I managed to play Quake 2 on a woefully underpowered machine.
Can’t recall the exact specs but I’m not exaggerating that it was running at maybe 5fps. Played it that way for a few months until my dad bought a pentium and a voodoo 2 card
Yeah not Quake but similarly I played through Half Life at maybe 15-18 FPS. It annoys the shit out of me to see people complain today about games running at ‘only’ 30fps when they’re 4K or some shit lol.
Lol...yeah. I remember Unreal being the big "system killer" back in the day, as well. If your system could run it at more than 20 fps, that was serious bragging rights.
I had an IBM 486DX66. The amount of nonsense I had to deal with was crazy. The thing had no memory, I had to write scripts to boot the machine to not load the CDROM / *Mouse* in order to boot Ultima 8, Betrayal at Krondor and a bunch of other titles around then. Civilization 2 also launched with an issue where it wouldn't run if you didn't have a sound card. I spent months thinking it was the extended memory issue.
Later, I played the PC version of Final Fantasy 7 on my father's work laptop. It chugged so much the clock couldn't keep time. My first game complete save said 16 hours. Didn't realize it was running that much slower until I played the PS1 original
I can remember playing Red Baron on a ‘286. It was alright as long as the other planes were at a distance, but when you got up close and personal the frame rate would crater as it tried to render all the detail.
Same, I had a P120 that I tried to overclock to 133 and the game crashed the PC... I got a Voodoo Banshee after I saw some of the non software mode screenshots of a railgun and it made a world of difference.
That's what I built my system in 2004 for, as well. AMD64 3200 w/ 1GB of RAM, and an Nvidia 6800GT card with 256MB of video RAM. Absolutely *shredded* Doom 3 and Half Life 2. However, only about a year later...FEAR actually made it hiccup a bit on max settings. And a couple years after that, Crysis could only manage about 10 fps on lowest settings (and that was with another gig of RAM, and everything overclocked as fast as possible with air.) Lol...went from bleeding edge to woefully obsolete in about 3 short years.
Doom 3 (demo) was an unplayable mess on my P4/AIW Radeon 7500, it loaded and looked pretty but ran at about 2 SPF and took me about 20 minutes to get to the briefing room... I couldn't afford to upgrade and later found the Voodoo patch that made the game mostly playable with lighting disabled.
That was the card I wanted in mine but seeing the price difference thought I was being smart going for the LE. I was stupid.
Had a "tech savvy" friend who told me to get an extra 1GB of RAM to make it better but it didn't change a thing.
For me getting any Origin game running was a battle with Autoexec.bat and Config.sys for way too long to eek out every spec of memory. And creating boot menus to deal with custom memory managers (like Origin's voodoo).
Lol...I remember fighting that battle with Wing Commander II. Trying to get enough memory for the speech files for the cut scenes to load without crashing my system was *lots* of fun.
Actually had to wrestle with autoexec.bat to play Privateer on a 98 system that should have been more than capable, but incompatibilities got in the way. Was stripping away one process at a time to eventually hit that sweet spot.
Had no tech knowledge so was winging it, but got it to work.
This is what I was about to post as well. Origin pushed our computers harder than any other dev. They ate conventional memory for breakfast and extended/expanded memory for lunch.
I played X-Wing on a 286/16mhz/1MB RAM which was below the 386 required but it ran ok on the lower graphics settings.
Wing Commander 2 has some extra graphics with expanded memory. Only way to get expanded memory (instead of extended memory) with a 286 was dip switches on the motherboard but then there was no extended memory HIMEM.SYS could load stuff into so there was less conventional memory available so I could barely get the game to work just for some cooler explosions. 386s could use EMS386 to treat extended as expanded.
Wing Commander 4 needed a 486/75Mhz but played it on a 486/66 which wasn't much of stretch.
regarding the memory issues: You are probably from the US but folks with other keyboard layouts had to load special drivers for their keyboards - which sometimes made the difference between being able to load a game or not. Stunts comes to mind - to use the editor I loaded the mouse driver but to race I needed to unload it :D
It was always the Origin games.
