I enjoyed reading the following article on PC Gamer:
It got me thinking of the hoops that I have jumped through to get a game to run. On our old family Pentium I had to create a boot disk in order to run Sim City 2000. The boot disk allowed you to skip booting into Windows and freed up system memory in order to have enough to run the game. Totally worth it since that game was a gem.
More recently I had heard good things about the CoD: Infinite Warfare and decided I’d really like to play it. It was still ridiculously expensive on Steam so I had a look at CD Keys where it was going nice and cheap. I didn’t notice at the time the region restriction, making it only playable in the EU. I figured I’d use a VPN to trick Steam but did not want to risk my main account. I created a second account and used a free VPN service to “connect” from France. I didn’t think to be connected to the VPN while setting up the new Steam account and so had to do a region transfer.
I also remember having to do some trick to download the game because the free VPN I was using had a small 1GB data limit. But in the end I got it to work and enjoyed playing through the Infinite Warfare campaign.
What lengths have you gone through to play a game? Was it worth it?
When I was 13 or 14, I got a copy of Quake 3 Arena. Wanted to play it so badly, but our family PC at the time didn’t have enough RAM to boot the game. So I started saving and doing additional tasks around the house to get some extra pocket money. I saved about 2 months and was able to buy an additional 32MB stick of RAM. This was also my first time tinkering with the internals of a PC, and I added the RAM to the PC and Quake 3 Arena played splendidly. Ended up playing for years, plus the exercise set me up with a live for tech that’s lasted the rest of my life, so yes, I would say it was worth it.
I’ve been gaming on Linux before Proton (Steam’s fork of wine) was a thing…
My list may be a bit long lol
As far as hardware goes, I remember we upgraded our Amiga 500 to 1MB of RAM just so we could play Dragon’s Lair. I don’t think we ever used the extra RAM for anything else…
Need for speed underground, my riva tnt 2 didnt have hardware T&l so the car rendered correctly but all the geometry around the car was white, ingame alot of thing were untextured but the game still ran
I’ve remembered another one. It was with the Enter the Matrix. The game consisted of 4 CD’s to install. The problem was the install would keep hanging on a certain disc. You’d then have to cancel the install and restart all over again.
I kept on trying without success until one time the pc itself seemed to be hanging so I did a hard reset. After rebooting I saw the game was still showing as installed, I took a chance and ran it. Amazingly it booted up and I was able to start playing the first level. It was fully playable except for one thing, there was no sound at all. Those files hadn’t been installed since the installation had been incomplete.
I decided to try run the installation again and found I could carry on from where I’d had to restart the PC. The installation still bugged out a few times but each time I did a hard reset and after a few reboots and running the installer, all the files were eventually installed and the game ran perfectly, sound and all.
I recall fiddling with DOS and the extended memory managers to get games to run. If you did not use an EMM there was not enough base ram available and the games would say “not enough memory”… BUT I HAD LIKE 4MB OF RAM!!!
Hours and hourse were spent to load things like mouse drivers and sound card drivers in the correct order and with the correct DMA and IRQ… Man, so glad I dont have to do that anymore!
The original Quake and Day of the Tentacle gave me the most headaches…
O, and no Googlee to help you find solutions! It was trial and error and reading obscure txt help files.
Those were actually fun days. I learned a lot about PCs and software back then, which probably greatly influenced my career decision and passion I have now.
running setup everytime for dos games to configure the sound
remember doing that with duke nukem 3d and tomb raider. there would be some pre configured sound options like soundblaster 16 and adlib but if you had a generic ESS sound card you had to type those things in manually. also had to exit windows to run the dos games as they would run crap within windows
Ahh, those were the days when the metal cover was never screwed back on because you needed to open the case so often. Dual stiffy disk drives and SoundBlaster audio cards. When jumper caps were currency!
