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Boy, I sure showed THAT computer game
emnmnme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
One of the satisfying perks of being a PC gamer or, to a lesser degree, a Mac gamer is being able to play the bulk of your old games on your current OS. Got a DOS game from '91? You can still play it in Windows XP with some know-how. Now that Vista has been released, many people have upgraded their systems and are possibly enjoying their old games on newer hardware. Some old games might have been barely playable back in the day but now a modern beefy rig can mock them all.
For example, back in the day, the Jurassic Park spinoff Tresspasser ran like ass on any system back in the day. But now, maybe you can get 100 FPS with a modern machine. Maybe now we can get a smooth online experience from C&C: Tiberium Sun. Was your Pentium 90 not up to snuff for Jedi Outcast? Can your new machine chew it up and spit it out now?
For me, my story of satisfaction was Baldur's Gate 2. I played the first one on my old Vaio PC...Pentium 2 at 400 MHz...integrated graphics. The game ran horribly even at the lowest resolutions and low quality sound and ashamedly I had to put it away for a few years until I bought a PC capable of playing it. Thanks to PC tech doubling again and again, any machine can play this game at max detail without breaking a sweat. I got the last laugh with Baldur's Gate 2 and that makes me a little happier.
For example, back in the day, the Jurassic Park spinoff Tresspasser ran like ass on any system back in the day. But now, maybe you can get 100 FPS with a modern machine. Maybe now we can get a smooth online experience from C&C: Tiberium Sun. Was your Pentium 90 not up to snuff for Jedi Outcast? Can your new machine chew it up and spit it out now?
For me, my story of satisfaction was Baldur's Gate 2. I played the first one on my old Vaio PC...Pentium 2 at 400 MHz...integrated graphics. The game ran horribly even at the lowest resolutions and low quality sound and ashamedly I had to put it away for a few years until I bought a PC capable of playing it. Thanks to PC tech doubling again and again, any machine can play this game at max detail without breaking a sweat. I got the last laugh with Baldur's Gate 2 and that makes me a little happier.
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Also, Deus Ex: IW loads a lot faster now.
I found out later that what happened was technically impossible, seeing as half life 2 doesn't even support integrated graphics cards :shock:
I made mincemeat of it with my 6600GT, though.
Thanks to APIs, like DirectX and OpenGL, they don't have to support them. They can require a card with specific hardware support for certain DirectX/OpenGL features for performance reasons.
These libraries specifically exist to make graphics work on non-specific cards. An unsupported feature is supposed to be done in software, though this is much harder to do now. I remember QuakeIII in software OpenGL when I tried to run it in Linux.
Anyway, I played through Half-Life 2 Episode One at a super-shitty frame rate because it was a new laptop and I didn't realize that it was defaulting to the slowest CPU speed even when I was plugged in (~900MHz instead of 2.66GHz on a Core Duo w/ 2GB DDR2). I was seriously underwhelmed by the ATI X1400 at that point! I kept checking in Catalyst to make sure that everything was set to maximum performance instead of "optimized" (for battery/rest). I beat the game and then it locked up on the Episode 2 teaser because the video was just too much for the CPU... it got WAY out of synch as the frames got jumpier and jumpier until the frames just froze, the audio stuttered, stopped, and after a ton of hard drive grinding, I was dumped back to the desktop. I was freaking out because I thought I'd have to beat the game again on a different computer to see it! I found it available for playback and noticed that it did this whenever I'd play the teaser.
Only then did I realize: If it's choking up on high-res video, it's a CPU bandwidth problem... NOT the ATI X1400. I didn't think to check it earlier because I remembered setting the CPU speed back on "maximum" before and I the setting just didn't stick. I have yet to play through it again proper, though I've put many video cards through an intro-play with the game.
Hehe, same, except I was running a GF4 MX440 (by far, the shittiest card on the market at the time, barely better than an integrated card), and the real achilles heel: 256mb of RAM.
Load times for each section was a smooth 5-10 minutes. And you *KNOW* how many load screens there are for HL2.
I'M A TWITTER SHITTER
WOOO.
And I still play Sopwith 2 every now and then, which is an upgraded version of a game from the monochrome era.
