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The Vintage PC thread: Because MS-DOS gaming still rules

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  • Sir CarcassSir Carcass I have been shown the end of my world Round Rock, TXRegistered User regular
    I still have the vast majority of the manuals and papers that came with my games, but I never kept boxes.

  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    I still have the vast majority of the manuals and papers that came with my games, but I never kept boxes.

    I usually keep everything. I lost a ton of PC bigboxes over the years, though. And, frustratingly enough, after keeping up with it for years, I think I've lost the CD-case for diablo 2 despite still having the game discs. And I can't find the case for Half-life either. So I dunno how I'll play those games without a cd-key.

  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    Damn, looked them up and I don't meet the minimum specs for Max Payne, Thief, nor Deus Ex. Looks like all those will have to wait for my inevitable windows XP machine.

  • Sir CarcassSir Carcass I have been shown the end of my world Round Rock, TXRegistered User regular
    I used to keep boxes, when I still lived with my mom. I kept them in a filing cabinet. Then pretty much the week I moved out to go to college, she threw them all away. That kind of put a damper on still keeping them from that point on.

  • dav3ybdav3yb Registered User regular
    So having not read through all the pages, what OS do people generally throw in these boxes? I've actually played with the idea is a retro box in the past, but I never got around to it.

    I've got a couple old pentium 3 boards I rescued from work and bought two 1.4 ghz p3 cpus for them (the fastest p3s they made). They have lots of ram too, I think one board had 3 slots and the other had 4, and I was able to salvage 256 sticks for both.

    At the time that one of them was actually put together I had Windows 2k on it, and eventually put Linux on it intending it to be a basic Internet machine for a guest room.

    Also is it difficult to find drivers for these old systems anymore?

    PSN: daveyb1337 || XBL: dav3yb360 || Steam: dav3yb || Switch: SW-5274-1897-8495 || 3DS FC: 2079-7419-8843
  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    I used to keep boxes, when I still lived with my mom. I kept them in a filing cabinet. Then pretty much the week I moved out to go to college, she threw them all away. That kind of put a damper on still keeping them from that point on.

    When I went to college, I rented myself a storage and kept all my shit in it. The first storage I rented wasn't climate controlled, and I lost a lot of stuff in it, including a power glove where rats got in and ate off the fingers. The second was climate controlled, but still flooded during hurricane rita and I wound up losing virtually all my N64 and SNES (and quite a few PC big boxes) in the water, turning them into valuable goo (I had, for example, the box for clayfighter sculptor's cut... worth quite a bit).

    I still have a number of my old PC boxes, but I definitely have lost a few. No idea what happened to System Shock 2's box, though. That's one I wouldn't have tossed out for sure.
    dav3yb wrote: »
    So having not read through all the pages, what OS do people generally throw in these boxes? I've actually played with the idea is a retro box in the past, but I never got around to it.

    I've got a couple old pentium 3 boards I rescued from work and bought two 1.4 ghz p3 cpus for them (the fastest p3s they made). They have lots of ram too, I think one board had 3 slots and the other had 4, and I was able to salvage 256 sticks for both.

    At the time that one of them was actually put together I had Windows 2k on it, and eventually put Linux on it intending it to be a basic Internet machine for a guest room.

    Also is it difficult to find drivers for these old systems anymore?

    I'm running Dos 6.22 on my 486, with a CF card with windows 95 installed for a few games like earthworm jim or pitfall. My Voodoo 2 machine will run either windows 95 or windows 98.

    Finding drivers can be a pain, that's why I either buy stuff that is still boxed with the drivers floppies included, or find the drivers for a specific model of hardware before I buy it. Like I bought a specific hitachi CD-Rom drive because I'd already located dos drivers.

  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    A whole bunch of goodies arrived today all at once. My living room is full of boxes of old PC junk waiting for me to come home today and put it together. I know both cases arrived, as did a bunch of hardware. I'll take some pics tonight as I'm putting it together.

    That said, I have a 3rd vintage gaming PC. This one I mainly bought pre-built:

    $(KGrHqN,!k8FJjOch,IcBScntsG-sw~~60_57.JPG

    Everybody remembered these hideous AOpen cases, right? They were ubiquitous for a while. Pretty standard machine there, Pentium 166 MHZ, 48mb RAM, not a lot special.

