What was PC gaming like in 2003?
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What was PC gaming like in 2003?
What was PC gaming like in 2003?
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it was like pc gaming in 2002, but 10% better
It was the year Ultima Online died so not really.
prostagma
dulome
Imagine a world where there's no such thing as micro transactions, DLC, or Free To Play models, MOBA's are a niche genre for actual autistic people, mods are actually total conversions and not just single lines of code that change someone's hair to blue or make you able to do thing cheats would normally do, and your computer wasn't bloated with a bunch of spyware from greedy corporate wiener-socks that are getting secret funding from the government for supplying them with residual information.
>your computer wasn't bloated with a bunch of spyware from greedy corporate wiener-socks
If you (or, more likely, your parents) got a prebuilt, it usually came with a ton of pre-installed Dell/Compaq/Gateway/etc. bloatware, that needed to be purged.
If you're running windows or iOS, you're running dedicated spyware.
Windows = PC gaming for 99% of people that play games on their computer.
Sure, if you're born in the mid 90's or later.
I was born in 89 and the only DOS games I remember are Doom and Jazz Jackrabbit. Windows was PC gaming.
I was born in 91 and even I knew about fricking Duke Nukem 3D and Alien Trilogy. Get better taste.
You need to remember that US PC ownership in the 1990s was surprisingly low. Something like 50% of homes didn't have anything resembling a personal computer, either IBM-compatible, or older-style microcomputer. It was on par with places like East Yuropooria.
That's mostly because of the mid-west.They only like farming, hunting, and fishing in those parts, and don't like any newfangled computer type parts.
I grew up in East Yuropooria and we had several micros at once (Atari ST, Amiga, Amstrad CPC) plus two PCs, one 286 AT clone and one 386, later 486. In the mid 90's.
>t. child of an oligarch
Here having an Amiga or anything Commodore in the mid 90s was a fricking sensation apparently.
The best that you could get in the 90s was a NES clone with pirated games, and that's what most people used for gaming at home. Having a home started to become common in the early 2000s.
*home PC
I consider my family of the time pretty middle class.
We had Amiga user gatherings in 1989 already here.
The UK didn't exceed 40% home computer ownership until the year 2000. The US was ahead of everyone else in raw adoption, it's just we don't autistically bleat about 'muh micros' online like Euros do for some reason.
>The US was ahead of everyone else in raw adoption
I grew up in East Yuropooria (one of the crappier areas, though thank frick not the dumpster fire of ex-Yugo).
The thing which massively boosted PC adoption was US companies sending their obsolete shit (286-es, early 386-es like the SX) as aid circa 1992-1993. Ostensibly, it was intended to use those in school IT labs, to boost PC literacy. Obviously, they ended up stolen and installed in private homes. For somebody whose prior computer experience was limited to some shitty cassette-drive Spectrum clone, even a 286 with 2 MB RAM and a 20 MB hard drive was a notable improvement.
Up until Windows 95, and even a few years afterwards, DOS was still the primary OS for gaming, even if it was running in a wrapper in Windows.
Quake was originally a DOS game, as are pretty much all the shooters mentioned in the /VR/ FPS general with a couple of exceptions
All of the Lucasarts adventures were DOS games
Dungeon Keeper was a DOS game
Tomb Raider was a DOS game
Carmageddon was a DOS game
All the Ultimas up to IX were DOS games
Ecstatica, Fade to Black, Command and Conquer - all DOS
When you ran a game in Windows, and the screen went black with white writing - that was DOS.
It wasn't really until 97/98 that pure Windows gaming was more common, and developers properly coded for it and Direct X.
>wasn't bloated with spyware...
MF the most popular platform on PC for games, news and multiplayer during those years was literally called Gamespy. Was a required install with 100s of games.
Gamespy didn't even exist until 1999, and no, it was not "required" to install, it was optional, it was limited purely to the multiplayer portion of gaming.
Even then, Gamespy wasn't spyware. They simply hosted master servers for online games for developers.
W...what is happening in that pic?
they're posing for le quirky picture to make people ask "wtf is happening in this pic", millennials still love doing that stuff
I don't see how that's any different from young people now making silly videos on tiktok, you sound fricking bitter dude
It was called a party, specifically a Halloween party.The picture was a candid shot. Not set up like everything now.
