Old School PC Gaming?

[Funk, E]

I'd love to see some kind of source-port or something of Wasteland. Man.

[gravitone]

I remember when the first command keen episode came out. My dad worked for an American Company called Atlas Wireline Service. They had a base of operations here in the Netherlands servicing all the North-sea drilling platforms off the coast. Of course being such a tech oriented enterprise they had outgoing modem connections to the US. Im sure those 9600 baud lines cost them a pretty penny back in the day. Since there was no monitoring of any substantial kind on those boxes, it was easy to abuse them to download games and stuff from BBS's based in the USA. This ensured me a steady supply of recent games on fresh 5.25" floppy disks at first. Leisure suit larry 1, the eagles nest, and Thexder were some of the first games I obtained in this fassion. All of this was played on a 16mhz(turbo) 286 with 2mb ram, 256KB EGA graphics card/joystick interface combo, 14" philips EGA monitor, the original 2 button genius mouse, and a STAR LC-10 matrix printer. I cannot forget to mention the 20mb harddisk which took up 2x5.25" drive bays. After a year or maybe two, it was complemented by a quickshot joystiq.

Unlike a lot of custom spec. home computers like the c64, amiga, atari ST, etc, generic AT hardware and the peripheral devices used at the time seem to have all but disappeared from the face of the planet. I cannot for the live of me re-obtain that system and its peripherals if I ever wanted to. The state of retro PC hardware is pretty bad in that respect.

My recent wave of nostalgia however, has led me to repurchase some other retro(ish) pc hardware. Right now im in the process of building a retro socket 7 systen for windows 98/dos games. So far I have a silent 230W asus powersupply running a gigabyte SA-GX motherboard. 256mb 133mhz SD-RAM, 2xVoodoo2, geforce 2 GTS, AMD k6-3+ 400mhz processor running currently at 550mhz, customized socket A cooler that is dead silent. Soundcards for this baby are on their way and include a monstersound MX300 (Great vortex2 card), soundblaster pro 2. An mt-32 has already arived but will probably be used for an older 486 based system for sierra games and early dos games that support it. Im still keeping my eyes out for either an external sound canvas or an scc-1 based ISA card. A soundblaster 16 will probably also have to be purchased some time in the future.

[General Chaos]

The first PC game I played was Quest For Glory 1 (the VGA version). I was instantly a fan of the series and have since played the original many times over. The atmosphere, art, and humor are still great to this day. I also dabbled in some of the other developers' big titles back in the day (Lucas Arts, Westwood's Kyrandia series), but mainly I kept to the Sierra series.

Around or shortly after that time I was also playing Settlers (Serf City), X-Com, Stunt Island, and then not long after that I recall playing Dungeon Keeper 2, Populous: The Beginning, Myth and Myth 2 quite heavily, then getting into a few MUDs and other western PC RPGs--which paved the way for Ultima Online at launch.

Since then my time has been split between console and PC gaming, but I will always consider my core gaming roots to lie with the PC.

[Ivo]

I used to play Amiga, but got into PC when the Amiga was dying, when there were 486 clocked at 66 MHz (if I recall correctly). I think the first game we got was Privateer (amazing game by the way, already mentioned in the thread).

So many nice games.

[fast]

I am busting out my K6 box that is underclocked to 100 mhz and running Windows 98 this weekend and having at Prince of Persia 2 again.

Update:
An hour into the game, I hate grues...damn zork and its inane difficulty sometimes.