>>734124468
Fun

i could only have a couple games installed at a time.

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About 20 times harder than Souls shit.

>>734124468
PC gaming was rough because shit hadn't been figured out yet. Hardware was a rapidly moving target. Basic stuff you don't think about these days was a crapshoot, like controller support or physics speed or monitor color depth.

Console gaming was beautiful, they had an actual reason to exist. Stick the cartridge in and you're done

>deleting random redundant system files in order to fit a game on system, just for it to run at single digit fps

>>734124468
half of your hard disk space could be easy video games and not windows + 3rd party programs(muh netframework) needed + 3000 $ hardware like nowadays

newer generations are failed for pcs

>>734124998
>something that 90% of pc users never happened
inventing schizophrenia out of your ass is a sign of mental ilness
>>734125047
never happened to me, guess you are a pc brainlet that doesn't even know how to install windows
>>734125059
true

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>>734124998
>Put cd-rom in pc
>Installer ask for cd key
>install game
>play
Whoa so hard

>>734125047
This is not a joke, the MS-DOS manuals suggest various OS files to delete to free up space.
Fundamentally DOS only requires 3 files to run.

>>734124998
werked on my machine

im experiencing it right now by playing the games they did. some of them are fun. i've played a bunch of build games. i think my favourite is blood

1981-2001 DOS kernel
2001-2021 NT kernel
2021-2041 ..more NT kernel
We have been robbed of the next gen OS, windows 10 was supposed to be "the last version of windows", only for MS to shit out 11, 12, god knows what else

>>734124468
>tfw someone installed the quake 3 arena demo (fully playable version of the game, its only restrictions were the numbers of maps and npc enemy variety) in every computer in the entire high school i went to
>giant potential lan party every school day
>elite fps gameplay on a combination of ball-bearing and OG microsoft mice
those were the days lads.

>>734125230
A lot of the time esp. early on, if your hardware config didn't match, you'd have issues and the game wouldn't run.

>>734124934
difficulty doesn't make a game inherently fun. so it doesn't matter if it's more difficult. this looks like shit.

>>734124468
Magical

>>734124468
I genuinely miss having to launch games off floppy drives through the DOS command line with my whopping cutting edge 64mb RAM stick. Modern gaming has no soul

>>734125530
I never said it was fun you stupid retard.

I liked that I could turn on a game and immediately start playing. No long intros, no online connection, no signing in, no pop ups. then when my older sister and I discovered hentai Flash games I would jerk off while she scrolled through all the nude CGs.

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>>734124468
Maybe not ancient but it is SOVL

>>734124468
Fun.
It felt like there were constantly amazing new releases because there were.
These days it's all graphics but garbage gameplay.

>>734125648
This is the biggest thing putting me off from modern games. I literally bought myltiple games I don't play because of how long it takes before I'm in-game.

>>734125582
>i miss when pc felt like console

>>734125701
>consoles use kb+m and needed a command line interface where you typed in commands to navigate your os and set up your hardware
how many times were you dropped on your head as a child

>>734125139
>>734125230
He's not wrong though, at least if you go back far enough. If you lacked the appropriate graphics or soundcard capability, some games just didn't work well, or would even refuse to launch (not much different from today, but game installation was its own thing back then). System requirements were much less of a unified thing, at least up until around after the mid 90's.

I enjoyed that era of PC though. Even if things didn't always work, it was a wild west environment where you never knew what to expect, and that's what made it fun in a weird way.

>>734125059
>3000 $ hardware like nowadays
This is how you instantly out yourself as either an underage retard who wasn’t there or an adult retard who thought emachines were gaming PCs. Computers were expensive as fuck throughout the 90s. I remember the first computer I built from parts myself in the mid 90s was over $2500 just for the rig, because I distinctly remember being upset that I got sold MMX as equivalent to a video card for that price

>>734125816
its been the same thing since consoles have launched into a desktop instead of immediately running the game.

>>734125930
These people have lived with directx and similar software design for so long they can’t imagine there was a time before even activex existed.

>>734124468
I remember being blown away that my father could play Air Warrior on an ancient packard bell and see chats from other players.
shit was comfy.

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>>734124468
All around superior to what we've had to endure the past 20 years now.

>>734124468
salty coins and bags of sand

>>734124468
Played tribes 2 with 20fps and enjoyed(hated) every moment of it.

You would sometimes have to stop gaming because the dinosaurs would attack the village.

>>734124468
Good.

