What was PC gaming like in the 90s and early 2000s? Were PC ports really infamously bad?

What was PC gaming like in the 90s and early 2000s? Were PC ports really infamously bad?

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They were dog shit. You needed a top of the line rig to play ports of PS2 games, and you'd still have broken graphics and constant crashing. Plenty of games had few video settings to speak of, so you couldn't even optimise it yourself. Ports like Halo and GTA were salvaged only by their amazing modding communities.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      https://i.imgur.com/f0qplqr.jpg

      What was PC gaming like in the 90s and early 2000s? Were PC ports really infamously bad?

      Oh, and on Windows 9X, getting an exception on any programme would abruptly crash your PC when you closed the error message. To make matters worse, crashes could corrupt your Windows install. Windows XP literally changed the world

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >To make matters worse, crashes could corrupt your Windows install.
        "could"? In almost 25 years this did not happen to me even once.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >play ports of PS2 games
      or you just didn't
      pc games were their own thing and they were awesome

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Yes. And honestly, it wasn't an either/or situation with any families I knew. People usually had a family computer that could run CD ROM games and also one of the contemporary consoles. Rich kids had a computer and both competing consoles. Just my experience.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Ports from PC to console were often pretty damn bad as well.

      Usually you waited 1-2 years to see a game that did create on consoles being released on pc.

      Even RE2 came out a year later after it was released on PS.

      There were very few 'good' games on PC.

      >There were very few 'good' games on PC.
      If you mean ports, maybe.

      For the average person it kinda sucked bc you couldn’t afford the hardware you needed to run anything. I remember trying to save up for a Pentium with a 486 processor and a few hundred MEGABYTES of RAM. It cost $1500 - $2000 (USD)

      Do you mean Intel? Because Pentium was the processor, and much more powerful than any 486.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        no i dont thats just your assumptions, few good games, there was just no money to be made on pc cause piracy
        so anyone that had talent did console games that were rarely ported to pc

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Maybe we had a 486 and I was trying to upgrade to a Pentium. I just remember our computer had an EGA monitor and my dad bought it from his work for $1. It was 25+ years ago, I’ve forgotten a lot of the details.

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    90s and early 2000s can't be grouped together. Radically different times for PC gaming.
    Things moved really rapidly back then.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >90s and early 2000s can't be grouped together. Radically different times for PC gaming.
      >Things moved really rapidly back then.

      This, you can't even group the entire 90s together. Shit got outdated stupidly fast. I am not joking, a top-of-the-line PC I got in mid-90s went from being able to run anything at the highest settings to no longer meeting the minimum requirements for anything in the span of a year.

      As for what it was like, mid-90s had some wild games. On top of the AAAs which usually was a shitty port of a console game, there was shelves of smaller never heard of games that many times were experimental. The 90s was also the time of gross-out humor and Nickelodeon's peak so many devs were going all over the place in their game design. Even many of the "educational" games had fun aspects to them.

      DOS based games could be a mess to get working, especially later ones that used mouse, sound, cds, or even 3D acceleration. They were a lot easier to use if they had a native Windows version.

      It usually sucked to get a PC port of a console game, if it even was a real attempt at a port and not a horrible re-creation it was usually a poorer experience compared to the console, just listen to the music of the PC version of Megaman X. In Windows 95 a BSOD didn't even mean you had to reboot, many of them were recoverable since it would BSOD on the slightest thing, even trying to eject a CD while it had "pending locks" (e.g. the software saying "Wait! Don't let the user eject it!") would cause it.

      The 00s was far more focus on 3D, but the early 00s was a mess of 3D hardware becoming standard in PCs and drivers being a mess with a system loaded with all sorts of expansion cards. A lot of the games were ports, and very hit-or-miss. Many other more original 3D PC games could be anywhere from great, to interesting yet repetitive or hard to control, to just plain boring with 3D utterly booming but many standards of how to design a 3D game not in place yet.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Yep, this anon was actually there. Certified non-zoomer.

        > DOS based games could be a mess to get working, especially later ones that used mouse, sound, cds, or even 3D acceleration. They were a lot easier to use if they had a native Windows version
        You have rustled me with me this. So many frustrating memories trying to make different things work together on DOS, it was like a psyop to teach you about computers with no fun gaming at the end of the tunnel, sometimes.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          My memories were about messing with .cfg flies to try and make DOS games work on Windows 98. To this day I have an irrational hatred for Ultima VIII due to the hours spent trying to tweak it so that it worked with sound. Much simpler when it became a bit easier to find the information online rather than ring up tech support. That said, that learning makes it far easier now to try and mess with things when emulating, which is a plus.

          Also up there was trying to calibrate my Sidewinder 3D Pro to work with Wing Commander III. It just did not like it.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >You have rustled me with me this. So many frustrating memories trying to make different things work together on DOS, it was like a psyop to teach you about computers with no fun gaming at the end of the tunnel, sometimes.