See back before everyone was sitting in their bedrooms in teh dark on their phones 24/7 and chopping of their penises, people used to have these things called "parties" where they would actually meet in person and enjoy themselves. I know, fricking boomers amiright?
Are zoomers really confused by pictures of a party? Jesus you homosexuals are sad.
DLC absolutely existed, expansions to games went back a long time, even Ultima VII had an expansion. Now were they a much better value than today? Generally, but add-ons were still definitely a thing. Also you forgot:
>playing older games was a crapshoot due to XP breaking compatibility with a ton of 9x and DOS software
>actually ludicrous security holes, to the point that you were at risk just by connecting directly to the modem without a router
>disk defragging
>had to scour the internet for game patches and hope the site/download wasn’t full of viruses
>P4 series ran insanely hot
dlc is more like wad discs
>"P4 series ran insanely hot"
>120w under load
>modern mid-range CPUs run at 220w under load
Sounds like you were using the stock cooler which was like a 40mm fan taped to a comically small heatsink.
I'm talking about heat generation, not power consumption.
120W worth of heat is 120W worth of heat. Everything else, short of like not having a heat spreader, is irrelevant. Even low profile CPU fans can handle that no problem.
>120W worth of heat is 120W worth of heat
True in absolute terms, but that doesn't mean it can't be more or less difficult to dissipate. Thermal density and the challenges of effectively transferring a set amount of heat from a smaller area will massively effect temperatures. That's why Ryzen CPUs run so hot despite posting incredibly efficient power draw numbers. 99% of the heat load is coming from one or two tiny chiplets, and transferring heat from such a small area through an IHS into a heatsink is difficult. Same goes for shoving 120W through a single core, compared to the same power running through a large quad-core die, for example.
Like a thermal bottleneck
You should be talking about reading comprehension. Namely asking for help in achieving the ability to do at above a 1st grade level.
Considering modern CPUs are 6-8 cores minimum now, and the P4 was single core, I’d say that’s pretty damn hot. AMD’s processors didn’t even reach 120W until going dual-core.
>which was like a 40mm fan taped to a comically small heatsink
You joke but this was basically the standard at the time. The beefiest fans you tended to see were the 80mm ones and heat sinks were just chunks of aluminum with no heat pipes or even real thermal design.
P4's biggest problem thermally though was its low TJmax. IIRC it was like 65-70 degrees which was easily achievable if you pushed it just a little too hard for a little too long.
Zoom zoom. DLC is not the same as an expansion pack.
Calling an expansion pack the same thing as DLC is like calling an wifi the same thing as an ethernet connection. They both connect you to the internet, but they are NOT identical. Expansion packs were fixed add-ons, while DLC was subject to the arbitrary whims of the developer, and could be anything from horse armor, to something like The Shivering Isles.
Throw in games being 100% complete without any additional downloads at all. Also throw in a graphics card being a graphics card, and not a large bulky bolt-on computing unit. Also throw in cheaper upgrades than now.
That photo looks more like 2008 except with less weird drug people everywhere
>playing ff7
>breath of fire 4
>counter strike
>quake
>everquest
>playing warcraft 3
>looking forward to wow
Boomers had it so good
ff7
Everything except this shit
PC bros would beat you up if they caught you playing something so gay instead of pub stomping Dust 2 servers with them
MAME
Halo PC port
Classic Counter Strike at it's peak
Unreal 2, UT 2k3
Postal 2
Quake 3 still fun
Final Fantasy XI
Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 still fresh
A couple hold overs from previous years that are still nice and hopefully work
PCgays made due
>Postal 2
Nobody played this game in 2003.
I played the demo, I remember I was playing with a friend and said:
>Man, this game is so realistic, almost like if I'd shoot the gas pipe, it would explode
>*shoots gas pipe*
>*explosion*
We did not expect that.
Expensive. Zoomers b***h about how much it costs to be a PC gamer nowadays but it was legit like $1500 ($3000 in today's money) to even get in on the ground floor back then.
