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PC Gaming...
I know this section is Pets and family... but I still remember back in the good old days or the so-called Golden era of Desktop PCs when every six month it seems like new computers doubled in total clock speed or raw performance...
Back then during the mid to late 90s I was still in junior high and our family's first home computer was a Packard Bell Pentium I that we got from the local Best Buy electronics store... it came with a stack of demo CD-ROM discs, including a trial/demo of The Journeyman Project game... Microsoft Encarta, TuneLand, and Packard Bell Navigator among many other Disc samples...
At our school in our computer class we had the chance to play The Oregon Trail game, the computer lab had a bunch of Macintosh at the time so I couldn't just copy the game to floppy and play it on our Windows 95 machine at home, for one thing the formatting wasn't compatible and I didn't know how to reformat a floppy to make it work on Apple system... in any case it was my very first encounter with a "shooting" game of any kind (my Dad didn't let me play DOOM lol) and I loved the part where you could go hunt for food while on the Oregon Trail...
In our Algebra class there was this math teacher who happened to be somewhat of a computer savvy lady and she had as her screensaver what she told us was an artificially intelligent virtual pet mopy fish... I was really interested in the whole concept of "AI" at the time and had many a philosophical discussion and debate with her on if it was truly possible to encapsulate the soul of a living thing inside something like a floppy disk. Turns out the HP company was running a sort of promotion/advertising on their printers at the time and commissioned a tiny Japanese firm to create a virtual Mopy (fish and fish tank) screensaver that the more you printed with the HP printer the more points you earned that could be used towards upgrading fish tank, adding accessories, buying more fish food etc etc and towards the whole experience of keeping fish alive... at the time this whole Mopy fish program/screensaver fit on a single 1.44MB Floppy disk
I had always been interested in flight/flying and as a kid wanted to grow up to be an airline pilot... since we lived in Dallas I frequently got my parents to take me to the American Airlines museum by their headquarters and inside that museum one of the stations was a set up that was a simulator (not full motion but just a static one) and I had always wanted to try that but it was never working and always under repair...
Then one day while shopping at ToyRUs with my parents I came across a game called "EF2000" it was on sale and only like $10 at the time, my parents bought it for me and I was so excited to take it back home and FINALLY get the chance to fly a flight sim game! But no luck, turns out this game was actually DOS based and while it should run in Windows 95 just fine, there was some memory configuration settings (something about HIMEM etc) that required configuration using DOS command line commands to get the game to start and my Dad couldn't figure it out and I had no clue either....
EF2000 game came with a really nice manual too, I was relegated to only reading the paper manual but not actually getting to play the sim... such a shame, it was like window shopping in the best store at Christmas but you couldn't buy anything
A while later I'm visiting China with my mom during my school summer break and one of my Chinese cousins tells me to come to his house he has a flight simulator game... at this point I had gotten so dismayed by previous experiences I was like yeah right, I didn't believe him and even if he was telling me the truth I figured just my luck probably when I went there the game would somehow stop working...
So I went to his house and he had a better system than ours back in the US, it was a Pentium II with higher specs and also he bought a voodoo graphics card 3dfx... I was shocked that he wasn't kidding and soon we were at 20,000 feet above the ground flying supersonic in the F-22 fighter jet! Since he purchased it for like $10 Yuan from the street vendor (all pirates ) it didn't come with any paper manual or even instructions, he couldn't read English and I never played a simulator before so the both of us were spending all night trying to fumble around figuring out how to shoot down enemy jets... it was mostly trial and error but suffice it to say I purchased his disc copy of the game from him and when I went back to the USA I spent the rest of my summer playing the F-22 ADF (Air Dominance Fighter) by the British DID company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgXAsjCEBiA
It wasn't until 2005 when I encountered a Boeing 747-400 simulator (add-on) for the then Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 (A Century of Flight or also known as FS9).... this was a third party add-on by a small company called PMDG (Precision Manuals Development Group) and at the time this was by far the best looking and most realistic flight simulator for any Boeing jet available for the desktop consumer market...
https://web.archive.org/web/20050830225437/http://www.precisionmanuals.com/html/747400.htm
I had never done a CATIII autoland in a Boeing Jumbo Jet before (not even in simulator world) and for the first time it was possible to work the FMC (Flight Management Computer) and with the simulated ILS/CATIII/autoland/Land3 systems I would be able to have the Boeing 747 land itself on the runaway all by autopilot! Back in 2005 this was a big deal in the simulation world since the stock/default Microsoft Flight Simulator had no such abilities at all!
