Minimum Requirements
When I was a child, I was a warrior. I fought many battles with PC games I wanted to play, waged on the blue fields of a DOS editor. My weapons were HIMEM, EMM386, and time. The war was long, and difficult, but like many who’ve been through war, I look back at it with fondness. I miss it. These days, shit just works, and that makes me nostalgic for the days when it didn’t.
The most infamous battle I fought was actually not with Tie Fighter, as today’s comic depicts, but with the game NHL 1998. It was the first game in the NHL series that “boasted” 3dfx Glide support. I put “boasted” in quotes there because that’s really not something you want to boast about. I spent a solid week getting the game to work with my video card, and when I finally saw that sweet EA logo come up on the monitor, I screamed in joy, and then turned it off. I didn’t bother playing the game; I had already beat it.
I think this kind of experience is important. It makes you appreciate the fact that these days, you don’t need to fight with extended memory, IRQ, DMA, MSCDEX and the like to make things work. If I ever have children, I fully intend to give them, as their first computer, an old 386 computer with a 3dfx card, 4mb of ram, and NHL 1998. It will be a test. If they succeed in getting it to work, they’ll get a newer computer. If they fail, they never get to use a computer again. MSN, Windows 7, and the internet must be earned with blood, sweat, and crying.
The war must never be forgotten.
Oh my gosh yessss. I had that game!
I once wiped out my hard drive trying to run a corrupted version of a virtual memory driver for DOS in an attempt to get fake EMS memory so that X-Wing would play digitized sound effects on my 8MHz 286.
I also remember being resentful that I couldn’t play Doom on my 286, which ran Wolfenstein 3-D just fine if you turned the game screen size down a couple notches.
Epic. My battle was LOOM. I actually deleted the C drive on my Mom’s Radio Shack Tandy back in the day trying to get that installed.
If you’ve ever tried installing games purchased from GOG.com or Impulse, you’d know that the battle still rages on occasionally.
If you are trying to run old games these days, you just use Dosbox or other emulators that provide all the stuff these games want to see.
The battle for me is the opposite these days. Trying to get those old games running on the newer operating systems. For the longest time, I had trouble running KOTOR 2 on Vista/Win7. I eventually gave up and never played that game. Every now and then I have a craving to play Baldur’s gate or Diablo 2 and I stare at my expensive Windows 7 laptop and wonder if it will make it. And when I do make them run, I cringe at those graphics :/
Maybe i’m confused, but wasn’t the 386 almost a decade old before 3dfx released their first video card?
yes you are correct. maybe he meant a Pentium 1 because there’s no way a 3dfx card would work on a 386 system.
yes, i apologize for the slight technical inaccuracy. i wrote that post when it was late. honestly though, i’m more surprised that you read it, all the way to the bottom.
what automaton is trying to say is, “i love you.”
I wish I understood this better. Unfortunately, I was more into consoles at that age and I don’t even think my parents got a computer ’till around 2000. If I could find an old computer, I’d be willing to learn. Guess I could look up tutorials – that’s what the net is for right? Aside from webcomics and porn, of course.
Finding an old computer is the easy part. Finding an old computer that still works may be a bit trickier. If you happen upon one that still has MS-DOS installed, you’re very lucky. If not, check out FreeDOS. FreeDOS even works on modern computers if you can’t be bothered to hunt down an old one.
Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep RUINED MY LIFE
My crappy old rig couldn’t even play the FMV on the intro to MechWarrior with out skipping, but i got it run and still had a blast.
I’d re-install that on a newer rig just for the satisfaction of having seen the FMV cutscenes!
I never really had a problem getting anything to run … had a 486DX with 4x9s banked out to the max. 16MB of RAM, baby. Sweet mobo had a VLB slot and everything. I even wrote up bootdisks for certain games that needed non-standard memory allocations. Life was good.
Now, if you want to fight with your computer, just grab a desktop linux distro and have a blast making old Windows games work with Wine.
The thought of toiling away to make gaming under Wine work makes me scared. Wouldn’t XP in a VM be a better idea? Unless the point of it is to make it challenging…