    Except I'm throwing this into it:

    $(KGrHqFHJBkFJSF)td3zBSWhMnWKn!~~60_57.JPG

    Nvidia Diamond Edge 3D NV1, the so-called "Sega PC" card. I've got two OEM games for it - Panzer Dragoon, and Virtua Fighter Remix. It doesn't come with the sega saturn controller daughter board, but I think I can build one myself.

    This video card is notable for a long list of reasons. It's highly sought out by sega collectors and is pretty hard to find. Only about 5 3D games support it, I have 3 of them (VFR, Panzer Dragoon, and Battle Arena Toshinden). It offers no directX support, and looks like it doesn't even offer OpenGL support. it only supports it's own custom NV1 API, of which only 5 games were made to support.

    The video card also doubles as a soundcard. I figure this'll be what I play Sega PC games on, like Sonic CD or Ecco the Dolphin.

  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    edited November 2013
    Yuk, so checking out the tower case I bought for the 486, the thing is in awful condition. I could tell by the pictures on the auction and the way the guy was all "It worked the last time it was plugged in (back in 1994) and all sales are final, sold as-is" that I was likely getting a junked PC. But, judging by the rust, the mold stains on it, the strong stench of urine and rat droppings I keep finding in it, I know exactly where this has been - in an unconditioned storage next to a field for the last 20 years. I know because a lot of my own electronics wound up in this condition from doing that.

    So, armed with a tooth brush, some bleach, a screw driver, several rags, an a bucket of soap, I slowly went through the case, taking it a part piece by piece. I have no use for the actual computer bits inside, I only need the case, so in the trash went everything else, regardless of if it looked fine or not. After about an hour of careful disassembly, I'm left with 3 pieces - the outer shell, which is rusted in spots, the inner skeleton which is rusted on the bottom, and generally filthy, and the front shell, which is covered in rust stains and what looks like black mold.

    An hour of bathing the front shell in soapy water and hitting all the corners and cracks with the tooth brush, and it's looking new again. the front looks fine when it's not covered in trash, and I'm letting it air dry out now. I considered hitting it with some retrobright, but, shockingly, this beige case isn't really yellowed, so I don't think that'll be necessary. Another scrubbing once it dries and it should be good to go.

    Tomorrow, I'll start repairing the skeleton and outer case. For that, I'll need to grab my drill and some bristle pads/sand paper and begin working the metal. I'll go at it like I'm polishing metal - gradually going down to finer grade sand paper until I have removed all the rust and given it a spit shine. I'll do the same to the outer shell, basically sanding it clean and smooth before I can prime it and ultimately paint it. I plan on painting the outer shell beige by color matching it at home depot, to hide the areas where rust or poor upkeep have knocked away some of the color.

    WRT the pentium PC I'm building, it's case is also here, but unlike the 486 case, it's brand new so no work required. However, not all of its parts are here, namely the flex risers for the PCI and AGP ports, so I can't fully assemble it' I've got as much in there right now as I can fit, however, including the motherboard, the "harddrive" (a tiny, internal Compact Flash kit), one of those front gameport bay drive dealies with rear bracket, and the video card and PSU. I still am waiting on the voodoo 2 card and risers specifically before I can turn it on. that said, I have it sitting in the living room where I was working on it, with a microsoft sidewinder plugged into the front, and it looks terrific.

    One other final project I have going on, which I've been really slow on the go with, is that I'm building a universal joystick. As I've said, this project has been on the back burner for a really long time, and it was originally meant as a purely atari jaguar joystick, but I've since expanded my goal for it to work with every game system I own. For the longest time, I've had this nice custom-made project box for it, along with the joystick and buttons and microswitches, and I have a custom-made IPAC I could get it working with on the PC as a keyboard, but no wiring, no crimps, no connectors, and no real motivation to finish.