          I remember when I had created several different bootdisks for different DOS games that could only use the 640K of base memory in my 8MB Win95 system that all would load just enough devices and drivers and in specific parts of low/high memory so all the supported hardware would work while still having just barely enough base memory free to run the game. As I recall, I think the worst one was The Incredible Machine since it needed Sound, CD, and Mouse drivers while only being able to see the base 640K of RAM and needing almost all of it free. It's not like was that knowledgeable about computers at the time or could Google (Or even Yahoo or Metacrawl) how to properly setup such a disk, I learned almost all of it by accident over time to manage to stumble my way through creating that set.

          Funny thing is, I got that game long after I had the floppy version of The Incredible Toon Machine and 100%ed it, even though Toon Machine was like, the 3rd game in the series and The Incredible Machine was the first.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Personally PC gaming was amazing up until the Pentium 4 came out then things kinda went downhill hard. Sure there were always bad ports but I dont remember many of them being comparibly bad until things like spiderman and the matrix came out

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Most PC games in the 90s weren't ports. You'd just play PC games on your PC. You probably couldn't get those games on other platforms and you probably didn't see PC games on other platforms.

    Exceptions to the rule are usually obviously irrelevant cases like Myst being ported to systems like the DS like a decade after it came to Windows.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      This is why modern pc gaming is not true pc games to me. Yes, there are pc exclusives, but they are mostly console genres. PC gaming use to mean stuff designed to make sense running on a computer, genres and control options very different then console. Yeah you got ports occasionally on both of the other, but pc had a strong identity of "you like these types of games? This is the platform for them."

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        100% this, if you owned a PC for gaming in the 90's to early -mid 00's, it was probably for playing games like sim City, RCT, dungeo keeper, c&c, the Sims, doom, quake, half-life, and so on. The boundary between PC and everything else was fairly clear, and most popular PC games only made sense with a mouse.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Age of Empires
          Age of Empires II
          Diablo
          Diablo II
          Dungeon Siege
          The Sims
          Along with a lot of RPGs

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        For sure. It's very different now, and older PC gamers are more a minority group. It's still there though. Games like StarSector are still very much PC games.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Myst came out on 3DO, Saturn, and Jaguar the next year though, and PSX the year after that.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Nobody played PC ports unless it is GTA. There were a lot of original games, mostly in the strategy and shooter genres.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Metal Gear Solid 2 port was pretty popular.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Nobody played PC ports unless it is GTA.
      Yeah. I remember them being generally neglected unless they were ports of very notable games of exceptional quality (rare occurence).
      Final Fantasy VII, for example, had a lukewarm reception since it was a port from an aging PS1 and it was mostly compared to WRPGs on the grounds of their design language (unfavorably, of course; but i am talking about publications in my country). MGS on PC went almost unnoticed because it was a port of two years old game with controls unoptimized for KBM, plus Codename 47 dropped in a month. Multiplatform titles of note like NFS up to PU were still different games using same assets, not direct ports. And so on.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I'm actually at a loss to think of a single console game in the 90s that anybody much played on PC. I suppose a lot of that has to do with the unfortunate truth that most good console games in the 90s were unported first party games or were actually arcade games later ported to console, so they don't count as console to PC ports.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      depends on if you count UltraHLE or not.

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Virtual On played surprisingly well, flawless actually, I don't recall any kind of lag or slowdown when playing it on Win 95. Most games played horribly though, I had the PS1 Frogger port which ran like shit in the later levels.

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    PC ports were terrible until 2010. Even early 360 ports has issues.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I think back then, games were more often made for PC first, and then ported to consoles.
    It should've stayed that way.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >I think back then, games were more often made for PC first, and then ported to consoles.
      >It should've stayed that way.

      Aren't consoles nowadays built with x86 or off the shelf CPUs unlike before when they were made specifically for the console and with their own architecture?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Aren't consoles nowadays built with x86 or off the shelf CPUs unlike before when they were made specifically for the console and with their own architecture?

        The original Xbox, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PS4, and PS5 are all x86 based, yes. IIRC the original Xbox was specifically based on a Pentium 3 CPU. Ironically the Xbox 360 is the only Xbox system that did not have an x86 CPU.

        Switch however is ARM, which I guess is technically still a modern and standard structure, but obviously not x86. There are ARM based PCs and laptops out there though.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          > Ironically the Xbox 360 is the only Xbox system that did not have an x86 CPU
          There is nothing ironic about that, Alanis.

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >posting the exact same thread on both Ganker and /vr/

    [...]

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Why do people do this? Why even ask Ganker about fricking 90s and early 2000s gaming? Have they even played anything that came out before GTA 4?

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Had the FF7 port and played on Windows 95. Solid port other than the blurry backgrounds blown up to 800x600. Also all the music was in .midi format so it sounded nothing like the ps1 game, and sounded different depending on your sound card.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Had the FF7 port and played on Windows 95. Solid port other than the blurry backgrounds blown up to 800x600. Also all the music was in .midi format so it sounded nothing like the ps1 game, and sounded different depending on your sound card.

      https://7thheaven.rocks/

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Oh Gee wiz I'll just download a 200mb file on fricking dial up in 1998! Thanks friendo!
        Did 7th Heaven even exist back then?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I.... used to download Dreamcast games all the time on 56K dialup... was able to get 2-3 games a week at those speeds depending on the size of the game. Was on it 24/7 downloading, had a second line for actual calls since every phone company back then was advertising getting a second line for cheap with everyone starting to sign up for internet access.

