that. It was also necessary to play games like Masters of Magic.
Also, fun fact: When SimCity 2000 was first acting up, Mom called the Maxis support line to see what was wrong. The support rep said Mom needed to make a boot disk. Mom, not knowing what that meant, asked, "What's a boot disk."
That fucking support rep laughed at her, and I swear I will exact vengeance if I ever meet him.
Managing memory, CRC errors at the last floppy while extracting stuff, ARJ-archives, turbo buttons, sound cards that were actually huge upgrades at the time. a lot of managing but it was all worth it!
Felt like a boss back then when I had da_menu launcher all set up to launch at boot and it had neatly categorized games there!
Felt like a boss back then when I had da_menu launcher all set up to launch at boot and it had neatly categorized games there!
Manually configuring the sound settings, manually resolving IRQ conflicts, I recall being a pain.
OP
OP
Painful
Having to juggle memory manager programs to clear 640k of conventional memory to boot a game was sometimes very difficult. Also hardware management was a pain dealing with IRQ conflicts and physical dip switches to adjust bus settings.
On the plus side being a PC gamer from the mid 80's to the late 90's prepped me for my Career in IT. Yes being an efficient PC gamer back then could lead you into Corporate IT with little problem as old PC gaming was that difficult.
Also dozens of floppy discs to install a game, pray they all work. Game has a bug? Oh well call an 800 number and hope the company can mail you a patch floppy in the next 5 months. 9/10 they wouldn't
Having to juggle memory manager programs to clear 640k of conventional memory to boot a game was sometimes very difficult. Also hardware management was a pain dealing with IRQ conflicts and physical dip switches to adjust bus settings.
On the plus side being a PC gamer from the mid 80's to the late 90's prepped me for my Career in IT. Yes being an efficient PC gamer back then could lead you into Corporate IT with little problem as old PC gaming was that difficult.
Also dozens of floppy discs to install a game, pray they all work. Game has a bug? Oh well call an 800 number and hope the company can mail you a patch floppy in the next 5 months. 9/10 they wouldn't
Started on Commodore 64 and swapping floppy discs was a pain , had to type in the correct commands to boot the game , I'm glad it's gotten easier lol
You're right, though when I was a kid we only called the bendable ones "floppy" and everything else was a hard disc. But hey, we were kids and it is one of those things that kind of stuck in my mind over the years.
Semi related but gotta say the first time seeing FMV in games absolutely blew my mind. 3DO used it everywhere and I loved it.
I remember one of my first gaming experiences was playing Rogue on a Tandy computer. We made backups of all our Floppy disks and Rogue treated my like a software pirate and made the game impossibly hard. It even put "Software Pirate" on your ASCII tombstone lol
All PC games ran on MS DOS for over 25 years. Is Paratrooper and Duke Nukem 3D the same generation of gaming to some of you?
DOS gaming is Pre-Win95, not Pre-Win7...
Gaming time primarily consisted of tweaking your config.sys and autoexec.bat so that you have 1) enough free base RAM, 2) enough free expanded RAM, 3) made sure you had your accessories and shit turned on, etc. And when all was said and done you reveled at Doom running on a screen the size of a postage stamp. Or games running too slow since it was assuming a 30fps frame rate for some reason. Or games running super fast since it was, again, assuming a certain frame rate.
Sound card configuration sucked, but it was worse to not even have one! Star Control 2 was GOAT for a long time for me because it somehow managed to play real sound off your PC internal speakers (you know, the one that chirps on boot and such). Ditto w/ Links golf.
I'm positive many of us learned how to work around DOS and all that BS for the express purpose of playing all the awesome stuff you saw in PC Gamer (which had no hope of running on your existing system). You worked at the computer lab so that you can play doom deathmatch after everyone left.
Gaming time primarily consisted of tweaking your config.sys and autoexec.bat so that you have 1) enough free base RAM, 2) enough free expanded RAM, 3) made sure you had your accessories and shit turned on, etc. And when all was said and done you reveled at Doom running on a screen the size of a postage stamp. Or games running too slow since it was assuming a 30fps frame rate for some reason. Or games running super fast since it was, again, assuming a certain frame rate.