Also your machine would start seriously showing its age by like year two or three. By year five a lot of new releases would be unplayable and the pace of change in the actual underlying mobo and CPU tech would mean you couldn't just pop in a new GPU.
I got a top of the line PC in 2002 (P4 with GeForce 4). Around 2005 I popped a midrange radeon card into it to replace the geforce (I was severely limited because AGP was on its way out). By 2007 it was unusable - Witcher 1 couldn't run even at the lowest settings.
My parents bought me a machine in 2005 that was slightly worse than the machine you got in 2002. Socket 478 P4 with integrated graphics and 256MB of RAM. I can't believe I used that machine until spring 2009, even with all the upgrades I threw into it.
>Also your machine would start seriously showing its age by like year two or three.
This. I got new pc in 2002 and three years later i could even play bf2.
Crazy I know.
That's what ruined it
Could never make the price make sense to me. Ya they had more stuff but even then it didn't fit the $3000 price
>Also your machine would start seriously showing its age by like year two or three. By year five a lot of new releases would be unplayable and the pace of change in the actual underlying mobo and CPU tech would mean you couldn't just pop in a new GPU.
This is something I absolutely do not miss at all. Circa 2001 I had a Slot 1 P3 with a GF2 (can't remember the exact model). Three and a half years later, pretty much every newer game ran like utter shit. Thank frick the shitty chinesium PSU went kapooya, taking the mobo, CPU and hard drive with it. It gave me an excuse to ask my folks for a handout (the power socket I had it plugged in was dodgy, so it was their fault for not keeping stuff working properly).
Though the mid-late-90s were even worse. In 1996, you could run pretty much everything on 16 MB of RAM. Three years later, Heroes 3 would barely run, with terrible stutter, lag, and ridiculously long loading screens when entering or exiting a town (it needed a bare minimum of about 24 MB to run acceptably, and 32 MB to play without issues). Might and Magic VII wouldn't even start on 16 MB.
The biggest thing was the move from single to dual core around 2005ish. Overnight most new releases became unplayable and you needed a complete platform upgrade. It was also a time where GPUs went from AGP to PCIe like you've mentioned and that was another big deal.
Now we tend to make incremental leaps, although GPU market is still silly.
If there's one thing that I will admit about PC gaming, it's that the autistic arms race for graphics cards that was propagated by said video card manufacturers was pure dogshit, and it paved the way for some REALLY fricking scummy behaviors, like Nvidia deliberately enforcing devs to include specific effects in their games to make their competitors cards run like shit.
I honestly wouldn't have minded games lingering on the Max Payne-level graphics for another couple years instead of immediately jumping the bar with Medal of Honor Allied Assault the very next year. I mean, come the frick on.
We jumped from needing a 450 Mhz processor, with 96 MB RAM, and a 16MB Direct3D Compatible Graphics Card with DX8, to needing A 1.8 GHZ PROCESSOR, 512MB RAM, AND 2 GBS OF STORAGE AND DX9.
This shit is fricking stupid, especially since Max Payne was considered a graphical benchmark at the time.
This came up in another PC thread earlier, specifically in regard to the retro cutoff for hardware in this board being 2001, which if applied to PC would mean the best "retro" PC would probably be an Athlon XP 1900+ paired with either a Geforce 3 Ti500 or a Radeon 8500, and while the CPU would probably hold up to maybe around 2006, by 2004 both GPUs would already have you resort to playing at lowest settings to get playable framerates on AAA games. Graphical advancements were just too fast back then, and so shit got deprecated incredibly fast.
And now a 300$ laptop from Best Buy can run all of those games at max settings.
Indeed, but the point is at the time, such a rig would've been monstrously expensive, only to be unable to properly run the bleeding-edge games just a scant few years later because they're all targeting GPU tech from the year they're released or, in some cases, for the future. Meanwhile, the much cheaper consoles stayed relevant for at least four years and had stunning games released for them despite being objectively weaker in almost every respect (with the possible exception of the Xbox, which had a GPU that was on paper superior to the Geforce 3 Ti500 released that same year, only held back by the lack of RAM).
Honorable mention to the PS2 as well, given it was so wildly different from both PC hardware and the other consoles and could do a few things the other platforms struggled with if properly taken advantage of, although it had its own shortcomings as well.