          Damn, I remember downloading the intro to FF8 on my old 14K dialup, took I think half an hour, which felt like an eternity for me in my younger ages back then. The game wasn't out yet I remember thinking that intro was the most amazing looking shit ever and played it endlessly. Considering I could download around 1 Meg per 5 minutes on that 14K, I can't imagine the shit resolution and bitrate it must have actually been, especially with late 90s era video codecs.

          At least in the second half of the 90s PC games were perceived as more mature and serious than console games. Every new Lucas Arts game on PC, whatever the genre was, was expected by gaming magazines like the second coming of Christ, and honestly for good reasons. Games like Tie Fighter or Monkey Island would not "work" on a console, even if they could technically.
          Point and click adventures, RTS, FPS (at the time they were known as Doom clones) were all the rage back then.
          Fightans, platformers and such were scarce and could not compete with the quality seen on consoles.

          >Games like Tie Fighter or Monkey Island would not "work" on a console, even if they could technically.
          There were plenty of point-and-clicks ported to consoles actually. I recall my friend having King's Quest 5 on his NES. Also there was point-and-clicks that were console-exclusive, like Nightshade on NES.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            I think I actually still have that exact same intro to FF8 video which I downloaded in 1998. Pretty sure it’s .AVI or something.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      pc port music sounds best with a yamaha XG card if i remember correct

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      It really sucked that PC users didn't get to hear One Winged Angel with lyrics. I remember being shocked with how shoddy the Steam re-release of FF7 on PC was, they STILL included the MiDi-only music at first! Though they thankfully were not stupid enough to leave it at that and eventually had an update to put OGG versions of the PS1 music in the game in place of the MiDi track.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Assuming some PC users didn't have a PlayStation or a friend with one with the game.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Heh, I first played FFVII on PC back then, though I had already heard OWA by that point and thought it was the coolest shit ever (well, next to Dancing Mad), but I thought the music overall sounded quite alright. Then I got to Safer Sephiroth, and I almost laughed at how shit that was. Ended up getting a PSOne the year after and ended up getting FFVII there as well just to get the proper experience.

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >PC ports really infamously bad?
    wait, they aren't now?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      You can change the resolution and link your gamepad almost to any game now, also despite Nvidia shilling "technologies" you can run the game on other hardware. It wasn't a thing during the 90s-00s

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      unlike console games they can be fixed/made better, even to perfection
      >inb4 autistic console screeching

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >console Black folk making up exagerrated statements: The Thread

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The biggest issue was that there were no standardized game controllers for PC's. No Xbox controllers, no Dualshocks, no Bluetooth and no USB even. Instead you got these archaic gamepads with the most stupid button layouts and designs that would plug into a DA-15 port, hopefully somewhere on your back IO, and even then it would take a miracle for the thing to work properly.

    When games were ported from console to PC, they would mostly be played with keyboard and mouse, which the games weren't designed for. It was functional in a sense though and PC gamers were pretty used to it.

  15. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Were PC ports really infamously bad?

    From my experience PC versions were usually superior

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I don't consider having missing/broken effects that the console version had a superior option.

      >inb4 higher resolutions
      That's just a coping mechanism cuz you blew big bucks on a GPU that's leagues higher than the console just to meet the minimum requirements cuz PC devs don't understand the word "optimization".

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        > having missing/broken effect
        overexegerrated a few games indeed have these issues but people like yourself make it seem like theres a huge amount of games that have it which is simply not true

  16. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >What was PC gaming like in the 90s and early 2000s?
    half life, cs, quake, max payne , gta 3
    >Were PC ports really infamously bad?
    no

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      All gay ass games

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        what were the manly ones then u facking gayet? hah

  17. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Usually you waited 1-2 years to see a game that did create on consoles being released on pc.

    Even RE2 came out a year later after it was released on PS.

    There were very few 'good' games on PC.

  18. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    pc gaming in the 90s and early 00 where great. Ports from consoles where nothing important just a bonus

  19. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Were PC ports really infamously bad?
    early 2000s ports from PS2 were shit, but few played them. I guess it had to do with PS2's architecture.

