«

[Dave]

Welcome Casey

[PrincessCasey]

Thank you Dave Nice to meet you!

Just a general update, I'm getting much better at DOS now, I wrote myself a little cheat sheet and keep finding out about new commands, I was playing with mkdir last night hehehe.

[RRS]

Originally Posted by PrincessCasey

I remember you could buy any game from back then and you knew it would just work

I assure you that new games were always demanding in terms of hardware, in the case of evolving platform as PC. 18 years ago I was struggling to free few kilobytes of RAM in order to run Doom (what a joy it was when I succeeded!).

It's different today because... let me just say, that in 1990s a 10-year-old game would be primitive, with clunky interface. Today 10-year-old games still have good controls, CD-audio quality positional sound, tooltips etc. That's why they age slower than titles from pioneer times of squeaky sounds and eye-gouging video palettes.
Compare movies: a film from 1910s is difficult to watch today, while a talkie comedy from 1930s still retains its charm, yet each are over 70 years old so the relative time gap between them seems irrelevant today. When a medium gets to a certain point of maturity, its works better resist time.

Some will say I complain about new games because I got old. Yet I did this over a decade ago while still a teen! Some changes are simply unwelcome and I have my own taste, thank you.
You've mentioned Lemmings, I'll nod to you by adding Worms. Sometimes gameplay changes so much when moved to 3D that this elusive something (playability) no longer clicks with the gamers.

[PrincessCasey]

I remember we got our DOS computer second hand, it was from a friend in exchange for a few pints of real ale. I think it must have been 1993 and it was old for the time, but I remember it having 8mb of ram which was something its previous owner was very excited about, it had cost him £50 per mb and he had upgraded from 4. It must have been a colossal amount of memory for the time as the hard drive was only 100mb!

Growing up I remember the game that you had to upgrade your computer for great expense for, the 2 I remember the most are half life 2 and then later crysis. Do you remember any games that you had to upgrade specifically for/were just impossible to run on anything but the bleeding edge? You mentioned Doom, I can see that being one

[Scatty]

I think it was actually a bit more of a run earlier to upgrade the computers for newer, better games than it is today. Of course there's still a bit of that now, too, just not as much as the hardware is pretty much on it's peaks and there's getting less PC games - the market is getting exhausted.

The 486DX2-66MHz I got in 1995 had also only 4MB memory which I upgraded only a bit less than a year later to 8MB. Half a year later I upgraded it to 24MB RAM and an AMD X5, which was approximately on a level of 486DX4-100MHz, because Quake 1 wouldn't run smooth enough on a DX2. Still didn't on the 100MHz one, so few months later I changed the motherboard and put a Pentium-100 onto it which was a big improvement in speed, only after which Quake ran like a charm, together with few other demanding (at the time) games like Duke Nukem 3D.

Compared to now, that Pentium 100 was replaced only in 2001 with a Pentium4 2400Mhz with 256MB RAM (few months later 512MB), because I couldn't play Diablo II on the former. That P4 lasted me for 6 years up to 2007 when I got a Dell Latitude D600 notebook, and 2 years later a Dell Inspiron 9300, for it's time (around 2005) a very strong gamer notebook with Pentium Centrino which serves me very good even now.
Sure, I can't play the newer games like The Witcher, Drakensang or Fallout 3, just Gothic III and the like which is old by now, but that's ok since I don't have that much time for that anymore, anyway.