    Well I've ordered a bunch of parts I need to get this together, including wiring and crimps, along with a 28 pin connector (both male and female, 8 sets each) which will connect the joystick to various game systems. I also ordered a professional IPAC - unlike mine, this one behaves as a programmable keyboard with 30 ports, where you can set the keys on a normal host computer. It behaves, according to the computer it's connected to, as a PS/2 keyboard, and is even free of the 3-key limitation most keyboards have because they deal with key matricies. My IPAC was made out of an actual, old AT keyboard, so this new IPAC is much smaller and sleeker, and includes a pass through so you can connect another keyboard to it and retain full functionality.

    So, finishing up this joystick is just a matter of drilling some holes in the project box, and wiring the thing up. No soldering left, in fact.

    So I'm not really all that close to being done, but I have a lot of work to do and that's the fun part.

    TheSonicRetard on
  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    I bought a game on ebay that I'd been wanting for decades. ビーバスとバットヘッド の ヴァーチャル・アホ症候群 Bībasu to Battoheddo no Vācharu Aho Shōkōgun as it's known in Japan, it's a pretty cool point and click adventure game where you play as 2 teenagers in midwestern america who try to join todd's gang. Lots of humor in it, apparently it's written by the same dude who wrote office space?

  • L Ron HowardL Ron Howard The duck MinnesotaRegistered User regular
    Is that tongue-in-cheek, TSR?

  • Sir CarcassSir Carcass I have been shown the end of my world Round Rock, TXRegistered User regular
    edited November 2013
    Heh, Battoheddo

    Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, that was the game that made me upgrade to Windows 95.

    Sir Carcass on
  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    Everything is here except my Voodoo 2. Hopefully it arrives before the weekend so I'll have time to work on these PCs, but I'm not hopeful.

    I have everything stashed in a corner of my game room, though. Lots and lots of PC boxes and cases right now. Gives me a nostalgia rush back to the days when I'd hang out in the PC section of electronics boutique.

    Which reminds me - remember when half of EB games was dedicated to PC gaming? Man how times change.

  • L Ron HowardL Ron Howard The duck MinnesotaRegistered User regular
    I do remember when you had to buy games in giant boxes, that had manuals, that you were required to read to understand the game. As well as some lore about the game and all that.

  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    I do remember when you had to buy games in giant boxes, that had manuals, that you were required to read to understand the game. As well as some lore about the game and all that.

    I remember getting a buck rogers game for my genesis back in the day that came with like a 90 page novel. It was the biggest manual I'd ever seen until I got BG2 years later.

  • imdointhisimdointhis I should actually stop doin' this. Registered User regular
    Dearest friends, can anyone help me figure out how to purchase Fantasy General AND get it to work on windows 7? With sound and all that good stuff?

  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    imdointhis wrote: »
    Dearest friends, can anyone help me figure out how to purchase Fantasy General AND get it to work on windows 7? With sound and all that good stuff?

    Looks like fantasy general is going for about $10 on ebay at the moment, and it sounds like it works flawlessly in dosbox:

    http://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=1747&letter=F

  • OrogogusOrogogus San DiegoRegistered User regular
    I do remember when you had to buy games in giant boxes, that had manuals, that you were required to read to understand the game. As well as some lore about the game and all that.

    I always feel this is overblown. Lore and background are nice, but generally the only reason I needed a manual was to get past copy protection, or to see the spell list (which you'd be able to see in-game nowadays). Even in a complex game like Baldur's Gate you won't go far wrong if you give your warrior a sword and hit people with it, without knowing anything about THACO or racial bonuses. The only times I remember hitting a brick wall were hyper complex flight sims -- which are still being made, apparently, and still come with 200+ page PDF manuals -- and freaking Rules of Engagement 2.

    Also, I remember Electronic Arts sold games -- many of them classics, like M.U.L.E., Pinball Construction Set and Starflight -- in cardboard trifold sleeve-boxes maybe a quarter inch thick.

  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    electronic arts also sold stuff like desert strike and deluxe paint in enormous boxes for no good reason. There really wasn't a standard for PC packaging back then.

  • StormwatcherStormwatcher Blegh BlughRegistered User regular
    Origin games had amazing manuals

    Steam: Stormwatcher | PSN: Stormwatcher33 | Switch: 5961-4777-3491
    camo_sig2.png
  • BlackDragon480BlackDragon480 Bluster Kerfuffle Master of Windy ImportRegistered User regular
    Origin games had amazing manuals

    I have all the four panel fold-out schematics of fighters and my copy of Claw Marks from my 3.5 floppy version of Wing Commander. I still remember how bad-ass it felt to fly that first mission in a Rapier and I still refer to things turning like Centaurian mud pigs.