  20. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    For the average person it kinda sucked bc you couldn’t afford the hardware you needed to run anything. I remember trying to save up for a Pentium with a 486 processor and a few hundred MEGABYTES of RAM. It cost $1500 - $2000 (USD)

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Honestly there's only about three points I can think of that gave me trouble during the very late 90s into the early 00s, having a non-MMX Pentium in an older PC, oddball early video card issues (Intel 740 and an ATI Rage Pro) and then later falling for the nVidia FX series card right when DirectX 9 took off. The i740 wasn't too bad but that Rage Pro was such a c**t of a card, it couldn't run anything right at all, it honestly made the FX card not so bad since we were able to go back and play a lot of pre DX9 shit that rendered bizarre as frick on the RP or at odd resolutions

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Yeah I never had any kind of graphics card back then. But I was a young kid with no job except sometimes my mom would give me a few bucks to mow the lawn and stuff.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >I remember trying to save up for a Pentium with a 486 processor and a few hundred MEGABYTES of RAM. It cost $1500 - $2000 (USD)

      That makes no sense. Pentium and 486 were different classes of Intel processors, the Pentium being what replaced the 486. That would be like saying you wanted to save up for an "I7-12700K with a I7-13700K Processor"

      Also a few hundred megs of RAM? That is an ABSURD amount for the original Pentium. I highly doubt there were any consumer boards that could support even 128MB for the Pentium 1 back then, much less several hundred. 8 Megs of RAM was considered mid/high end for the Pentium 1 originally, 16MB later. It wasn't until the Pentium 3 that 128MB was becoming a more standard amount to have, and that was still not a budget amount. There is no way if the 486 was still relevant that you were looking at several hundred megs of RAM. The largest harddrives at the time were 1-2GB, putting several hundred megs of RAM in a system from back then is like the equivalent of having 512GB-1TB of RAM in your home PC today.

      Maybe if you didn't have any computer knowledge

      >Using PC version of MMX as an example of good PC games
      You know that MMX is one of the more infamous examples of bad PC ports right?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >bad MMX port
        Not him, but says who? Modern oppion? It was a fine version for the era that sold well and the only changes would be noticeable if you played both versions and really were not that big of a deal. It even had a "turbo" option to make it run faster which was neat to dick with. Its a far different standard then actually infamous pc versions like the Street Fighters.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Not him, but says who? Modern oppion?

          No, just the opinion of anyone who played it and had also played the SNES version, including me back then. I thought the game was glitched or corrupted or something when I heard the cacophony of "music".

          Someone already posted a comparison video, how can you listen to that ear-rape and say it's a fine port? It's not just bad, it's not just a downgrade like the soundtrack of PC FF7 was, it's so horrific it might as well just be randomly generated notes. The sprites are all fricked too. Stretched and have a washed-out look to them, making them contrast far heavier with the background and giving them an appearance of not even belonging there when viewed on a CRT.

          Is it as bad a Megman 1 for DOS? Obviously not, that wasn't even a port, that was an abomination to all that is gaming. But it's up there as one of the more infamously bad PC ports back then. A modern "bad" port isn't even close to what a bad port back then was like, now a port is considered bad if it has few configuration options, is locked at 30 FPS, and basically is exactly like the console version and didn't add configuration features for the PC version. But the truly bad PC ports were back from the 80s to mid 00s.

          That's not to say there weren't good ports too, but when they were bad, they were REALLY bad. Destruction Derby for example was a pretty decent port to DOS:

          Rollcage wasn't bad either:

          Come to think about it, both of those were racing games by Psygnosis. I recall liking many of Psygnosis's PC games back in the day.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Idk man, i had snes version before pc and for the era, it was a fine alternative if you didn't have a snes. You sure you were not using some different soundfont/sound card back when you played it? Not saying its the same quality, but id hardly classify the music in ear rape territory, all the tunes were still there and audible. Gameplay wise i dont remember any major alterations besides the lack of the mechs which really were not that big of a deal. Obviously the snes version is supperior, but for the era, few pc versions, port or not, of home console originated games played as closely as that. Literally first time ive ever heard anyone shit outright on it as being bad.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >you sure you were not using some different soundfont/sound card back when you played it? Not saying its the same quality, but id hardly classify the music in ear rape territory, all the tunes were still there and audible.

              The music sounds terrible no matter what midi device you use, it's off key and the percussions are nonexistent. It like they just slapped the midi data from the snes version without any regard to how it'll sound on other hardware, in fact it's probably what they did.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Not that crazy gibberish anon but by the end of its life this old beast of mine had 128MB in it and it was bought sometime in late 96, 200Mhz Pentium PC, started with 32MB. I eventually put an MMX capable processor in it to watch all the porn getting encoded in newfangled formats that would choke the original.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >this old beast of mine had 128MB in it and it was bought sometime in late 96

          You somehow got Windows 98 in 1996?

          Idk man, i had snes version before pc and for the era, it was a fine alternative if you didn't have a snes. You sure you were not using some different soundfont/sound card back when you played it? Not saying its the same quality, but id hardly classify the music in ear rape territory, all the tunes were still there and audible. Gameplay wise i dont remember any major alterations besides the lack of the mechs which really were not that big of a deal. Obviously the snes version is supperior, but for the era, few pc versions, port or not, of home console originated games played as closely as that. Literally first time ive ever heard anyone shit outright on it as being bad.

          >You sure you were not using some different soundfont/sound card back when you played it?

          Like I said, someone posted a comparison video. Every other game on my system had the sound play fine, and every system I have seen it played on whether it's real hardware, a VM, or emulated sounds like ass. It's well known how horrible the PC version of MMX sounds, and the weird sprites.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            That's not my specific PC and no, it came with 95 out of the box. Problem is the thing ran unstable as frick under 95 because USB support was a crapshoot and which didn't help because that big dumb LCD panel on the monitor was USB. It acted like combination quick-launch bar/control panel/IR receiver for all the media center apps and added TV tuner card. Notice it's dark, the fricking thing never had 98 compatible drivers.