LoL Summoner: infobrains | XBL: cwap4brains | PSN: infobrains
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
We need a solid XP port like they did with Duke 3D, which, by the way, is better than its ever been.
It doesn't play well with XP. The dudes who work on SCUMMVM have a side-project called Residual just for Grim Fandango, but it's not really in active development. I think it's a hobby of a couple of the devs.
http://scummvm.org/subprojects.php
I tried a patch for Sonic, but apparantly I've got the early 16 bit version that the patch doesn't work on.
Ecco crashes right after the load screen. I have no problem running DOS programs, though.
Oh! Btw: I reinstalled Sims1 and it was installed in record time, not to mention that the resolution is fucking tiny on my 1200x1024 17" display.
I had a TNT2 when it came out and either A) I had to run in software or
p.s. anyone remember the guy who got Doom 3 to run on a Voodoo 2?
I remember when I wanted a Voodoo 2. Those were the days.
Diablo 2. Haha, I remember reading the IGN review of Lord of Destruction that took off points because "most computers will have trouble running the game at fullspeed due to the newly implemented 800x600 resolution".
Lol.
Needless to say, the first time I played it on my brand new 1.3GHz AMD Duron with 512MB RAM, the game went a lot faster
Its like someone took a flashlight and taped it to the fucking walls.
Also, uglies.
Unreal had this progression. Deus Ex = Unreal Engine.
i still associate SLI with voodoos
I guess its impressive, but to do so he took out everything that made doom 3 what it was. I mean, I don't think many people played it for the story.
I think you'd be impressed if someone got Mario Galaxy to run on an N64.
As long as the game played the same and felt the same, yes.
I mean, if he could have found away to keep some kind of rudimentary lighting in place it would be a different story. But as is, that is not really the same game as Doom 3.
Nope.
No, those were Anachronox and Daikatana.
I also bought Grand Prix 4, and the game barely ran on my 600MHz Celeron with 192MB RAM and a Voodoo3. It was sort-of playable if I turned off all effects and trackside objects. When I got my Athlon 64 3500+ with 1GB and an admittedly integrated GeForce 6100, it was one of the first things I installed and it flies. That machine can also run Vampire: Bloodlines at a very good clip, although it nearly choked on the Prey demo (which I fully attribute to the 6100).
I got the Celeron because of one of these stories, too. I played UT on my wife (then girlfriend)'s K6-2 of unremembered speed (200MHz tops) and no 3D hardware whatsoever, in software mode at 400x300 and it was just about playable. I got the Cellie and stuck the Voodoo3 in it just for UT, really. It was completely awesome.
Now, the laptop I got a couple of weeks ago for $240 (1GHz Pentium IIIm, 256MB, ATi Mobility Radeon) runs UT better that that, and at a higher resolution!
Times do change, that's for sure.
P.S. The only DOS game I've never managed to get working at all under Windows is Strike Commander. Pretty sure that's impossible... unless DOSbox somehow pulls it off. Oh, and MechWarrior 2 is a pig as well, since I don't have the Win95 edition.
Steam | XBL
The manual was sheer GOLD. Back in the day when they had huge manuals that gave you everything. It ran down stealth tactics, how to pull different manoeuvre's, weapon statistics, the whole deal.
Funny thing. During the time the game was made, the game lists Iraq as an allied country (This of course, during the days when it was seen as OK to let Saddam do his thing in the ME as long as he did it for us). Skip forward to the sequel game (F-117), and Iraq is now an enemy country. Gulf War and all that. Tends to sour a relationship.
Fantastic manuals and whatnot are seemingly a lost art, but that's a subject for another thread, methinks.
Kinda funny about Iraq, too, you're right.
Steam | XBL
Actually, for me the biggest thing was Warcraft 3. I played through both that and the expansion on a 400 MHz G3 with 8 MB Rage 128. It was torture. When I finally built a fast PC, a huge part of my motivation was being able to play WC3. Lo and behold, once I can play it I discover that I really don't like the game very much any more. Now I can run it at 1440x900 with FSAA on my new laptop, and I just don't give a shit. (Of course it's horizontally stretched for game balance or something, which is incredibly lame. Particularly because there's no 4:3 resolution with a vertical height of 900 pixels so i can have the game look right, and still run at native.)