Moving onto Home computers

[noiseredux]

Yeah, retro PC gaming is a lot of work if you think about it. I guess that's part of the charm of retro consoles. You plug a NES into yr TV and yr good to go. No dicking around with soundcards, vidcards, OS's, and so on.

But of course, I too drool over these retro computers, and wish I had the room for all of them. haha.

[skate323k137]

how about DOS and WINDOWS.
Every one played those right?

YES. Incredibly so. While I was playing with my Atari 2600, I was playing adventure games and other stuff on my QDos pc from Radioshack mailorder. Anyone remember the BBS systems? Who needed the internet then?

I may only be 22 and have grew up on the cusp of everything, I still was exposed to all of that good stuff as a small kid and was navigating DOS before I went to Kindergarten.

same here, I'm 23 and learned dos while learning to read before grade school. I think I threw my first 486 together in like 4th grade. and man, nobody remembers BBS'es. ATDT 555-blahblah... text based games, the beginning of "file sharing", man... This thread brings back some serious nostalgia.

and to address the post above, yeah, I still remember having to set IRQ 7, port 220 for my soundblaster card.

nowadays, VDMsound is sweet, and Dosbox can work wonders too.

[fast]

Hey now, some of used BBS's and telnet well past their prime. Granted those are the same ones of us who transitioned to IRC around when mIRC was being created. When I was nliting xp for my EEE I had to think twice about that telnet box.

[skate323k137]

I wasn't ragging BBS'es, I used several of them. I was just saying that pretty much nobody remembers them.

[msimplay]

Yeah I missed the whole BBS era due to not being able to afford a PC during my school times hence I was bought up on consoles. I guess it would have been nice to be part of it but I did get to go on a modern day BBS system just to see what it was like but since I wasn't part of it, it's just another peice of history to me I didn't feel the need to keep using it or the nostalgia to keep on using it. However if I remember correctly if you look around there are a few BBS systems still in operation today. Although I don't think are
practical any more since the internet has come about and I think that in many ways it was the internet of it's day as I remember reading that BBS systems were around all the way back in the Spectrum days too.

My experience of a BBS was thinking man I missed out on so much. Someone once told me that they used to download games from BBS's for the Super Nintendo / Wildcard I had no idea what he was on about at the time

[Erik_Twice]

I think it can be broken down to:

Stand-Alone Computers (Spectrum/Commodore/etc)

486 (With CD player)
Pure Dosboxing. This includes everything between stand-alone computers and early pentiums because you can play a 286 game in a 486 PC. In fact I remember my computer having a Turbo button that changed from 33Mhz to 66Mhz.

Early Pentiums
Mostly unplayable (as far as I know) as they cannot be run in Dosbox nor can't be run in a modern computer's compatibility mode (As Windows 98 is too modern and Windows 95 too old)

Old Modern Games (less than 1Ghz)
Should run in modern computers, some games could not be playable due being too old for direct use but too modern for compatibility mode.

Modern Games

This may seem a rough sketch but it gives us a good idea of what we need to run games of each era.

[msimplay]

I think it can be broken down to:

Stand-Alone Computers (Spectrum/Commodore/etc)

486 (With CD player)
Pure Dosboxing. This includes everything between stand-alone computers and early pentiums because you can play a 286 game in a 486 PC. In fact I remember my computer having a Turbo button that changed from 33Mhz to 66Mhz.

Early Pentiums
Mostly unplayable (as far as I know) as they cannot be run in Dosbox nor can't be run in a modern computer's compatibility mode (As Windows 98 is too modern and Windows 95 too old)

Old Modern Games (less than 1Ghz)
Should run in modern computers, some games could not be playable due being too old for direct use but too modern for compatibility mode.

Modern Games

This may seem a rough sketch but it gives us a good idea of what we need to run games of each era.

Thanks for this sounds like a good idea

[gravitone]

some games were really picky since the ingame speed was entirely determined by the CPU frequency. Take wingcommander for example. Even on a 66mhz 486 its too fast. Or the alone in the dark games. A lot of games were badly coded back then and barely worked at all to begin with. Some games even make insane requirements when it comes to the the first 640k ram. Like 630kb free. Try reaching that with all the TSR's and such which you have to load for a lot of hardware. Time to make some custom boot floppy's again.

[riseup]

don't forget 386. had a laptop. veeerrrrry portable
ran pac-man & oregon trail beautifully

street fighter II, not so well..

i still have one or two win 95 cd's. i installed the system a while back just to play that stupid Hover game that was included. remember? bumper cars that floated. you had to get flags.

and those dam aol cds. they used to come in the mail every 3 days. you couldn't get away from them! and now you couldn't even buy one if you wanted to

i loved how many computers back then had a turbo button to switch from 33 to 66mhz

[Octopod]

I really dig old computers but know next to nothing about them. It would be great if there were some articles on Racketboy. Ive been thinking about getting a Commodore Amiga lately.