            Goddamn, I remember when prebuilts had soul. Say what you will about the price and the quality of components, but aesthetically they seemed to actually try to stand out and often had neat shit. I remember the HP we got back in 1998 had a photo scanner drive. Almost never used it, but it was pretty fricking wild to have such a thing.

            The monitor's speakers were surprisingly decent for built-ins and it also sported an underslung subwoofer. It also used this kind of weird folding aluminum bar to act as a "swivel" to adjust the viewing angle. It was nice but died fast, within about 3-4 years

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Goddamn, I remember when prebuilts had soul. Say what you will about the price and the quality of components, but aesthetically they seemed to actually try to stand out and often had neat shit. I remember the HP we got back in 1998 had a photo scanner drive. Almost never used it, but it was pretty fricking wild to have such a thing.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        good thing emulators where already a thing by the time i found that port, was just a shoddy oddity and nothing more

  21. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It was a real crapshoot. Sometimes you'd get lucky and get a game that was good and would also work on your computer no problem. But a lot of games either didn't work, were a pain to get to work, or worked but they just sucked dick.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Maybe if you didn't have any computer knowledge

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Mega Man X for MS-DOS
        >1 year late
        >fricked music
        >fricked speed
        It's a shit port.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      i remember playing a lot of games at like 5 frames a second, or would only get to play them for a few minutes before they'd crash. I tried to play a Sin demo on PC from a demo disk I think in like 1998 and it was running at like 2 frames a second and I played it for at least a few hours just trying to see how far I could get before it crashed which would happen every 10 minutes or so, if it even started. Then i'd just go back to playing doom or something instead

  22. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Ports were kinda shite but game purposedly developped for PC were great. Hardware, OS and input peripherals slowly standardizing gave devs an easier job as they no longer had to ask themselves what controls the player would end up using, hardware compatibility gradually stopped being too much of an issue. So you had some specifically PC games that were meant to really use PC controls and that opened quite a lot of room for new types of stuff that would be horrible to play with console controls.

  23. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Until Model 2 emulation, Virtua Fighter 2 on the PC was the best home port available. On my crappy 166 Mhz computer I could only get decent frame rates if I reduced the window size to a small fraction of the screen. At 800x600 desktop resolution

  24. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Generally speaking there was a clear distinction between consoles and PC gaming, with fairly different titles on each system.

    It wasn't profitable at the time for Devs to make games designed for (usually) one or two consoles with already massively different architecture work well on the huge variety of different hardware and drivers available for PCs in the early 90s and 00s.

    PCs tended to specialise more in FPSs, Strategy games (both turn based and real time), point and click adventures (which were not great fun on consoles until the Wii), longer form RPGs and Simulators of various sorts. Consoles tended to focus much more on racers, sports games, beat em ups, platformers (both 3D and 2D) and shorter form RPGs. What you get now, which is things being played fairly consistently across multiple platforms simply wasn't commonplace. Ports from consoles generally weren't that great, ports from PC to console were often even worse.

    There were of course some games that worked reasonably well on PC and Console, some that come to mind were:
    - the GTA series
    - The Tomb Raider series
    - Resident Evil 2 onwards

  25. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    At least in the second half of the 90s PC games were perceived as more mature and serious than console games. Every new Lucas Arts game on PC, whatever the genre was, was expected by gaming magazines like the second coming of Christ, and honestly for good reasons. Games like Tie Fighter or Monkey Island would not "work" on a console, even if they could technically.
    Point and click adventures, RTS, FPS (at the time they were known as Doom clones) were all the rage back then.
    Fightans, platformers and such were scarce and could not compete with the quality seen on consoles.

  26. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    PC gaming in the early 2000s was the best fricking thing ever. Imagine growing up on your brother's NES games, and then one day, you get a Win XP computer and you're playing Command & Conquer Renegade online with 64 other people, waging huge wars in giant battlefields. There was Diablo 2, Quake 3, some of the best games ever made, all released within the span of a few years. There was crazy stuff like Ragnarok Online; I'll never forget playing it for the first time and thinking "holy shit, I'm in a virtual world with thousands of other people" while exploring this game the size of a small country, making friends and crushing on girls and starting my own shop and fighting in guild wars; that stuff may seem pretty standard now, but at the time, it was unbelievable. All of this on top of the culture of the era: it would be a friday night and you'd go downstairs, make pizza pockets, wait for Trigun or Cowboy Bebop to come on Adult Swim, boot up StarCraft on the family PC, try to sneak a beer or some liquor from your dad or smoke a cigarette without being found out... it was just a simple, wonderful time to be alive. If there's any period in my life that I could return to, it would be that magical era.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      > All of this on top of the culture of the era: it would be a friday night and you'd go downstairs, make pizza pockets, wait for Trigun or Cowboy Bebop to come on Adult Swim, boot up StarCraft on the family PC, try to sneak a beer or some liquor from your dad or smoke a cigarette without being found out... it was just a simple, wonderful time to be alive. If there's any period in my life that I could return to, it would be that magical era
      Millennials like us are always going to be hung up on our adolescences, just like gen x is with their childhoods and boomers with college/their 20s. 2008 really shattered the world and the shockwave is still being felt. Zoomers are going to be so mad when they finally realize how much of their critical, formative years our feckless elders stole from them during Covid. It’s insane.