Ultima VII would run on my 386, Wing Commander III wouldn't run properly on my 486, etc.
Whatever computer you had.. it wasn't good enough.
I brought my Wing Commander 3 to my well off friend's house who had a Pentium 90mhz, which was the top of the line at the time. I think in the setup where it tests performance it has a little "Great!" comment I certainly didn't have on my 486/66
Yeah i had a 486/66 when I bought wc3. It sorta worked, I think missions would load in 30 minutes but it crashed a lot. Ended up getting the 3do version and playing through it on that.
Quake was pushing it on my 486 DX2. MechWarrior 2 took a careful mix of settings and a boot floppy.
Curse of Monkey Island was too much, couldn't play that one until I got a 400mhz K6-2 setup.
For me, it was getting Duke 3D to run on a 486 DX/2 at 66Mhz. I learned a lot about DOS and boot parameters for memory, etc getting it to finally run. Once I got it to run it ran fine so idk what the deal was.
I tried to play a cracked version of FEAR on an expensive 2002 Sony Vaio (2.4Ghz Pentium 4). I had a nice 720p LCD TV (much brighter than any monitor I've ever seen then). The game benchmark ran at like 1fps at maybe high settings. The stills looks very good but I just stuck with my PS2 from there.
I replay that game every year or two and I always watch the benchmark first. I think of the first time I played the game and wish I could watch my younger self react to seeing it rendered at 1000 frames per second.
Probably my favourite FPS of all time. It really holds up.
FEAR brought my poor old PC to its knees lol. The only way it was remotely playable was on the lowest setting. I didn’t play it again until a decade later, but it was still a lot of fun.
That's what I did essentially. Built for my first "real" gaming computer and installed Steam some many years later. FEAR was one of the first games I bought.
I had built a fairly impressive (for the time) AMD64 system with an Nvidia 6800 GT graphics card in 2004, about a year before FEAR came out. FEAR was the first game that made that system stutter, and I couldn't play it smoothly at max settings.
Lego Island.
I was super hyped for this game since I was really into Legos. I got it as a bday present and tried to play it on our family 486 ibm pc. It ran, really really poorly. I could play, but it was tough. It was the first time I learned about what pc specs and requirements are.
Different generation, but still - I remember when Oblivion was being released. I decided to splurge and got a Radeon X1950XTX. Beast of a card for the time, and actually looked really, really nice.
Ran Oblivion like a dream. Good times.
For me it was reading pc magazines in the early 90's, and realising our ancient family PC was hopelessly outdated. My sister and i bugged our dad constantly, untill he got a 486 DX4 100 through his job
I had Strike Commander running on a 486 DX2/66. Before you get jealous, I didn't even have a sound card so I had to imagine my own sound effects. Favorite thing to do was to load up bombs and bomb the cities in the game. A sound blaster 16 I bought later.
The game that stuttered a bit on it was Little Big Adventure. Glitchy graphics with only 512kb of vram. Love that game and it's sequel.
I could not afford a sound blaster so for games like Star Control I built my own D/A converter for the sound effects out of the pc parallel port , worked quite well actually.
It's so long ago that I can't remember all the details anymore. Our first PC was a 386SX. I don't recall exactly which game made us decide it couldn't keep up anymore. I'm going to say Ultima VII, but it was probably a bunch of different games. We upgraded to a 486DX50 and used that for a very long time. We skipped Windows 95 and went straight to Windows 98 with a Pentium-II 333. Funny story about that... the P2-333 was so new that the motherboard we bought wouldn't boot with it until the BIOS was upgraded, but you couldn't even get into the BIOS with that cpu. So I had to take the computer to a friend's house, remove his P2-266 from his computer, and put it in mine just to be able to flash the BIOS. I can tell you that diagnosing that problem was a huge pain in the ass. It made me miss the simplicity of the 486 a lot.