    Fuck, now I feel the need to dig out the 486DX I've got buried in the garage and my old Thrustmaster stick and throttle combo and play the shit out of the first 2 WC's.

    No matter where you go...there you are.
    ~ Buckaroo Banzai
  • Sir CarcassSir Carcass I have been shown the end of my world Round Rock, TXRegistered User regular
    Orogogus wrote: »
    The only times I remember hitting a brick wall were hyper complex flight sims -- which are still being made, apparently, and still come with 200+ page PDF manuals

    Haha, try 700+. Whenever I read the DCS A-10C manual I feel like the FBI is going to bust in the door and arrest me for possessing classified information.

  • GlalGlal AiredaleRegistered User regular
    edited November 2013
    I always wanted to learn how to play SU-27 Flanker (because it looked fucking amazing to me. Still does, I'm a sucker for flat-shaded untextured polygons) but my god, that thing makes many of my exams seem trivial.

    Glal on
  • SmokeStacksSmokeStacks Registered User regular
    Orogogus wrote: »
    The only times I remember hitting a brick wall were hyper complex flight sims -- which are still being made, apparently, and still come with 200+ page PDF manuals

    Haha, try 700+. Whenever I read the DCS A-10C manual I feel like the FBI is going to bust in the door and arrest me for possessing classified information.

    Yeah.

    If you bought something like Falcon 4.0 or old DCS games and read the entire manual, on the last page there is a form you can fill out to mail away for your complimentary pilot's license, because fuck it dude, you've earned it at that point.

    Not to mention the fucking manuals that used to come with RPGs. The first Diablo had a great manual, and I'm pretty sure I could kill a man with the extra phonebook sized tomes that would ship with some games that came out before it. Even Kotor had a decent sized spiral bound manual.

    Then came the standardization of game boxes (no more huge weird sized triangular boxes like Eidos used to do, no more boxes with opening flaps, no more huge eight pound boxes filled with feelies), I remember when I bought a standalone physical copy of Portal for the PC. Inside was a DVD and a single glossy sheet of paper with a Steam Key printed on it.

  • StormwatcherStormwatcher Blegh BlughRegistered User regular
    Oh, I still have the full Falcon 4.0 binder manual. And I bought the 3ring binder Lock On Gold extra Manual. And I still have all my Wing Commander stuff.

    Steam: Stormwatcher | PSN: Stormwatcher33 | Switch: 5961-4777-3491
    camo_sig2.png
  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    I had an old Chuck Yaeger game that came with a manual in a ringed binder. Incidentally, I could never, ever get that game, although my dad sunk hundreds of hours into it.

  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    edited November 2013
    made another batch of labels for my next set of games. They should be done tonight:

    EayPsLb.png

    edit: the blakestone one came out poorly, i'll re-do it on the next batch.

    TheSonicRetard on
  • LaPuzzaLaPuzza Registered User regular
    Some good memories there. I don't know if Blake Stone was good or not, but I liked it.

    I must note that if you played multiplayer OMF 2097, it introduced rounds by number. And it pronounces the number 1 like the word "woman." If you don't laugh at a Soundblaster 16 saying "Round Woman . . . FIGHT!" you don't have a soul.

  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    LaPuzza wrote: »
    Some good memories there. I don't know if Blake Stone was good or not, but I liked it.

    It was basically wolfenstein with floor and ceiling textures instead of solid colors, and a sci-fi theme. Not a bad FPS, but it had the misfortune of launching weeks before Doom.

  • SmokeStacksSmokeStacks Registered User regular
    LaPuzza wrote: »
    Some good memories there. I don't know if Blake Stone was good or not, but I liked it.

    It was basically wolfenstein with floor and ceiling textures instead of solid colors, and a sci-fi theme. Not a bad FPS, but it had the misfortune of launching weeks before Doom.

    It was more advanced than that. It had non hostile NPCs that could give you money or items, the ability to purchase health items from vending machines, teleporters, activatable force fields, the ability to go back to any completed level at will to pick up items you left behind, etc.