The problem was even though my computer by then had upgraded to a Pentium 4 the 3D model of the PMDG 744 was too detailed for my rig and I had wished there was a lower resolution model that I could use and still keep the raw underling systems and simulation/data fidelity whilst running at smoother frame-rates by using a lower polygon models ... even though I pirated the game, I had the audacity to go on their support forums and ask around and that is when some folks pointed me to use the DOS Aerowinx B744 CBT (computer based trainer) which had even more systems/simulation fidelity than the PMDG744 but without the eye-candy...
https://archive.org/details/msdos_747-400_Precision_Simulator_2000
So here I was, using a DOS simulator to learn/prepare/train for the PMDG 747 add-on for Flight Simulator (for when the day came and I finally had the money to upgrade my desktop again) to then hopefully prepare for when I could finally afford to rent some hours on a full-motion CAE simulator of the 747, which itself was a simulator for the actual real thing!
Outstanding stuff here. I will tell you that I have been jonesing to buy me a copy of No Man's Sky once I upgrade my RAM to hand it.
I do love a good RPG, and space and strategy are my favorites. Oh, and I do love this discussion, and you can just post away at will here.
Oh the horror of DOS gaming in the Nineties - needing a boot floppy for many games crazy (and seemingly random) memory requirements!
No Man's Sky is a weird game as it's mainly a open world survival thing. Not much story to it and it has morphed over the years to focus on multiplayer. A very interesting experience though that's easy to get lost in.
A nice "space sim" is Evochron: Legacy. It will run on just about anything and will work with whatever controls you have, from mouse and keyboard all the way to big HOTAS setups. Inexpensive too.
Quote from congjing yu on August 30, 2021, 11:10 amOutstanding stuff here. I will tell you that I have been jonesing to buy me a copy of No Man's Sky once I upgrade my RAM to hand it.
I do love a good RPG, and space and strategy are my favorites. Oh, and I do love this discussion, and you can just post away at will here.
If you are able to run NoManSky then you should be able to run the new Myst that just came out a day or two ago...
Myst 1993-2021 Comparison
My first encounter with Myst is getting introduced to it freshman year in high school by more senior guys that had gotten lost into the game...
Of course it was 2D at the time, moving around like a powerpoint slide and using the arrow keys on the keyboard... so very primitive... but over the years there have been many Myst remakes/remasters and I think this final one in 2021 that was just released in late August sort of tops it out...
In any case, they released the game on GOG (a Steam competitor whose value-proposition is that all the games on that platform are DRM-free meaning no online required to play, no serial key, no activation code, etc )
While I could have just downloaded it on piratebay these days I don't really need to anymore but the GOG version comes with offline installers and I downloaded them to archive a local copy (for when the CyberPolygon or Biden's Dark Winter takes down the Internets, lmao) so that I will always have an archive copy for retention... In any case I used a free software called MultiHasher which calculates the digital or forensic 'hash' of each file to guarantee integrity and authenticity (or at least if the hashes match with other versions found online, its mathematical certainty that its the exact same file identical down to the every last bit etc)
The 2021 version of Myst for PC runs on Unreal Engine and I finally feel this 3D game is the version that more than 20 years ago when I first played Myst how I ideally would have wanted it to be....
https://mega.nz/folder/Pn4QjIyT#eqrgb2V2Ub9bN6xAM6ldzw
(link is valid but upload gonna take a couple hours, my ISP is slow)
@bochen EF2000!!!! Holy shit - do you remember the hot voice when someone shot a missile at you? It was a female voice all mellow and shit! I wouldn’t know to hit the “flare”’ button or twist a fattie and chill!
Amyone have the TI-99? My parents got me that and it was game over. My school work went out the window along with ANY chance of college (at that time).
How about the Commodore 64? I was stationed in Boston and me and a bud took a train all the way out to some ritzy-shitzy neighborhood in the snow to get my bud one! He is like an older brother - to this day I call him that. But fuck - that thing was fun. Copying games and thinking we were getting away with something.