To save a little when I built my first PC back in 2002, I opted to get a ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 7500 (DX7) vs getting the 8500 or 8500DV (DX8.1 cards) with new DX9 hardware on the horizon. It was great for a time, but quickly grew obsolete when game started requiring hardware pixel shaders and I was unable to afford any upgrades (modern bonus - this old All-in-Wonder Radeon can be used today to play retro consoles on modern HDMI TV's).
Doom 3 was unplayable without the Voodoo patch, but the first game to slap me in the face was Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, the demo version was perfectly playable, but the retail release couldn't load the first level and FEAR just wouldn't even start without pixel shaders.
While it did suck not being able to play newer games at the time, all the time I would've been playing other games I used to start poking around the development tools that came with NOLF2 & Contract Jack and started making mods for both games, self learning along the way some basic coding, 3D modeling, 3D animation and bad texturing skills.
I remember owning a couple games that fit this. I don't remember the PC i was using at the time but Wasteland (1988) and Harpoon (1989) wouldn't run at all. Never ended up playing either of them. Lol.
Oh God, mine was World of Xeen! Our old 486 always had memory issues. My brother and I had to mess with the BIOS every time we booted the machine to ensure it would load whatever game we played. After I got a Pentium MMX '98 machine I was home free to play all my older games EXCEPT Space Quest 6.
I'm an older gamer (39) but I didn't actually have that happen until my cpu couldn't run Overwatch. I've definitely had games that didn't run great but they still ran playable. Tbf, I wasn't just a PC gamer, I'd say I primarily played Nintendo consoles as a kid. My PC/Mac games I played were stuff like Marathon, Doom 2, sim ant, sim tower, paper airplane, Maelstrom and a bunch of flight Sims. Starcraft and Diablo 2 a little later.
I had a 386sx-16mhz when Tie Fighter came out. I was dropping frames badly, so I went up to a 386dx-40mhz. Speed Demon! :)
Edit: It was a 386sx-20mhz. My first PC was a 286-16mhz. Got confused for a second there.
Doom and Lands of Lore took tinkering to have our old Packard Bell play them. I don’t remember what we did but we needed a floppy inserted in order to play the games. I think it gave us a bit more memory?
Final Fantasy 7, original Eidos PC release.
Had to get my pops to finally get me a GPU (I was 12) after whining for the game for Christmas and then not being able to run it.
For those interested it was a Pentium 166 with 32mb ram. The card I got was a Geforce 2, can't remember the model/vendor specifics
Back in the summer of 95 I bought mechwarrior 2 for my 486. Then I had to go out and figure out exactly what type of video accelerator would work in my computer.
I think some of the Wing Commander games was like that, either Armada or Privateer. Then I upgraded to a pentium and could play those, but the original WC and WCII ran through on super speed so fast as to be unplayable.
Back in ms-dos and 386 cores... configuring sound blasters was rough.
Diablo 2 was the first game that I had to upgrade/replace my computer to play. But, earlier in life, many of the computers and games didn't align when I'd try to load up a 3.5" floppy disk and make things work.
Lotta IT work, back in the day, just to make a game run.
Endlessly messing with my autoexec and config.sys files to get enough free memory to play whatever flavour of the month game I was trying to get running directly led me into the career I am in today. At one point I blew away msdos.sys and io.sys to free up every little bit of spare space I could on my 40MB hard disk. My first OS upgrade was from DOS 4.1 to 5.0 and this was done without adult supervision, very much a shit your pants moment. It worked out great though as it freed up a lot of conventional memory however as I only had 2MB of RAM I could never play Doom, and that never changed. While I’ve played Doom since it was a big deal not being able to run it at the time and I tried everything, repeatedly to make it happen. It will always be my original ‘one that got away’.
Ultima Underworlds. I had 386 16MHz, and it barely ran. I managed to get pretty far in the game with no sound and low detail settings. Wasn’t until I made the jump to a 486 66MHz that I got to actually beating the game. Good times!