Sound card configuration sucked, but it was worse to not even have one! Star Control 2 was GOAT for a long time for me because it somehow managed to play real sound off your PC internal speakers (you know, the one that chirps on boot and such). Ditto w/ Links golf.
I'm positive many of us learned how to work around DOS and all that BS for the express purpose of playing all the awesome stuff you saw in PC Gamer (which had no hope of running on your existing system). You worked at the computer lab so that you can play doom deathmatch after everyone left.
i used to play this and nibbler at my mom's law office when she'd drag me into work.
Gorilla.bas, the first computer game I ever played.
whats your avatar from, grandpa? I feel a story time coming on.
Ah the memories!
My first pc game was Under A Killing Moon.
During installation the mouse would not work. I had to install the drivers. Ok.
Then I had to reinstall them every time I turned the pc off.
What I had to do was to add a line in some autoexec.bat file. Had to read that huge dos manual to find out how. Not easy for a kid.
Trying chanels and khz(?) for my soundblaster to produce sound was fun each time somehow ...
My first pc game was Under A Killing Moon.
During installation the mouse would not work. I had to install the drivers. Ok.
Then I had to reinstall them every time I turned the pc off.
What I had to do was to add a line in some autoexec.bat file. Had to read that huge dos manual to find out how. Not easy for a kid.
Trying chanels and khz(?) for my soundblaster to produce sound was fun each time somehow ...
OP
OP
as a kid it was too overwhelming for me. half the games i bought didn't even run despite having a decent PC, so it was all pretty much a No Man's Land for me
i really regret not giving it more a chance though. i always wonder what it would've been like to play something like Daggerfall in '96. i feel i really missed out and i don't have the "it was before my time" excuse to fall back on
i really regret not giving it more a chance though. i always wonder what it would've been like to play something like Daggerfall in '96. i feel i really missed out and i don't have the "it was before my time" excuse to fall back on
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Thanks for calling me old, learn some manners and maybe I'll answer ;)
I mostly remember edit autoexec.bat / confit.sys. Last game I played on dos was probably Quake.
I only ever played some really crude educational games on DOS... I was way more into NES games back then.
Boot disks were a bother, but not as much as EMS, memmaker and the need to enable or disable it on a game by game basis.
I think about the mastery of settings and inner workings knowledge needed at the time... Now everything just works, or every problem has an internet solution at hand.
But so many cool games were available in the 90s... I don't even know where to start!
Syndicate, magic carpet, gods, simcity 2k...
I think about the mastery of settings and inner workings knowledge needed at the time... Now everything just works, or every problem has an internet solution at hand.
But so many cool games were available in the 90s... I don't even know where to start!
Syndicate, magic carpet, gods, simcity 2k...
I miss The diegetic manuals/ goodies that would come out of those huge boxes:
Half of the thing in the box were made to make you wait for the game to work properly:
There is a technical manual for the installation
There is a second manual in universe speaking to u as if you are the main characters.
There is a map
There is reference cards of binding and actions
There is a fake newspaper in universe to get you in the lore.
Half of the thing in the box were made to make you wait for the game to work properly:
There is a technical manual for the installation
There is a second manual in universe speaking to u as if you are the main characters.
There is a map
There is reference cards of binding and actions
There is a fake newspaper in universe to get you in the lore.
I was a of the glorious master race (C=64/Amiga) and gaming was great. Started out with a cassette drive and waiting forever to get into Jumpman Jr and forbidden forest was so worth it. Thankfully my Gramps was a computer guy so u quickly got my trust 1541 disk drive and a speed load cart. The 64 was the computer to have in the early/mid 80's I typed in so many games from magazines. The Amiga came and the future started. I'd love to go back, and to this day I still play some of that stuff on the semi regular when I can.
Dat bomb the bass soundtrackNot sure what constitutes DOS but I very faintly remember playing Cannon Fodder and Lemmings from floppy disk when I was real young
Oh and Xenon 2, used to love that so much
I'm 31 now
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EgjNb-6EOYw
so good
The joys of sound configuration.
I hated this so much. I was just a little child trying to play some rabbit game, damn it.