No, I don't want to go back

>>734128414
>uncs lived in jrpg villages
us zoomers got raped out of this

>>734125620
it is fun to be fair

>>734124468
You popped in a CD, listened to the reader spin a song. You looked at the launcher splash screen, listened a little to the music, pressed Install and entered in the CD key you copied from your friend's house and waited for the installation to complete. Then you clicked the desktop icon and just played your game.
Headphones were uncommon so you at night you'd drag the speakers close to you and turn down the volume. Very comfy, very good times.
If you raged out and punched the monitor, it'd only be your hand hurting. CRT screens are so damn thick and sturdy you wouldn't believe.

>>734124468
Great. Elitism pushed games at an insane rate and led to insane classics.
The whole "le toxic" mindset opened the door for imbeciles and literally retards.
And now in 2026 we have cat reddit game threads and eceleb threads and gacha threads.

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>>734124468
>buy physical media for cheap
>the box had nice art, a manual and sometimes a lore book
>was actually worth collecting vidya back then
>install game from CD
>no need to download anything
>it just works

>>734124998
>shit hadn't been figured out
What you mean to say a commercial standard wasn't agreed upon.
This was a good thing, and a bad thing of course. Good because it's what lead to a lot of innovation, bad because - as you say - incompatibility, jank and trying to make shit work was not as simple as just googling "how to X"

>>734125683
My childhood game!

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>>734125683
It's so good man, I remember having a hard time with the later levels and years later finding out that they patched it to make it easier. if you didn't play 1.0 you didn't beat it

>>734128909
Something I liked a lot back in the day was inspecting the backside of CD covers and boxes. The screenshots would often be taken straight from early builds that wouldn't always be consistent with the final release.
From the top of my head only Warcraft3 comes to mind right now, but there were quite a few. In the WC3 one you would see peons pushing Horde/Orc catapults, whereas in the release version the catapults are just self-driving

>>734125230
Big box PC games were always KINO

>>734129059
My friend had that game, he'd never let me play

>>734124468
There was a real social aspect where a buddy would tell you about a game, you went to his house or he went to yours, you'd burn the game on another CD and now it was yours to keep or he'd lend you the CD and you had to pray that it wouldn't get scratched. I fucked up a buddy's Rollcage CD, years later when I finally got a CD-RW I burned a copy and returned it, still feel bad about it lol

>>734125620
>exposes himself as a coward that is concerned about what zoom zooms think "fun" means
the game you posted was fun and you're a faggot

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>>734124468
No Steam, so you got your games from picrel. Once a game left the shelves, forget it. It's gone. Go drive around to the Software Etc. or Comp USA 25 miles away and hope they have a copy.

>>734124468
Wonderful.
Just many types of games, you just needed to install the game from cd and you played it. And there were many great games like up to today they are so many games from these times i didn't played yet waiting to be played.

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>>734125230

>>734125530
so does roblox and minecraft

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>>734130425
Your soundcard works perfectly.

>>734124998
I feel like this poster still isn't able to use a pc in 2026

>>734124998
>>734125230

It’s pretty obvious itt, an actual oldfag is discussing pc games from the mid to late 90s, and another anon are discussing pc games from the 2000s before steam became the defacto. there’s like a whole decade and some between these two eras. trying to get a controller to work on a pc in 1999 was like hacking the pentagon. running games in dos and hoping it detected your soundblaster was actually a thing. fuck, even having a game on a cd (with an install wizard too!), was itself a futuristic luxury

>disc 1 of 4

>>734129059
The architecture in this game was diabolical.

well you wouldn't be using a first gen LCD screen for starters

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>>734131226
>disc 1 of 8
you'll also need the patch

>>734125479
Ive been gaming since 1996 and ive had no such issues

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>>734131226
>>734133159
I remember having to do this shit in 2011 (TWO THOUSAND AND ELEVEN) to play L.A. Noire on Xbox 360. I think that was the last time I ever seen a multi-disc game

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>>734131226
yes

>>734133205
1996 was the cutoff where things "mostly" worked, but getting older games to run was still difficult.

anyone remember the dark days of drm? denuvo is horrible, but i would still take it over safedisc, securom or starforce

>>734133205
it was before my time, because i didn't have a computer that far back not because i wasn't alive,
but that poster is referring to having to do things like select the proper sound card config, set the IRQ, etc.

it was far more enjoyable than what we have right now

Fucking ass. Nothing every worked right. Oh, you think this time the sound card will work? Too bad, 3D card now says go fuck yourself. Enjoy your 128 colors. You're out of disk space and it costs $1000 to buy a hard drive. Now go clean your mouse ball.

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>>734129189
>The screenshots would often be taken straight from early builds that wouldn't always be consistent with the final release

I remember all the gaming magazines using some pre-release game version screenshots for Red Alert 2 reviews where buildings and units looked different. They still use those for the Steam page lol

>>734136330
Errr most games had a list of compatible parts on the box or in the manual. I had this issue once with a janky old game called Queen: The Eye and buying the listed part fixed it

>>734133205
You're a babby. You only started gaming with the pentium era.