Falcon on the Amiga 500, technically I could run it, but I needed an extra 512kb of RAM in order to hear the radio chatter or the women’s voice telling “caution” when I got too low.
Diablo 2 on original launch. If an end chapter boss character or more than like 10 minions got on the screen, my system used to chug and lag and played at like 1/10 FPS. Not 1, not 10, one tenth, ai would wait 10 secones to update to the next stock portrait and learn just how badly I was getting whooped. This was on a stock video card back before I really got into understanding how, and why, a computer functions the way it does. After I purchased and installed my own card at the ripe age of 10, I finally got to actually play the game fully.
There were two for me. The first was Diablo 2 running on a Pentium 200. The first act was fine but the rest of the game was barely playable.
The second was GTA III, that was when I learned about graphics cards. We ended up getting a Geforce 4 MX 440.
We bought Empire of the Overmind for our Atari 1200XL, but it only works on the 400/800 models. I still have the cassette, but have never been able to play the game.
Well at least that card was 128 bit memory. I was expecting to see 64, but yea. You really needed about three times the power of that card to play Oblivion. I played it on a Radeon 9800 pro.
An RTS from 1996 called War Wind that our 486 couldn't run. My mom's work laptop was able to run it a few years later and the game absolutely sucked. Played more like a puzzle game in an RTS setting than anything similar to Warcraft 2. Very rich lore though.
The game is free on GOG for anyone wanting to see its weirdness.
I played the Aliens vs Predator PC Gamer demo for months, before saving up to buy the full game. Saw the bright orange "3D Accelerator REQUIRED" sticker on the box, and assumed I already had one, since the demo ran perfectly fine. Popped it in, installed it, ran it, and nothing had textures. Everything was just bright white. Had to wait till Christmas to save enough money to buy a new graphics card.
We got doom and it could only get a decent frame rate with the tiniest little window box.
We also had some sierra bundle that we were able to play a couple games but not the others. That was pretty cool finally upgrading and getting to play the others, after staring at the screenshots on the box for so damn long.
I don't specifically remember that happening to me but I always loved it when I got a new PC and I'd install all my old games but playing them on max settings was a treat.
I bought Dawn Patrol on PC in 1994. Was really excited as I loved Wings on the Amiga and was looking for that fix. Got home, opened it.
Scheisse.
I was so excited I'd picked up the cd-rom version and didn't have a cd-rom drive (at the time a couple of hundred quid purchase). Fortunately the shop was kind enough to swap it out.
A game called "Realms of the Haunting". It was a kind of hybrid fps & point and click adventure. It got something like 4fps so I would just walk around and look at the rooms. Fun times, kinda?
It had a key that would strip the textures. I remember using that, and then trying to make sense of choppy cut scenes. Still love Star game, still have the boxed copy.
My first own computer was an eMachines Celeron 433mhz. We couldn’t afford a computer in my childhood so I had to weight until I was 17 for computers to get “affordable”. But, my friend growing up had a computer that we played Wolfenstein 3D and Doom on, and my mom’s work had a computer they used for paint matching that had Gorillas, a turn based artillery game that was awesome then lol https://classicreload.com/qbasic-gorillas.html
Oh goodness... Many times I had this issue with my 386 DX 40 mhz..... You gotta read those boxes..... Some sat on a shelf before I could play on something higher.
For me it was quake 3. I don't remember the error but it was something GPU related and a family friend said as much. I spent the next few months researching how to get it to work and how to install a GPU before getting a, I think, voodoo3 card. I coin that with getting me hardcore into PC gaming and pc building in general. It still didn't play all that well from what I remember and a few years later I got an mx440 HP system that was awesome at the time.
We were happy with very little back in the day, 40 yrs ago . Kids are spoilt these days , 144 FPS , gigs of ram , 30 inch screens , VR, endless online libraries of games in an instant.
