How we did it in 1993

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Wow, I sure miss the simplicity of the old days. Code "Just worked", no updates every other day, had to go to Best Buy, or some other computer store to buy your games - not having 200 games at your fingertips that you will never play.

Games were much MUCH more reasonably priced :-D . And you had to finish a game and wait with baited hands to get the next release.

Era was much more social back then too... Although, I do wish LCDs/OLEDs were around back then - those Viewsonic monitors were no joke. Although, were were in much better shape too ;).

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mattblack77@reddit

Be honest tho…..was your breath ever actually bated?

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n5xjg@reddit

Hah you’re right ! Would be odd to have baited hands 🤣.

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TheGillos@reddit

They had patches you could download or send away for in the mail.

But I get your point.

At least prices are low if you want to play old games. I found an e-waste computer, put Windows 7 on it, and it can play loads of retro games

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mhd@reddit

Code "Just worked"

I remember getting the version 1.666 update.

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sa547ph@reddit

In addition, we used to get our gaming news fix from magazines, what's hot, what's going out, what's being reviewed, and excited for what was to come.

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notusuallyhostile@reddit

Not to mention a lot of our magazines came with game disks. Looking at you Simtel!

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thaiborg@reddit

Where’s the turbo button on the case??!

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mattblack77@reddit

Exactly.

Not checking this was a rookie mistake.

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thelargeoneplease@reddit

I grew up watching my stepdad do this, but I’m pretty thankful my formative years were in the GUI era.

I bet this has a lot to do with why 40-something and older IT guys insist on commandline-based administration and under-40’s are less psyched about it.

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moogoothegreat@reddit

None of us knew what DOS4G/W did, but were always happy to see it when loading a new game...

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RaymondDoerr@reddit

I'm still not entirely clear on what it is honestly, and I game on my old 486DX running DOS 6.22/Win 3.1 pretty regularly. 😅

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gonzaled@reddit

I could be wrong but usually most DOS programs ran in "real time" mode, meaning that if a particular program executed code that was bugged or could interfere with whatever was loaded at RAM it could corrupt the entire system. That's why a "protected" mode was introduced, which "partitioned" the memory assigned to that particular software avoiding most problems.

Don't take my word for it. Last time I used DOS was 22 years ago when I was barely a teenager.

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RaymondDoerr@reddit

That makes a ton of sense, I think I had it's philosophical(?) purpose backwards in my mind, and it was some sort of "DOS Extender", kinda analogous to the modern gaming world where some heavily moddable/modded games also have helper "Script extender" mods and what not.

But something to protect the memory from the game, and dump the entire "partition" of memory on exit so nothing gets trapped in there until a hard reboot, makes perfect sense. It's an easy way to eliminate memory leaks post-exit.

Sounds like something to put on my wiki/lookup list later when I have more reading time. :D

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ComparisonCheap3964@reddit

Floppy disks love the magnetic fields and the degaussing of older crts! Expert video advice

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RaymondDoerr@reddit

Suddenly curious what would happen to a floppy sitting on top of a CRT being degaussed.

I never really thought about it until now, you'd think that would be a bad thing. But I'm sure myself and many other's had floppies randomly sitting on their monitor at one point, thinking nothing of it. So I guess it's probably fine short of shocking the disk against the glass and hitting the degauss button?

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thewheelsgoround@reddit

Why would anybody xcopy the install files onto c:? This a long and roundabout way to perform an install.

Realistically, you would: a: (enter) setup (enter)

The installer would prompt you for which directory you wanted to install into.

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onefiveonesix@reddit

100%. That vid is definitely not how we were doing it back then lol

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RaymondDoerr@reddit

Yesh, this vid is someone karma farming or some kid who objectively wasnt alive yet.

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Rementoire@reddit

Perhaps it's faster to just read/copy the installation files first than to read/extract from the slow floppy drive? Also makes a backup of the installation files on c:.

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jungleboogiemonster@reddit

This is why.

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thickener@reddit

Exactly because buddy wants his floppy back ;-)

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mareksoon@reddit

I came here to rage about the same thing … lol

If you want to demonstrate how difficult it was, include editing config.sys, making sure your sound card was working properly with no address, DMA, or IRQ conflicts. Repeat that with NIC if you wanted to play multiplayer, plus loading IPX and ODI drivers just for local play, then getting Kali working for online play over TCP/IP. Probably fiddling with EMM, too …

… and sorry if I made a ton of mistakes there; it was over 30 years ago.

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thewheelsgoround@reddit

I think much of that could be reasonably summarized by "building or upgrading a '90s PC". If you were to buy a PC from your local PC-builder, or buy a big-box-store PC - all of the resource management would have been worked out for you. I used to give out a post-card sized, laminated card to all of my customers which contained all of the settings necessary for them. It would say things like "Sound: Sound Blaster 16, DMA 1, IO 220, IRQ 5. Video: Super VGA (SVGA).

IPX / TCP/IP of that era, though? Yes, absolutely - that was always a rotten pain in the ass. LAN parties were reliably 1/3 troubleshooting...

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wallace321@reddit

Why would anybody xcopy the install files onto c:? This a long and roundabout way to perform an install.

I was wondering that too. That wouldn't even install the game. You'd just have a copy of the compressed install files now on the C: (which he only did for 1 of the 2 disks) completely unnecessary to play the game.

"How we did it in 1993" my ass.

This was so painful to watch because he's clearly doing more than was necessary just to make a show of "how bad things used to be".

You didn't even have to "know" or "figure out" a lot of this stuff.

Notice; it tells you how to install the game right on the disk. He didn't do that.

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6502zx81@reddit

Great "low radiation" sticker on the CRT!

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ComparisonCheap3964@reddit

Thats what keeps the doom floppy disks safe. #fake

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kenef@reddit

My man didn't even spend 5 minutes fiddling with sound card options and IRQ settings in the config utility. I smell fakery! /s

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MelAlton@reddit

Well once it's configured you don't need to do it again. It just works, until you add another card with conflicting settings.

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kenef@reddit

Fair point, though the vid shows him installing it, so the assumption is that since it was just installed there is no prior configuration saved and this is the first time he's setting it up.

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MelAlton@reddit

Oh yeah, Doom had it's own separate config setup, you're right! I think my mind blanked out the bad stuff, like sound cards that don't have the jumper setting info silkscreen onto the card itself.

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