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>kids don't remember a time when mouse support wasn't guaranteed

>>734133205
Did you ever have to fuck with DOS? I remember having to teach myself all the stuff to get Duke Nukem 3D to run including how to play with my friend via modem.

>>734136897
Or random stuff not working because of a IRQ conflict.

God I do not miss trackballs. How did I ever live like that.

>>734124468
Making bootdisks with your autoexec.bat and config.sys edits to get your game to run without shitting itself.

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>game can't run because your 640k block of memory is full

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HOLD ON TO YOUR BUTTS

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Simple

>>734130872
I remember trying to play x wing alliance with a joystick that we had and it was so painful to get to work. Kids these days dont know shit about ps/2 connectors, fucking spoiled with usb and automatic driver downloads

>>734131974
Yeah there's a couple of leaps of faith but at least they had the decency to let you scroll down the camera

>>734129189
I miss reading instruction manuals. Poring over them as you wait the 3 hours for your game to finally install. Speaking of which, install screens were also very cool, lots of fmvs or what have you as you anticipate finally playing the game

a lot of you didn't have to do the arcane rituals to get sidewinder to work and it shows. Old pc gaming was horrendous shit im glad its better now
but some of the games from that time still hold up

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It just worked

>>734125230
fuck you and your shit takes. I once wasted 2+ hours installing the same game on my 3 friends different pcs, plus the expansions, so we could play Dawn of war 1 on lan. By the time we finished installing everything and getting the lobby to work, we only had time for 1 fucking game. I spent 3x as much time installing the damn game on their pcs as actually playing it, thank FUCK for digital distribution for pcs. Go play on your poorfag consoles retard.

Good riddance to physical on pc.

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If Sony is the first thing you think of when you hear "PS2", you are both a child, and a casual console pleb.

>>734143051
>I spent 3x as much time installing the damn game on their pcs as actually playing it
Still a better ratio than time spent modding games vs actually playing them

>>734124468
I had to go to an arcade that had PC's you can pay to play on in order to play the newest games

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>>734124468
Amazing

>>734140548
>>734143190

Remembering the age when plug n play was not a thing and if you plugged in a new device you'd have to restart the computer before it'd even be detected.

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>>734143284
and? wtf does that have to do with my story.

>>734144616
It wasn't an argument, you defensive retard.

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>>734124468
>640x480
>10-12fps slideshow
>ungodly loud fan whirring from the tower
>"FLIPENDO!"

Yep, it's gaming time

>This program has performed an illegal operation and needs to close.

The Windows 95 experience

>>734143190
Can still use mine, but have to press the reset button when it turns on for some reason

>>734124934
doesn't this game have super strict time limits that basically make it so that if you mess up once, you can't beat the level

Before turdies were everywhere the internet was actually fun

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>start unreal tournament
>join a server
>2MB MAP DOWNLOAD? this'll take 2 years
>disconnect and look somewhere else

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>>734124468
simply fun, anon. no social media like /v/ telling you the game you are enjoying actually sucks, no story with a hidden agenda, just people who genuinely care about making games trying out wacky ideas and not caring so much about making huge profits.

It was better on consoles until the early 2000's

>>734124998
>all these zoomers born after windows XP in the replies
My N64 felt like a supercomputer compared to my parent's PC at the time, and our home computer wasn't cheap. I don't think there was parity until halo 2 and half life 2 came out. After that it felt like the PC master race pulled ahead faster every year.

Right now there's zero reason to own a gaming console. You need a computer anyways so its better to spend the cost of a console on top and get something that can run games too.

>>734146546
>It was better on consoles until the early 2000's
in terms of performance per dollar and ease of use, absolutely. Console exclusives were a huge percent of the best games too. Though pc still had a much larger library/variety of games to play, not to mention the ease of piracy. All you need was a stack of CD-RWs and you were set

>>734144742
stay on topic fuckwit. Don't just bring up random shit that has nothing to do with the topic, or my response, you vastly overvalue the worth of your opinions.

>>734146546
its wasn't soo much the console itself, it was the lack of investment and money in making pc games at the time. Until Half-life 1 there just wasn't that much money in making pc games. Who would bother optimising games for pc when there was soo much variety in components, 5x more than today, with a fraction of the consumer base that actually buys game.

>>734126205
I miss the 90's so much :(

>>734124468
Exactly the same as now. You had some good games, many bad games. However over time games have become better and better overall. Better gameplay, better graphics, sound, storytelling. And it will continue to evolve like that.