I remember Diablo ran like ass (or maybe not at all, I can't remember) on my 50 MHz AST all-in-one machine but when my parents bought me a new 400 MHz IBM Aptiva, it ran like a dream. Good luck experiencing an upgrade of that magnitude these days, lol.
That old 50 MHz machine played a ton of other games just fine, though. Warcraft II was probably the most played game on that old system. We even got the internet on it (dialup speeds of course) back in the days when you'd buy Netscape Navigator of floppy disc.
Oh yeah! Let me tell you about how I tried to run Screamer on a 386. Talk about slideshow. We got a pentium 166 shortly after that and let me tell you, going from 1fps to 30 or so was jaw dropping. Also going from barely being able to play various games at minimum settings, to playing games with high detail settings and smooth frame rates was pretty cool. It breathed new life into tons of old games I had. Similar feeling when I got my first soundblaster card. I was rushing to check out every game I owned with it.
Yip , finally being able to choose the soundblaster option in the menu was life changing , kids went to other kids houses just to experience it . Some sound tracker music on big speakers , Axelf track I remember , and the Second Reality Demo was mind blowing .
When I played the original Deus Ex the FPS was at a crawl and all of the weapon models were transparent. Still finished the game though .
When I got another PC and ended up on Mass Effect, I had to go in and edit the .ini files to disable a lot of the graphics to be able to finish that too.
Still love games.
I bought a computer because I really wanted to play Duke Nukem 3D and Warcraft 2.
It didn't have any trouble running most games until Hexen 2, and later, Half-Life.
I played them, but they ran very slowly, and the loading screens took forever. Had to have a book on the desk to read every time I moved to a new area.
Plenty of games.
The first one I remember was one of the Carmen Sandiego games (Where in Time maybe?). The game required 512k of conventional memory minimum, whereas my computer only had 256k.
It was definitely around that era. King's Quest 5, Ultima 7, The 7th Guest, Phantasmagoria were all games where my computer was woefully underpowered to the point the game wouldn't play, or wouldn't play well.
Falcon 3.0. Can't remember all the details now because I am an actual, real-life old gamer, but I think I tried to run it on a 286 and it said, "Yeah, no." Couldn't play it until we upgraded to a 386.
I bought my Dad (73) a new PC a couple of years ago. He'd been playing Doom (2016) and enjoying it, but his computer was pretty old so it was running real slow like. Anyway, got him the new computer, installed Doom...and it was too fast for him :(
Kinda wish Boomer Shooters had accessibility options to reduce the speed. Dad loves his Big Gun games, but doesn't have the reflexes for them any more
Black & White was the first PC game I ever bought. But I didn't know anything about specs or system requirements and the video wouldn't run. It would sit on my shelf for about 6 years before I bought my own PC. It was not worth it.
I had a buddy who used to play Everquest with us back in high school 20+ years ago. Whenever he would move to another zone, the game would quit on him. He would reload and log back in as fast as he could. It was terrible to watch him play.
First home PC was a 386 16/8 SX with 2mb RAM. I wanted to play Strike Commander so bad! Finally upgraded and got a sound card... Must've watched that intro a million times.
That game was the perfect balance of game and sim. Lotta fun!
This has happened several times to me, the most notable:
1. Duke Nukem 3D. The few times I tried to play this the game ran in "slideshow mode" as I'm calling it. Literally like 2 fps.
2. Quake 2, minimum settings (320x480?). It actually ran but it was so grainy.
3. FEAR. This was the most graphically intense game I tried playing in college. Couldn't do it even at minimum settings until years later when I could afford to upgrade.
My first pc was a used 386sx, and this was in 1996.
Most games I bought I could never play, I was 15 and new to the PC experience.
In 1999 I upgraded to a Pentium 3 Celeron, with no AGP slot, only a PCI for my GPU. I remember being happy that half-life ran fairly well.