I have no idea what you're talking about. You're applying relatavistic standards to consoles and not to PC's. Consoles were only relevant to themselves, while PC's were relevant to the entire industry.
I guess relevant was a bad choice of words. What I meant to say is because consoles are fixed in specs for at least four or five years, increasingly complex games came out for them all throughout that took better and better advantage of said hardware, whereas in the PC gaming landscape, even a top-spec PC from the same period would've fallen behind in a much shorter amount of time, at least when it came to the AAA games.
Again, think of the very best PC you could've possibly built at the ass-end of 2001 when the Xbox released. Sure, it would've been killer for everything that year and still very nice for most everything up to 2003, putting damn near everything on the consoles to shame, but the top games that came out in 2004 were on a whole other level and it just wouldn't have been able to keep up without serious compromises. By 2006, you start seeing games it straight-up wouldn't be able to play, such as Oblivion, though by that point we're pretty much squarely on non-retro territory anyway.
This is all just to say that the downside of PC gaming was not only that it was expensive, but that it also required you to upgrade or replace your hardware more frequently to keep up, at least if you wanted to play the latest games with good quality and performance. Of course, if you could or were willing to do that, it was fricking sweet, not to mention you always had the option to revisit older games and play them at a fidelity that was previously out of reach, so there's that.
That's the good part, if you were okay lagging behind a year or two, you could get parts for really-really cheap, even trash picked. Still good parts and played everything up until a point well, but cheap because they didn't support the latest API.
This was pretty much what I did. Plus there were lots of games you could run on older hardware just at lower detail levels or resolutions. I don't think I ran anything above 640x480 or 800x600 until mid 2003 when I upgraded.
Also - really unless you were a massive online FPS dude who built their career on the lowest ping and the highest performing config file you could devise, few people cared about getting high framerates apart from running the odd 3D benchmarking tool when you bought a new graphics card or 3D accelerator.
I just generally assume games will lag and are pleasantly surprised when they don't.
expensive? dude we just played all on toasters and shit like vice city, bf1942 or wc3 run no problem on a crappy riva tnt2
>"run no problem"
I don't know whether to laugh or cry when you thirdies tell me about your formative PC gaming experiences.
thats the cheapest and slowest tnt2
yeah, vanta was the xx50 before xx50s existed
>M64
Not a real TNT2.
what am i missing? looks fine
thirdies? im from europe. we were just kids that played games on their parents office toaster builds in early 00s.
its the same price today kek. PC gaming was most affordable in the late 2000's.
>its the same price today kek
so tired of this meme. a gaming PC only costs $2k when you want to play the newest AAA goyslop on max settings, and even then it isn't always necessary. my rig cost a total of $390 after tax and can play basically anything 2012 era or earlier on max settings, as well as most indie steam game type shit. you absolutely do not need to spend more than 500 if you just want a machine for playing games.
>UT2k3
>BF1942
>Freelancer
>Diablo 2
>SC:BW
>Quake 3
>WC3
>C&C:RA2
It was a golden age of online gaming, and I didn't know how good we had it.
WC3 and Tron 2.0 were crazy good and somehow sleepers. NOLF was incredible too. HL2 was right around the horizon and flash games were surprising decent.
>WC3
>sleeper
Far from it. It was super popular. Unless you mean the main game and not custom maps like DOTA.
>sleeper
homosexual I worked at Best Buy when WC3 came out and to this day I've never seen a PC game get as much hype. We had the entire tv walls playing the trailer non stop. There were multiple pallet displays on the floor. There were prime time commercials airing for the game. WC3 had the most marketing hype I've seen for a PC game ever.
piracy
You were seriously limited with what you had. My Dad bought a desktop for $2000 back in 2000. Came with a DVD drive with a second CD-R drive. I think it had a voodoo card in it too. Used to play CS and Diablo 2 on it all the time. He had high speed internet and used to download warez, music and video all the time. It felt like the future every time we visited.
At my Mom's house, we had an old Pentium with Windows 95 that barely ran Warcraft 2. My brothers and I begged her to get hooked up to the internet and we got some dial-up service.
