7 Terrible Things About PC-DOS Gaming

FoxEye said:
It's pretty true to say that those of us who grew up in those days acquired a healthy dose of problem solving ability. If a kid has a problem with a game today, I know plenty who simply have no idea how to fix it. Even when these problems are relatively minor, today's gamers often give up before they've really tried.
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I wouldn't say it was a good thing. The problems are there for the software designers to solve, not the end user.

I hated all that messing around. I wanted to play a game!
 
Just reading through this thread brings back sooo many memories! Getting a new game only to find it needed over 600kb conventional memory when you were over the moon at having 590-5 and having to spend ages disabling things correctly.
 
Yeah brings back a lot of memories. Finely tuning boot scripts to leave as much memory free as possible whilst still loading all the drivers necessary. I remember finding a cdrom driver that worked with 95% of all drives and took up minimal memory - funny how happy that made me! Working in a pc shop back then so having boot disks that worked with lots of different hardware helped a lot.
 
Argh HIMEM... never had a problem with sound tho as my card was 100% compatible with Soundblaster 16 and AWE64, etc.
 
my first gaming experience was C and C 1 on the Dos, at the time I was maybe 5-6 but I remember not knowing the play command, so reinstalling every time. Never had any of those mentioned issues though
 
And of course back then you couldn't just do a simple google search to find out how to get your soundcard working or how to get xms memory.
 
I don't remember having problems with memory but getting the Soundblaster to work and tweaking the IRQs wasn't fun. Also running a basic BNC network was quite painful in Windows 95.
 
Urghhh extended memory is the one of the few times iv seen my dad look so so confused with dos! (he loved unix)

I learnt the sound card stuff all by my self at the tender age of 4 as my neighbour had all the sounds in goblins and I wanted them too!
 
Only 2 of those niggles were really bad.

The Memory/expanded memory, and autoexec.back/config.sys :)

The hard drive space is to be honest still a problem today (and much worse for poor console owners:p), the IRQ issues you only really ran into when you changed hardware, and the copy protection wasn't a major issue (unlike modern drm..), and the cases are the reason I always buy a brand name now:) (having left a blood trail in many an old machine).

I actually miss the old days at times, when games had to rely more on gameplay and/or story than how they looked with a quad SLI running 3d at 2048 pixels:p

I used to have about 20 or so boot discs for different games with different variations of the config/autoexec files loading different things into himem and extended memory :) (I think I had 4 basic ones with different combinations of cd rom and sound card driver, then had others that juggled the basic settings depending on the game).

As for multiplayer...The joys of finding and installing one of the new enhanced RS232 cards that had the new fangled FIFO buffers and could work at higher speeds for games like Netmech and Duke Nukem 3d :)
 
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