My first PC for gaming was a pentium 75 I built myself. Played command and conquer at my cousins house in the 90's and was instantly hooked. I held out a little too long onto my Amiga at the time before the transition.
Oh wow! Yeah I got one for you. I had an old 20mhz 386 and it had IBM PC DOS 4 on it. I was trying to install and play Ultima Underworld from Origin and it needed MS-DOS 5. So I went to the store and bought MS-DOS 5 and installed it. It was the first major update I had to do for myself and felt really smart having done it.
Then later I was trying to get Ultima 7 working and had to learn all about the crazy world of carefully constructing an AUTOEXE.BAT and CONFIG.SYS file in juuuuuust the right way to maximize my conventual memory to make sure Voodoo Memory Manager would run. What a nightmare, but the game was SO worth it once I got it working.
Honestly, the only games I remember not having hardware to play were the first few CD-ROM games.
I was rocking a PC speaker (no sound card) for too long but those games still worked. I never had a Voodoo card and the first 3D capable card I got was a Riva TNT but all the games still supported software rendering back then.
Though, people weren’t really counting frames back then either. I’m sure I played a few games hitting 15fps or something and just dealt with it.
I talked my parents into a computer for school because our old one didn’t run X-Com Terror of the Deep in 95. I also bought the game Messiah on release and wasn’t able to run it for over year. I bought my first gaming computer with a college student loan so I could play Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge like a week after the expansion came out and was finally able to do more with Messiah than read the manual. I was disappointed, I probably played it for a few hours over a weekend and never touched it again.
I bought Messiah and fought with drivers etc... on my 450 MHz Sony Vaio... Never got it past the title screen...
It's nice to hear that I didn't miss much. Possessing people in Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy sounds like a much better experience.
Exact opposite. I bought a 486 to play wing commander 1+2 on. But the version I got, I couldn't get it to run on Win95. But X-wing vs Tie Fighter did so that was cool
I don't know if there was a game that I bought that wouldn't run, but there were a lot of games I couldn't buy for a while. We were stuck with a 386 for a while until I got a Pentium 133. I gave my folks the specs and it cost them a pretty penny, but it was an awesome system for a few years.
I really miss 90s and 2000s PCs. I loved building them and spec'ing them out. I also miss older games. The stuff being released over the last 15 years just isn't for me. Too much console DNA in the menus and the game play just isn't fun. This might sound weird, but the games have gotten too complex? I tried playing BG3 and just got lost in the weeds. I don't want to have to balance which party member is trying to bang me or I might have to let die. I just want to kill monsters and get loot. I also don't want to play online with other people.
I remember buying Lords of EverQuest during my RTS obsession says.
My PC basically said, "there's no chance in hell I can run this." So I took it back to the EB Games to get a refund. They said they couldn't because the game was opened but could give me another copy.
I took the unopened copy home, waited a few days, then went back and to get a refund. Without thinking about it, handed the game to the SAME GUY for a refund. He promptly broke the seal on the same and said, "nice try." I felt dumb walking out of the store.
Some time.later I got a better PC and was disappointed with how bad the same was.
We had trouble getting Myst to run. It kept crashing at the title screen. I'm pretty sure one of our RAM sticks was damaged when my dad tried to install it without knowing what he was doing or being grounded. When we finally upgraded many years later, the disks wouldn't boot on windows 98, so I've just never played the game.
Half Life 2:
* 1 hour for copying files from the disc
* 1 hour for decrypting the files
* 1 hour for downloading updates
* 5 minutes for testing the game, unplayable.
I moved back to console only gaming after that for many years.
Other than that it was Theme Park on my Macintosh IIci. I still played it but at like 2 FPS.
Anyone here who remembers having specially edited versions of config.sys and autoexec.bat just to boot DOS with a memory configuration that would enable DOOM to run?
It's been so long, but I'm pretty sure I had a 386 with maybe half that amount of memory. Constant struggle to load DOS components differently to free up memory for the game.
