So, in the thread Computer Gamers: What Are You Playing These Days?, it was mentioned that a rare few of us are old enough to remember a day when a computer game didn’t install automatically when you put the disk in your computer, and when you had to do more than click on a little picture to make the game run every time you wanted to play it.
Some classics I fondly remember from this era include System Shock and Wing Commander: Privateer. Any of you Dopers care to share some fond memories about the days when we had to walk two miles, up hill both ways, in the snow, with no shoes or feet, just so we could pay for the priviledge to muck about with the startup files on our computer to make a game work right?
The classic example of a game impossible to get working without a special boot disk would be Ultima 7. They had a bizarre memory manager that not only didn’t work with anything but if you had to have a mouse driver that was amazingly small to be able to use it.
Heh, check out abandonia. You have to use a DOS emulator (assuming you are using a modern computer) to use the majority of the games on this site so you will have to muck about to get these games to work.
Replaying the original Might & Magic has been quite the blast from the past. I spent too many hours of my childhood trying to get to the end of that game on my C64. Now, with the full power of the gaming community on the world wide web the Secret of the Inner Sanctum shall finally be MINE! M&M II, III, & IV are also available on the same site.
WC: Privateer? Pah! How about the original Wing Commander? I’ve still got the original floppies, though I doubt they work any more. Going back a bit further how about Choplifter?
I grew up in a mac household, so I never had to deal with DOS. I do remember that, rather than making a proper port of Pool of Radiance, they made a mac version of it in hypertalk (black and white to boot). Good times.
Hee, I own a copy of The Kilrathi Saga, which I picked up for $35 from someone online a few months before the game started selling for rediculous prices on eBay, so I never had that particular problem with the early WC games in Win9x. Now, Windows XP you had to do a little playing around with compatibility mode, and I’ve not yet tried it on Vista yet (I don’t own a joystick in any case).
I hate to tell you after the fact, but Gametap has almost all of those games and runs them seamlessly from a built-in emulator. If you don’t mind the subscription fee, it’s a lot easier than mucking around with DOSBox or its ilk.
I remember MS-DOS. I grew up with MS-DOS. I put off installing Win95/98 for the longest time, because I was so accustomed to the idea of telling the computer directly what to do, instead of the computer telling me what I’m allowed to do.
I’m still bitter towards Bill Gates & Co. for not understanding that operating systems need to be backwards compatible, if only for the sake of playing old DOS games which don’t work on a modern O/S without an emulator. (DOSBox is nice, but it still can’t play the late-era DOS games like Carmageddon.)
One thing I don’t miss, however, is all the tweaking MS-DOS required to play certain games. Multiple boot-up configurations. Memory managers. Editing the AUTOEXEC.BAT & CONFIG.SYS files. Nowadays, all you do is stick in the CD/DVD and click “Install” – soooo much easier.
But do you recall the surge of pure joy you got when the first game screen finally appeared after you’d spent all morning tweaking your startup files?
And then you could spend the rest of the day trying to get sound as well…
Pshya. Disks? In the real old days, we had to type our games in, line by line, from “Compute!” magazine. There was none of this fancy-schmancy “load from floppy” stuff going on back then. In fact, I’m gonna go old school for a while. Can someone send me a hard copy of the “Hellgate: London” source code? I wanna type it in.
I try to tell kids these days about that age when we felt priveleged to have the opportunity to carefully type in programs by hand. Now, as I was a power user, I of course was able to subsequently back up my code using a tape player interfaced to my TI-99/4A through a process known as mod/demod, a.k.a. fairy mushroom kingdom magic. But some of these poor bastards would actually re-type the program whenever they wanted to run it, and they will of course claim to be the harder core crowd. I salute them, though not necessarily with all of my fingers.
I say bah to all of you. Because in System Shock you could play a mini-version of Wing Commander on your in-game PDA. Crouched in a dark corner, hot-barrelled assault rifle across your lap, playing Wing Commander on the tiny display in the corner.
I think my first game was probably a pirated copy of Karateka, we used to play that alot. But my first real game was Bard’s Tale, now that was some hardcore vicious game design. The game didn’t even pretend to be nice to you, it was pure ironman, you had to make your own backups of your characters because dead was dead. How we ever won that game I’ll never know. Wait, yes I do. Too much free time and lots of graph paper.
The thing is I still have these old games in boxes stored away. Sometimes they come out to play again. I recently picked up a $1 replacement at Goodwill of my damaged Return To Zork. The Zork games were some of my favorite. Sim City, Outpost, Grim Fandango, Entomorph, Lighthouse, Myst, Doom, Kings Quest, 7th Guest, The Journeyman Project, Oblivion, Kingdom O’ Magic, Dungeon Keeper, and many others. Phantasmogoria was the first break from child safe software that Sierra released. They all are graphical and could be a configuration nightmare. Many were the cause of new hardware installations.
Disks? Forget disks. I played Telengard and Flight Simulator from tape. You remember? Type in the command to load, go eat breakfast, flip the tape, go shower, ready to play! (provided there were no errors and you didn’t have to start the process all over again.)
Boy do I ever remember that. That’s some hard core gaming right there. We need to bring that back
Eh, I’ve got a 6-month subscription to Gametap (which I intend to cancel when it’s up) and would prefer to “muck around with DOSBox.” I’ve never had a problem playing a game in DOSBox and that includes some of the classically difficult to run DOS games like Wing Commander Privateer.
I loved Droll on the Apple II. Spent a long time pulling and pushing in the touch typeing tutor cartridge on my TI-99/4a to make the screen do funky things. I still have the TI and casette recorder in the basement…alas, I don’t think I have a TV I can plug it into anymore.
And remember the anxious expection after installing Wing Commander while it computed the graphics?
I still remember being seriously wierded out when playing Doom (freeware) for the first time.
Ahh yes Spend several hours or days typing it in, then read through the code 7 or 8 more times trying to figure out why it didn’t work at all. The finally giving up all pissed off.
Then finally when the next month’s issue came out, in the corrections section it said
“We inadvertantly left lines 3400-3500 out of Super-Hyper-Dragon-Byke last month , the following lines need to be added…” :mad:
I think I became a programmer in the first place trying to figure out what the code always needed to work.