      My memories were about messing with .cfg flies to try and make DOS games work on Windows 98. To this day I have an irrational hatred for Ultima VIII due to the hours spent trying to tweak it so that it worked with sound. Much simpler when it became a bit easier to find the information online rather than ring up tech support. That said, that learning makes it far easier now to try and mess with things when emulating, which is a plus.

      Also up there was trying to calibrate my Sidewinder 3D Pro to work with Wing Commander III. It just did not like it.

      >You have rustled me with me this. So many frustrating memories trying to make different things work together on DOS, it was like a psyop to teach you about computers with no fun gaming at the end of the tunnel, sometimes.

      I remember when I had created several different bootdisks for different DOS games that could only use the 640K of base memory in my 8MB Win95 system that all would load just enough devices and drivers and in specific parts of low/high memory so all the supported hardware would work while still having just barely enough base memory free to run the game. As I recall, I think the worst one was The Incredible Machine since it needed Sound, CD, and Mouse drivers while only being able to see the base 640K of RAM and needing almost all of it free. It's not like was that knowledgeable about computers at the time or could Google (Or even Yahoo or Metacrawl) how to properly setup such a disk, I learned almost all of it by accident over time to manage to stumble my way through creating that set.

      Funny thing is, I got that game long after I had the floppy version of The Incredible Toon Machine and 100%ed it, even though Toon Machine was like, the 3rd game in the series and The Incredible Machine was the first.

      Situations like the ones you’re describing were some of the only times I felt relieved my family had a Mac in the 90s. I used to waste so much time over at friends’ houses just trying to get things to work like that. Of course, suffering cements friendships lol. Our own personal Vietnam.

      At least in the second half of the 90s PC games were perceived as more mature and serious than console games. Every new Lucas Arts game on PC, whatever the genre was, was expected by gaming magazines like the second coming of Christ, and honestly for good reasons. Games like Tie Fighter or Monkey Island would not "work" on a console, even if they could technically.
      Point and click adventures, RTS, FPS (at the time they were known as Doom clones) were all the rage back then.
      Fightans, platformers and such were scarce and could not compete with the quality seen on consoles.

      Yeah, lucasarts was the cream of 90s gaming. Almost everything they put out was a hit, and Star Wars was so popular back then. Indiana Jones titles were impressive as well.

      Early 2000s i use to find a bunch of pc games at dollar stores.

      Yes! There were so many great deals, especially at retailers that had no idea what they were even selling when it came to games. I remember picking up a few C&C games from a bargain bin at Staples in 1999. Half-Price Books used to have amazing deals, too.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      That's not WinXP

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Royale Noir my Neegrumps

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        yes it is moron, it's called a theme.

  27. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    That was my time with PC gaming. Just anything VGA was what got me interested. While the ports may not have been great, they were inexpensive, but the real stars were the exclusives. The exclusives were experiences which really took advantage of the platform.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Never happen here. Had to go to Walmart/K-Mart, smaller department stores, or an entertainment store in my town.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Early 2000s i use to find a bunch of pc games at dollar stores.

        Yeah, my village/town's central meeting place is the Walmart these days. Back then 7-elevens and Kroger even had PC games. While there were a lot of puzzle and card games, they had some really high production value artistic games too. They would have them at Dollar stores and Five Below too.

        assuming this is your pic, you have great handwriting. What exclusives do you recommend the most?

        Thank you. That's the thing, back then there were games specifically designed for the common control methods of PC games that leveraged mouse+keyboard controls like FPS, RTS, and strategy. There were even some that utilized more special controls like flight sticks. Sometimes even RPGs has the space/resolution to have more text to elaborate and characterize the world and is enhanced by being on the PC. While the games could be adapted to the common controller, I feel some games really stood out in the PC space that utilized the advantages of being on the PC platform.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Early 2000s i use to find a bunch of pc games at dollar stores.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      assuming this is your pic, you have great handwriting. What exclusives do you recommend the most?

  28. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    playing diablo 2 in native resolution on a crt monitor just hits different

  29. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    for some reason Resident Evil 1 and 2 received excellent ports

  30. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    When a game was released on 6th and 7th gen consoles the PC port was usually the 6th gen version so more toasters had a chance to run them.

  31. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Console to pc ports sucked, most devs outside of 2 or 3 didn't bother because "pc = piracy", entire franchises and genres withheld from pc entirely (unless you wanted to deal with shovelware). It really was just id, Valve, and epic (until gears).

  32. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >What was PC gaming like in the 90s and early 2000s?
    It was great. I miss it.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      JEsus Christ anon please tone down the nostalgia. I nearly tried to climb into my laptop's screen.