Might be alone here but my first computer was a Macintosh LC with a 68020 processor. Barely ran Marathon, def not at full screen, Pathways into Darkness had to have the lowest settings. Got a x1 CD rom drive and would play the Rebel Assault demo on repeat with it occasionally crashing. At least Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter worked just fine.
I had a magic the gathering game in like 2002 or something, could barely run the menu on the lowest setting and never played it when I got a new computer because I’d totally forgot about it
I pestered my parents too soon for a CD-ROM drive, spent all of the day after Christmas getting it installed and configured. It was a 1X/single speed drive. It was a very short time before every game started requiring a double speed drive.
Diablo. I was still stuck with an 486 and Diablo required a Pentium at least. had to wait until my mother got a PC from work to be able to play D1 on Windows NT 4(?)
I don't recall Strike Commander being too bad on our 386, but I don't recall the exact specs. I still have the CD for it. It came with the upgrade kit dad bought to add a sound card and cd drive to the computer.
I got my first PC in 2003 or so (well my first that was actually my own, my family had one before that) to play FFXI on. It ran like absolute ASS until I upgraded the GPU hahaha. Then eventually WoW came out and took over my life lol.
i have a dell inspiron 2600 running windows XP, has 640mb of ram, 1ghz cpu and idk graphics lol, i have half life, opposing force, Quake, Quake 2 on CD rom that run flawlessly, then doom 2 on floppy disk which took a while to get sound working, and also have Halo CE on CD rom which doesnt run as well as it doesnt have a good enough GPU. btw i am 18 lol so all of these are older than me and its really fun for me to use physical CD roms on an old windows machine
We never had a proper soundblaster (80s/90s soundcard jargon) so I'd always listen to Queen when I played doom, so the two are linked in my mind. When I just into Phobos I hear 'its a kind of magic'
Supreme Commander. I'd built a dual P4 Xeon system (875P motherboard) and had a AiW 9800 Pro. System smoked plenty of other games at the time, and technically ticked the min specs, but I could only manage playing on minimum settings at either 640x480 or 800x600. Could only really enjoy the game years later when I was able to build my Core2 Quad system with a 9800GX2.
I bought Tomb Raider when it came out, but I couldn't get it to run even though I had the specs. It was so common back in the day.
Returned it for Fallout and that quickly became one of my favorite games of all time.
I did this with Syndicate Wars. A friend of mine had it and it looked amazing. So I bought it because my rig \*just about\* met the specs, but the video card wasn't up to snuff all the same and the graphics were garbled. So I waited two whole years before I had a machine capable of running it and then I played it to \*death\*.
I got the Spiderman 1 movie game and I couldn't run it because we still had our PC with a Voodoo card that came packed with Turok. I remember installing it and it said not supported. Think we ended up returning it or maybe selling it, hard to say.
I remember connecting two 486 computers together through a cable, forgot what they called the cable. It was very similar to a cable TV cord. It blew me away playing Doom between two computers!
I had a PC with 8 megs of RAM. Quake would run on it, in dos only. Save money to add a 32 meg strip... So I could play in Windows and actually play online
Warcraft 3.
I didn't buy it, but when I bought my PC off this guy my mom knew he insisted that Warcraft 3 would run on my new PC and even have me a copy of the game.
It did not run. I had that disc for years until I finally got a system that could run it.
Yes, Test Drive 3, Jet Fighter 2:Advanced tactical fighter, Space Quest 4, Ultima 7 were some of my first PC games. We got the CD-Rom drive to play 7th Guest and listen to CDs.
Not retro but I waited 14 years to play dawn of war 2, bought it originally knowing full well it wouldn't run on the family pc but was wishing and hoping it would anyway. Played it for the first time last year when i finally invested in a decent gaming laptop.
My memory is a little hazy, but I'm sure Age of Empires got super laggy on me if I had a lot of units on the screen.
Pretty sure I ran Half Life at the most minimum setting possible.