Who would have picked a LCD for gaming over CRT at the time Halo CE was current?
I got my first LCD in 2005, a 17" Samsung SyncMaster. My old 15" ADI Microscan was getting darker and darker, and I got tired of it taking a shitton of space on my desk.
And I still have that SyncMaster, I use it in portrait mode as a second screen for my laptop.
At the time; Perfect geometry and 400 nits of brightness(compared to 120-150 on CRT) were hard to pass up.
Why would you ever think OPs monitor does 400 nits. It's literally 200 nits, also only 768p with a 200:1 contrast ratio and 25ms response time. Horrible for gaming, even back then.
>NEC 15" MultiSync LCD 1530V 1024x768@75Hz, Pixel Pitch 0.3, Contrast 200:1, Brightness 200CD/m2, Response 25ms, TCO -99
Not to mention, it cost 500 bucks. For less than 100 bucks more you could have gotten a E530/540 instead for example, doing 1600x1200@85Hz and still perfect geometry, no latency and much better image quality in general. Sure, completely white screen would have given only around 150 nits, but with much better contrast.
Early LCDs were fricked for games. Pristine images tricked you but once you played anything it descended into a blurry soup with max ghosting whenever anything moved.
that was the year I built my own pc for the first time. My specs where Pentium 4 2.4 ghz, Radeon 9700, Abit IC7-G and 1gb of ram. It ran Windows 2000 because I didnt like how XP looked
I got a PC around that time and I remeber playing Age of Mythology, Prince of Persia Sands of time/Warrior Within, GTA:SA, Max Payne, Far Cry, Freedom Fighters, Blood Omen 2 and Need for Speed Underground 2
It was great
I hated the original PC version of Sands of Time, it needed a super specific GPU the sequels didn't.
>What was PC gaming like in 2003?
Why the frick does my soundcard only work sometimes and what the frick is an IRQ interrupt request.
It was a bit like that.
That's the 90's, which is still embarrassing that it took so long for PCs to catch up with PnP.
By the early 2000's, everything was PnP.
It was pretty great. You did have to have pretty up to date hardware to play the newer games though.
It was Morrowind time. It was Deus Ex time. CRPG galore. Max Payne. Soon Fear, Oblivion, and Stalker was coming.
I had an Athlon XP with a Radeon 9800 pro in 2003. I had built my self. The worst thing about it was the Soyo motherboard I picked because it got capacitor plague pretty early and I was too dumb to just fix the caps back then. Wish I could ever find that motherboard. It's actaully worth a good bit of money if I could find it and get the caps replaced.
In that regard, I'm glad hardware now lasts long, the 00's technological growth was so quick in just 2 or 3 years your hardware became outdated.
My 1.5 GHz single core P4 from '05 running XP with 4Gb RAM was hopelessly obsolete by '09. Couldn't even decently browse the Internet (thanks Flash and Firefox RAM leak). The Win7 PC I bought in 2010 (I7 quad core high end office PC) for Starcraft 2 still can go on the internet provided the video card in it is decent. Hell, it could play Call of the Wild with almost everything at High.
I was playing Desert Combat at that time. I will never forget the broken yet hilarious shit that mod had. It was cobbled together on hopes and dreams yet it still worked.
>be Opposition on El Alamein
>steal AC-130 from Coalition base
>AC-130 has a spawn point built into the aircraft
>spawn point is set to Coalition regardless of the pilot's team
>friendly fire is off
>fly circles around Opposition base to bait Coalition forces to spawn inside the AC-130
>friendly Opposition fighter jet follows me around
>Opposition fighter mows down Coalition soldiers with nose gun as soon as they've spawned
>much rage in chat
Another:
>enter Scud truck in Opposition base as Opposition on battle of 73 easting
>aim at a very specific point in the skybox
>fire
>the missile lands in Coalition base
>rake up massive kills
Back then, it was a lot of envying rich Linux users with their Intel processors that broke the 3GHz barrier and nVidia advancements in graphics. I was stuck with the poverty AMD Athlon XP option and their "2600+" moniker naming scheme to seem like they were keeping up yet in reality it was just 2GHz. Saved up enough to get a used GeForce3 (Hercules brand for that sweet blue PCB+heatsinks) to get a taste of what Linux users were enjoying to replace a rapidly aging Voodoo 5500 and while the GeForce4 was already out I was still comforted the 3 was still better than the MX line of GeForce4 cards but still behind their flagship Ti line. As for gaming, It was a lot of Ragnarok Online which was just amazing playing and communicating with all those players from around the world. Meeting up with friends and finding new ones to party up or simply chat within the game was quite the feel. Nihon falcom and Illusion were releasing their iconic games. Sharing all sorts of mp3 music, games, apps, scanned doujinshi, etc. via WinMX was a great portal to discovery. PC gaming was beautiful.