  33. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    This is my entire 00s gaming career that I can remember playing for more than an hour:

    >Counter Stike
    >Sims > Sims 2
    >Age of Empires > Age of Kings
    >Starcraft > Brood Wars
    >Warcraft 3 > Frozen Throne
    >World of Warcraft

    Feels like nothing, but man it was an era of pretty heavy competitive online play. After WoW hit that was the new era.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >>Sims > Sims 2
      >>Age of Empires > Age of Kings

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      AoE, SC, and WC3 were the core of my 2000s gaming experience. Also, WC3 is definitely better than TFT, and yeah, AoE always hit me better than AoK, though I admit to playing the Star Wars: GB port more than AoK.

      Also
      >Age of Mythology
      >SW: Rebellion
      >MOO2
      >Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Master of Orion 2 and Diablo 1 were my jam. We were pretty poor so all my PC stuff was outdated and free hand me downs from people my parents knew. So around 97 thu 99 I was running a 486 dx4 with windows 95.

  34. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Depends on the company and the era. There were many lazy PC ports that barely ran well, and more than a few that were done by 3rd party devs hired to port the game. Then there were ports that were surprisingly respectable, or even on par with the originals. Sega could be hit and miss. They ported a few of their Genesis titles to early Windows and were about on par with the originals, they also ported a few Saturn titles over to Win9x that are extremely finicky about exactly which version of DirectX they will work with.

  35. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    i miss the girls
    damn i miss messing around with my classmates

  36. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Installers had access to the entire system and DLLs had no standard versioning system. Welcome to DLL Hell, where installing one program could literally break every other program with no way to diagnose it and often times the best solution just to reinstall the operating system, and then all your programs, and hope that you figure out an order that doesn't break anything.
    Then you have 3d cards that only do one API properly (at best) so you don't even know what games are compatible, and that's on top of getting good drivers, which is a pain because your only hope is, at best, a 56k modem, and at worst a phone call asking your system builder to send you a driver disk, which they won't, because the tech support monkey is hell bent on being moronic.
    But you put up with it, because at least it wasn't DOS.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >getting good drivers, which is a pain because your only hope is, at best, a 56k modem
      It wasn't like today with bloated driver packages clocking in at the gigabyte range, back then they typically weighed in at most around 10~20MB, mind you it still would've been painful to download via dial-up.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Just about everything was painful to download at that speed back in the day
        I remember using kazzaa on 56k. damn that was rough. got some cannibal corpse songs though lol

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        less than that in the 90s
        Voodoo2 9x drivers: 2mb
        nvidia detonator 3.68: 1.5mb

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        That's true. The benefit of distribution being difficult was a greater incentive not to wiener it up in the first place.

        Just about everything was painful to download at that speed back in the day
        I remember using kazzaa on 56k. damn that was rough. got some cannibal corpse songs though lol

        It still amazes me that I can download something a couple of megabytes practically instantly. I remember having to plan out downloads because my ISP only let you connect for an hour at a time. God bless GoZilla.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >It still amazes me that I can download something a couple of megabytes practically instantly
          I moved over to fibre a couple of months ago. The time it takes to download a gigabyte's worth of garbage is staggering. I would have felt on top of the world as a teenager with these absolutely unnecessarily badass speeds.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >around 10~20MB, mind you it still would've been painful to download via dial-up.
        I remember downloading the full DJGPP with Allegro library and RHIDE ide for game dev on 56k.. took like several weeks

  37. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Ports were complete shit and barely worked as intended, but it didn't matter because we had actual PC games made for PCs with mouse and keyboard back then, and not just diluted console garbage. A gamepad was an optional peripheral for a few games, not a necessity (and PC gamepads sucked ass anyway.)

  38. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    For poor kids who couldn't afford a Nintendo.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      More like rich or hobbyist nerd dads who had a cool machine to play games on.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Nintendo was always the premium option

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I remember playing C&C and Warcraft 2 multiplayer over null-modem while console lamers were gobbling up awful shit like Superman 64.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Ah, the good old days of playing Diablo 1 on a dial-up connection with friends. You had to call their homes to set the game up.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Consoles in general were the inexpensive way to game. A lot of people didn't own PCs in the 90s and if they did, they were often outdated as technology was moving much more rapidly at the time. PCs and especially laptops were also more expensive then they are today.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >implying you could get a PC reasonably powerful enough to game for less than the cost of a nintendo

  39. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    QuakeSpy/GameSpy were huge thanks to Quakeworld. Lots of cool mod communities. All servers were browsable and static. IRC and message boards were huge. Take me back.

  40. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Very surprised how no one mentions flash games. For me, it was Maple Story, Xgen Studios and Newgrounds.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I spent countless hours watching animations on Newgrounds, but I rarely checked the flash games section. The reasoning being that I had better stuff to play on PC (even before making my first steam account in 2009)

      The one I remember playing the most is that Hallowen point and click adventure game they released on I-Mockery:

      http://www.i-mockery.com/minimocks/trickortreat-adventure-quest/default.php

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Newgrounds and Cartoon Network had great games back then with Adobe Shockwave and Flash. There were also a ton of Java based games too.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Hey, Conan O'Brien poster.

