General Computer Thread

[Candlicious Ghost]

I used those to get enough ram to run Red Baeon II on my 286 Packard-Bell...With a whopping 40 MB HDD. I could get a few games, some Warez and some utilities on there. A buddy reformatted my drive with some sort of reserve partition which kept file sizes smaller than 1k using 1k of disx space. It added a few more mb of storage space.

The reason I mentioned those was that there were certain games back in the old days that needed lots of tweaking of things to work.

Wing Commander I'm looking at you

 

[The Salt Umpire]

The reason I mentioned those was that there were certain games back in the old days that needed lots of tweaking of things to work.

Wing Commander I'm looking at you

I was more into war and flight sims, with Harpoon, Red Baron II, Fighting Steel, Silent Service and anything that Microprose made that flew. I still have Fighting Steel, which runs just fine on my Win7 Thinkpad. I never played WC.

 

[John Clark]

The reason I mentioned those was that there were certain games back in the old days that needed lots of tweaking of things to work.

Wing Commander I'm looking at you

Yep. My boxes for those probably still have the floppy in for them too.

Seem to recall Command and Conquer being a pain too.

The Amiga A500+ seemed easier at the time (and I had a 40mb HD for that too) but I got used to messing around more with the pc.

 

[Santaman]

Command and Conquer was indeed a bit of a pain.. one trick we used later on was to start up Windows 95 which loaded drivers etc in good order and then fall back to DOS, the Win95 drivers were just a teensy smaller than the DOS versions and C&C worked with that, when booting up to DOS alone it was a pest, you had to load drivers and TSR's in exactly the right order or else no go.
Can't remember which game it was but it demanded 629KB of conventional memory... now THAT was a puzzle to get right, no CD drivers, the smallest and crudest mouse drivers and older Soundblaster drivers because these were also smaller..

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Funny how times have changed, 4 classic C&C titles are now Free/Open Source.

 

[The Salt Umpire]

Soundblaster drivers because these were also smaller..

Soundblaster was so fiddly. It needed attention constantly. I don't miss all that one bit. Remember saving for more or faster RAM or a graphics card that would fit into the one available slot after the FDs & CD took the rest and wouldn't be obsolete in four years..

 

[Haggis and tatties]

I used those to get enough ram to run Red Baron II on my 286 Packard-Bell...With a whopping 40 MB HDD. I could get a few games, some Warez and some utilities on there. A buddy reformatted my drive with some sort of reserve partition which kept file sizes smaller than 1k using 1k of disc space. It added a few more mb of storage.

I bought my first Pc in 1994, a 25mhz dos machine with Dos4, from my local Dixons at the time......£699, and yes i know today i was robbed blind, but being my first PC i had no idea what i was doing........but anyway, brought it home, with my first PC game ever, Star Trek 25th anniversary, and i was ready to boldy go in game form...........1 week later, and after many flights of the DOS 4.0 manual across the room, i found out about highmem.........and i was away........only to find out they sold me a Pc without any kind of sound card, so when i first got the 25th up and running i was greeted to Beep, Beep, beeeep.....Beep beep beep beep. beeeeeep.................and the human adventure was just beginning.........

That first PC was a baptism in fire to say the least. ha