I was always a flight sim guy. Not to the point of doing “fly ins”!and stuff - but I always spent hours on it. Even in med school - when I needed to give my head a rest - I would pop the thing on and just go. I always wanted to be a pilot. I got close enough by fixing aircraft in the reserves - but things were explicit. Medical School... Every time I would try or get the cash to take lessons - a frigging mountain would get put in front of me. Crazy. Seriously. The more I write this shit the crazier it is!
Cool crazy though. Not like crazy crazy. I already have enough of THAT on my plate!
@pissedlizard the C64 was my childhood. Here you either had a Speccy (Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K) or the more expensive but far better C=64. I was lucky, at the time both my parents were working and my mother got a discount at the Co-Op (she worked in their bank.)
No one had disk drives here so all games came on tape. Nothing was better than getting a C30 or C60 full of copied games from a friend and then trying them out, one after another, although many would probably not load. The patience we must have had back then to wait for games to load from tape.. A good one could load in 3 minutes but an older loader could take 10 minutes plus.
After than I got an Amiga 500 Christmas '88 which ended up huge in Europe, selling millions. I think they sold 2 million in the U.K. alone!
F/A-18 on the Amiga was the first flight sim I ever played. So much fun landing on the carrier. It wasn't very accurate but it was great to mess about with. Like flying up to 40k feet, switching the engines off then landing without power. Utter nonsense but it felt like an accomplishment.
A better version was released as Jet Fighter 2 for PC in 1990. It works well in DOSBox these days.
Possible to download or play in browser here.
@feal My buddy had a C30 - and YES I remember the tapes! Holy shit this is funny - when someone showed me a floppy disk I was AMAZED that you could put 10 tapes on it!
Can you imagine going back in time to THAT age and giving someone an iPhone? Their fucking head would explode!
The F/18 sim - don’t get me started on that. I was in the USCG and worked in an electronics shop. Turbo-nerd city. And we started playing that game on our work computers and shit went to hell on that base FAST! That’s all we did. Played that game for MONTHS! I could never get past the “lemming” nickname!
When I was in six grade I often rode my bicycle to our local public library, this was during the golden era of desktop computing and the library had started a multimedia section where it lent out CD-ROM software and games. Even before the James Cameron 1997 Titanic movie, I had fallen in love with the ship and the legend of Titanic through my repeated borrowing of Titanic An Illustrated History, which to this day is one of the definitive books on the Titanic...
Then one day while browsing the CD-ROM/Multimedia computer isle of the library I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw there was this 3D adventure game based on the Titanic, a virtual 3D representation of the ship called Titanic: An Adventure Out of Time
So I put it on my library card, cycled my way back home eagerly, and to my surprise our home computer passed the minimum requirements to play this game...
It came in two separate CD-ROM discs and the installation seemed to take forever, I recall it had to install a 3rd party software called "QuickTime" first... and that based on the manual this game took advantage of a new technology at the time called IPIX, which was basically a way to view a scene in complete 360 degree by scrolling around...
Eventually I got to playing this game, and it was more or less like the first Myst experience, in that you use arrow keys to move around, mouse cursor to click items on screen, and movement was a single PowerPoint slide at a time, with the exception that the IPIX technology sort of did a morphing so that it was a quasi 2.5D experience, not really 2D but not quite 3D either....
Now in 2021, finally like with Myst, we get to experience it how it was meant to be experienced way back then had technology not have been a barrier at the time!
I had the TI-89, I learned to code some simple BASIC programs on that calculator, but like most of the folks in school we downloaded "assembly" games for it, and played Tetris, Pong, etc etc, I never did learn to write asm language for that platform lol... but later on I downloaded the emulator so I could use the TI-89, etc on my computer... (just had to import the ROM from my calc) but after I started using Maple math software to help me solve equations, and even show the steps/proof I had stopped using TI graphic calculators
I was a big fan of Jane's F/A-18.... could never get it to work with Windows 10 but I still play it sometimes in Windows XP inside of VMware Workstation Pro. Its not a DOS game so DOSBox couldn't help in this case.
Nowadays the DCS is where its at!
@bochen - You gave me a BIG smile this morning with this post-thank you!
The Titanic game brings back so many fond memories. I was either in med school still or undergrad, but during a break my Dad and I played that the whole time. It was the coolest thing - the way you walked around and interacted with the “people”.
Janes games were awesome. I wish they still made them.
Thanks for this post though!