    For a person who has never played it, going back and playing it these days I guess it wouldn't feel too terribly different from Wolfenstein 3D, but back then those were some pretty innovative features.

    And then Doom came along and blew everyone's minds straight out of their assholes and no one cared about Blake Stone anymore.

  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    LaPuzza wrote: »
    Some good memories there. I don't know if Blake Stone was good or not, but I liked it.

    It was basically wolfenstein with floor and ceiling textures instead of solid colors, and a sci-fi theme. Not a bad FPS, but it had the misfortune of launching weeks before Doom.

    It was more advanced than that. It had non hostile NPCs that could give you money or items, the ability to purchase health items from vending machines, teleporters, activatable force fields, the ability to go back to any completed level at will to pick up items you left behind, etc.

    For a person who has never played it, going back and playing it these days I guess it wouldn't feel too terribly different from Wolfenstein 3D, but back then those were some pretty innovative features.

    And then Doom came along and blew everyone's minds straight out of their assholes and no one cared about Blake Stone anymore.

    No, I mean it literally ran on the wolfenstein 3D engine.

  • SmokeStacksSmokeStacks Registered User regular
    edited November 2013
    It still did plenty to differentiate itself from Wolfenstein, saying it's basically the same game only with floor/ceiling textures and scifi elements is like saying Doom is basically the same as Wolfenstein 3D only with inclined surfaces and skyboxes.

    I remember Corridor 7 having different vision modes, and all of the work that was done with outdoor areas and bouncepads in ROTT. It was a trip what developers were capable of doing with such a primitive engine.

    Although, all of that paled in comparison to even older games like Ultima Underworld, that had jumping, dialogue systems, an economy, etc.

    SmokeStacks on
  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    I didn't say it was the same game, I said it was wolfenstein. The difference between Blake Stone and RoTT is that RoTT made changes to the actual renderer to apply height changes and stuff like that. Blakestone didn't. The rules of the game might be different, but the renderer is straight wolfenstein. The only visual differences are textured floors and ceilings (which actually weren't textures, but a mode-7 effect on a 2D background).

    You can literally load wolfenstein WAD files in blakestone (but not the other way around). You can't do that in RoTT, Doom, Duke 3D, or any other derivative games.

  • SmokeStacksSmokeStacks Registered User regular
    I didn't say it was the same game, I said it was wolfenstein. The difference between Blake Stone and RoTT is that RoTT made changes to the actual renderer to apply height changes and stuff like that. Blakestone didn't. The rules of the game might be different, but the renderer is straight wolfenstein. The only visual differences are textured floors and ceilings (which actually weren't textures, but a mode-7 effect on a 2D background).

    You can literally load wolfenstein WAD files in blakestone (but not the other way around). You can't do that in RoTT, Doom, Duke 3D, or any other derivative games.

    I can load HL2 maps in Counter-Strike Source, that doesn't mean that I could say that Counter Strike is "Basically HL2 with a military theme" without someone correcting me. They both run on the same engine.

    You said that
    It was basically wolfenstein with floor and ceiling textures instead of solid colors, and a sci-fi theme.
    but failed to mention the numerous other differences that set the games apart from one another. When I mentioned them, you backtracked. I'm not really interested in getting dragged into an argument with someone who is only arguing for the sake of argument though, so I'm going to consider this matter closed.

    If anyone is interested in checking out Blake Stone, both of them are on gog for $6 each, but you're better off getting them on Steam. The Apogee Throwback Pack is only $10, and with it you get both Blake Stones, Rise of the Triad, and its expansion pack. Like most classic games, Steam just gives you the original files alongside a version of DOSBox, so you can even grab the non-DOSBox files and throw them on a disk and play them on a vintage PC if you wanted to.

  • TheSonicRetardTheSonicRetard Registered User regular
    edited November 2013
    I didn't backtrack, and if someone told me that counterstrike was HL2 concentrating on multiplayer, without the physics, and with a military theme, I wouldn't bat an eyelash. Because that's what it is.

    And a bunch of unique objects don't amount to "numerous differences." They all stem from the same source - wolfenstein.

    TheSonicRetard on
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