  41. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Things were much more manual and involved. Incompatibility was a thing.
    Far less wealth of information on the internet. So if a game just black screened on launch it was harder to find out why.

    Just getting sound to work in some games was painful.

    You had to boot into MS-DOS for a lot of games. Basically reboot into the command prompt for the zoomers ITT.

    Multiplayer was pure, unfiltered gamer word Kino.

    Honestly if I could go back to the 90s but with SSDs and LCD monitors I would in a heartbeat. Matchmaking, official servers, chat filters, report buttons etc. we live in a dystopian gaming nightmare.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Honestly if I could go back to the 90s but with SSDs and LCD monitors I would in a heartbeat.
      you can, it's called playing the old games instead of nushit

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I’m an ausgay so all the old multiplayer games are dead.

        I’ve played all my childhood singleplayer games 5x over.

        It’s unironically over.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >bro i can't relive my childhood for the 6th time, it's ogre
          you could uhh try playing old games you've never played before? enjoy your melancholy reminiscing and pity partying homosexual.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            What old games haven’t I played?

            If you look at a list of top X PC games of X year I’ve played them all.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              yeah man i'm sure you played thousands of games as a child and then replayed them all 5x as an adult. enjoy being a fat miserable gay i guess.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Name two thousand good PC games from 90-00.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Old multiplayer games are dead. The closest you can get to a classic multiplayer experience is TF2 which is pretty sad. Fricking sucks.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I don't think I'll be able to experience a CTF 128 player server ever again. Tribes 2 was wild. 64v64 was chaotic even on those giant maps where the bases are 2000+m apart. A dozen shrikes in the sky shooting lasers all over the place, multiple bombers, many APCs fully loaded with a squad of 15 heavies flying to the other base to rape it, with a shrike or two to escort it so it didn't get shot out of the sky...and that's just in between the bases. You never got to rest with so many people in the game.

          Houston Vehicles, Miami Vehicles, and the 128 player server I forget the name but I'm almost positive it was the same group.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      > Incompatibility was a thing

      Remembering the despair of having a Non-Vesa compatible graphics car (S3 Virge) and not being able to play a ton of DOS games at 640x480. And their Windows versions, while svga, where not optimized. While Duke Nukem 3D worked, Carmageddon and Quake would only run at 320x240.

      With no internet, it took some time until a pirated games compilation CD that included the old version ot UnivBE came to me. That version reduced Windows colour to 256 in exchange for vesa support, but the serial worked with a DisplayDoctor 5.1 trial from a magazine cd that had no issues with color density.

      Immediately went back to playing those games.

      PS: Oh, right. I forgot about the 3dFx patched that would undo the cracking of a pirated game.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        That brings back memories. I remember using this thing so I could get additional display modes in ZSNES DOS that allowed for transparency. I actually found my original registration card recently when I was cleaning out some old junk.

  42. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    it was like warm apple pie

  43. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    One thing I remember is that shovelware games had a big if ephemeral impact on the gaming scene because they were marketed to casual PC users on shelves at Office Depot and CompUSA, and also often came in cheap bundles that would come in magazines or be found in bargain bins at supermarkets. Ports and shitty remakes of arcade games were perhaps the most common type of shovelware during this era, but just about every kind of game imaginable was represented. As a kid in the 90s-00s, you often got a mix of these games and more legit games from your parents, and since the wait to get new games(not to mention the hardware to run them) could be a long one, sometimes you just had to hold your nose and dive into your shovelware backlog after you got burned out on the better games.

  44. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I only played Half-Life mods so I had a great time.

  45. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    in the 90s videogames on the shelves were working finished products with no day 1 patch and having to wait 6m for the community to patch a broken product the developers will never fix.
    oh and no loot box and other hyper predatory practices that ruins most AAA games.
    On the other hand, the indie games scene is pretty cool, silver lining I guess

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >in the 90s videogames on the shelves were working finished products with no day 1 patch and having to wait 6m for the community to patch a broken product the developers will never fix

      Actually, it happened more frequently that we would have liked. Just that with no internet, outrage did not went very far. Rather than Day one patches, you would get month One patches if you paid for the magazine with the CD containing it, if you did not have access to internet or a BBS.

      - Jurassic Park Tresspasser.
      - Point and Click Adventure games with scripting mistakes leading to an unwinnable situation. I remember I Have no Mouth and I must scream in particular, where if you murder a character before talking to him, an item you need to continue never appears.
      - marathon 2: Durandal: Oxigen would not refill between levels, so you could stuck in a dead end starting a water level with not enough Oxigen. That's where I dropped the W95 version.
      - Copy protection systems that did not work. It Got funnier in the early 2000's when if you had certain cd drives, the original game would identify itself as a pirate copy (Konami's Shadow of Destiny)
      - Daikatana with broken AI beyond hope
      - Uninstallers that simply deleted the entire folder, and at the same time allowed installing the game to C: (the root of the system)

  46. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    late 90s PC gaming was the origin of emulation in the most soulful form possible

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