>envying rich Linux users
>in the early 2000s
Why
Don't get me wrong, I was a heavy Linux user back in the early 2000s and it was where I taught myself how to program. But back then wine barely worked, dial-up and wifi were unusable for most people, and you were lucky if you could get your GPU to do better than base VESA modes.
Oh yeah, early Linux support for 3D GPU functions sucked massive amounts of ass.
Not true, there were Linux versions of some of my most favorite games. See the requirements on the lower left of Q3A, it supports 3D acceleration on kernel 2.2.x and the game pushed some of the most gorgeous graphics of the time.
Programming required math well beyond my capabilities. I wouldn't hate such capable people because without their amazing contributions, we wouldn't have the amazing technology for games we have now.
Yeah, I did get a lot of cool stuff via WinMX in those days but then they moved onto Winny which I was unable to logon to. I am so grateful for the filesharing as I was unable to afford any of the stuff.
Winny and Share required open ports, many people failed to set this up on their router or their ISP blocked them.
Doesn't matter anymore because both networks are ghost towns these days.
Skill issue
You were a proto-troony type of gamer and I absolutely loathed people like you.
Feel better soon.
>the guy sperging in the halo thread is also marbletroony
makes a ton of sense honestly
Did you trade with the japanese on winmx?
People who leeched their shit and kept it safe are my heroes. There are so many files that were only shared during that era that would have been completely lost now that japan has curbstomped piracy so hard japanese people don't share anything at all. You can only wonder if some obscure thing you're looking for was once available and now it's only on some japanese dude's old hard drive.
There were so many MMOs that had great communities.
People you really bonded with over adventure.
It was kind of magical really.
I was mainly playing flash games at the time from Newgrounds, Miniclip, and ArmorGames. When I wasn't playing that I was playing point and click games like Riven and Starship Titanic, and shooters like Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament.
Idk I had a GameCube, PS2 and Sega Genesis.
I had a black Dell with LCD monitor in 2003.
Better question: what were you like in 2003?
rate my setup
>DirecTV cable box
This is peak early 2000s, with the corner desk/hutch, it's perfect. I had a similar set up. Though, the TV is smol. No judgment, though... not everyone has big tvs.
n e v e r o b s o l e t e
early january 2000 out of 10, so really good.
>wooden chair
makes my ass hurt just by looking at it
What's playing on the TV I can't make it out because of the flash.
Nevermind I see it now, it's SpongeBob, 10/10 set up.
Not bad.
I had that mousepad
Just frankenstein'd a rig and I'm installing Win98 on it right now. Should be pretty decent, just unfortunate I don't have a CRT monitor. 4:3 LCD will have to do.
shiiiet just realized it was that awkward time period where half of the graphics cards were AGP and the other were PCI...
Were anywhere near half the cards AGP? I remember there being a lot more poorgays.
I dunno how things were globally but, in East Yuropoor, by 2003 a lot of cards were AGP. My GF4MX440 was AGP, even though the guy I bought it from specifically dabbled in cheap shit for poorgays (and eventually got busted for running a stolen PC chop shop).
AGP was already fading in terms of relevancy by 2003. The first PCIe cards arrived in 2004 and AGP support was quickly demoted to bridge chips. Though AMD technically supported it all the way until mid-2009 and the HD 4670.
In the mid-00s there were still enough AGP cards out in the wild that motherboard producers offered semi-compatible ports on boards lacking native hardware AGP support (stuff like ECS's AGP-Express, or Asrock's AGI). I remember seeing an ad for a such a motherboard in a leaflet I got with my Elitegroup poorgay-version mobo.
Would make sense there'd be more AGP cards in a stolen PC chop. Like how a car chop shop probably wouldn't have been chock full of stock Kia radio cassette players.
Yes, it really was only a few years where AGP cards were the superior option.
The best time in gaming.
>Quake 3
>StarCraft
>Diablo 2
>Command and Conquer Renegade
>fricking Ragnarok Online at its peak
Why is the PC port of Halo CE criticized so much? I get that it had a few missing visual effects, but it still looked 99% the same and had better framerate, resolution, controls and added real online MP and mod support. I don't remember anyone hating it back in the day, now it always gets called "the broken Gearbox port". I feel like it has to be hipsters hating on because of muh Randy Pitchford. It was a solid effort, they even released patches and updates for 10+ years and with chimera mod it is inarguably the best version of the game.
It also added weapons and vehicles to multiplayer, as well as 6 new maps. The inclusion of Death Island alone make it the better version.
>I get that it had a few missing visual effects
Only on older cards.
Good but mostly because I have not yet irrevocably destroyed my life, or rather, I haven't yet realised the slippery slope I was treading that would lead me with absolute certainty to my current predicament.
Actually kind of impressive how fast a clean install of Windows 98 boots given the hardware. 32 seconds cold boot.
Even more impressive if you consider the dog slow hard drives at the time. The bloat of today's OS that boot slow on a super fast SSD is disgusting.
My modern Windows 11 install boots in like 4 seconds.
*wakes from sleep
No, literally boots. Not anon but my 10 does the same.
But
was talking about specific hardware, probably retro hardware.
>No, literally boots
Unless you specifically went into the old control panel and turned off Fast Startup, your Windows 10/11 machine is simply waking from hibernation even on a "fresh" boot.
or do:
>REG ADD "HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerPower" /V HiberbootEnabled /T REG_dWORD /D 0 /F
Mine takes 8 and a half seconds from power button to desktop with Fast Startup off. Windows 10 Enterprise.
your older shitpost is still alive. stop killing other threads for this shit.
>get Dell OptiPlex shitbox
>use hackermans skills to find free dialup because poor
>get NSFU PC ver at EB
>Install
>runs at 8fps
Ah, free dial-up, how I remember thee...
Thing is, most of those free connections were throttled to something like 33.6 kbps, so you had absolutely shit speed, despite your "blazing fast" V92 56kbps modem.
PC gaming for me in 2003
i now remember making shitty custom notification sounds for this and downloading roms from sites with popup ads for hentai galleries
good times
There were other games out there besides Warcrafrt 3 but let's be real, they didn't matter by comparison.
Got my first PC around that very time. Pentium 4 2.4ghz, 512mb of RAM and nvidia FX5600. The GPU came with a bundle of Ghost Recon 1, Duke Nukem Manhattan Project and Morrowind.
MOH Allied Assault, Counter Strike 1.3 with bots, Wolfenstein, Call of Duty 1, Tactical Ops, GTA Vice City is what I remember the most from those few initial months
>shoot barrel
>it explodes
>"cool"
>never actually use it to kill enemies
I've done that to kill enemies since Doom. It's satisfying to see a bunch of enemies gib around the barrel from splash damage.
A frick load of RTS gaming.
In 2003, I was playing RuneScape classic and a bunch of flash games on my retail store bought Presario Compaq running Windows 98SE. Other than that I was still playing some older games that was bought for me along with a stack of old DOS games that I had got from some old guy in the mid 90s. Used to always obsess over MegaRace and 3D Dinosaur Adventure.
stickdeath.com
chaos arena
stick arena
Bush shoot out
bloonz tower defense
blockhead game
treehouse friends
gamespot animations
looking up cheats on gamewinners
playing flags on MSN messenger
nudging people's chat windows
moving fish theme
setting emoticons for words
;_;
people's chat windows
>installing that one MSN addon that would remove nudge cooldown and spamming people
yep, good times
You had to not be a drooling moron and able to into TCP/IP.
It was better back then.
it was shit and soulless just like PC gaming is today