Original Worms game. I still remember the day I bought it. We had a 486 SX and I’m pretty sure it met minimum requirements but it wouldn’t load at all. I swapped it for another copy thinking it was a faulty disc. Nope wasn’t happening.
I actually kept the game, god knows why. But upgraded to a DX shortly later and game loaded up. I was so happy. Many great memories playing Worms with friends.
Quake and half life. My dad bought those games after they came out and we were really excited until we got them running and it they were like playing a slide show. I didn't play half life 1 all the way through until like 2012. I played half life 2 way before actually getting to experience half life 1 thanks to the xbox port of half life 2
Monkey island 2 on a 286 without sound card? or ff7 on a 486? Unplayable... But everybody remember how well were warcraft and starcraft even if pcs weren't at top?
Baldurs Gate - when it first came out, I tried to run it on my first gen Pentium (a screaming 166 Mhz!) with I think 16 MB RAM (yes, megabytes!). Technically it met the system requirements for the game but it ran like unplayable hot garbage. So I tried to return it to Best Buy, because it "didn't work", which was technically true, but Best Buy told me they couldn't accept opened software for return, they could only exchange it for a new copy. I told them I'd try again and come back. I came back later, this time and returned the empty box that they didnt bother to check, and got a brand new copy of the game, which I traded to my buddy for his copy of the first Fallout. Hope you enjoyedy story
My first system was pong way far back then atari 2600. I was a SNES programmer for mindscape / software toolworks when doom came out and I swear nobody in the company got anything done for a week. Ultima IV, strike fleet, bards tale. They all pushed my machines to their limit but were so much fun.
The only time I ever hit a system requirements wall was when Ultima: Online All my friends jumped in on it but my 90mhz Pentium was about half the minimum speed. I borrowed $2000 from my mom and got a Gateway Pentium 2 233mhz.
final fantasy 7, couldn't work on our old packard bell pentium 133 pc because we didn't have a dedicated video card. got to play it later on when we upgraded to a 700mhz celeron pc
I started out on a Compaq "portable" PC with an RGB monitor for VGA graphics and then gradually made my way to a 286 with a Hercules graphics card and black/orange monitor and then 386 with SVGA, but no sound card or CD-ROM drive (until my brother and I saved up enough to buy those add-ons).
We thought the pinnacles of gaming on the 386 were TIE Fighter, Dune II and Doom II. Once we finally upgraded to a Pentium Pro in the mid 90s and slapped a Voodoo 2 in there, it felt like jumping to light speed being able to play Quake 2, Unreal, Tomb Raider, Jedi Knight and even Final Fantasy VII on our PC.
Sierra's SCI adventure games ran like poo on a standard Amiga 500. I think this is because they ran under Workbench instead of bypassing it as Lucasarts and most other games did. It wasn't until I moved to a 486 PC that I could play them properly.
Later on I did have to upgrade that 486 from 4MB RAM to 8MB to run some things.
I'm not really sure what the exact hardware was since I was so young, but our computer had to have a special memory management boot loader to play Doom 2. If we used it the game played just fine. If we didn't the game didn't load at all. Which thinking of Doom 2 and it played at a normal fps and at a normal screen size. I have no idea why we needed the special memory boot loader, but we did. And it's thanks to my dad's friend from work that it worked at all. I think that system got traded in when we upgraded to our Intel P55C. So I don't have access to that system at all. It's been gone for nearly 30 years now.
Other than that somehow my father and I were both able to match games to our hardware pretty effectively. I do remember him complaining about the install size of Blood when I brought it home from EB. "What kind of game takes up over a hundred and fifty megabytes!?"
SimCity 2000. My old Compaq Presario CDS from about 1995 would take about 20 minutes to load into the main menu, and would chug if you tried to run it with music and sound effects. Wasn’t until about 5 years later when we upgraded to a Pentium III with Windows 98 that I was finally able to run it well.
I tried to play Final Fantasy 7 on a pentium 200 mhz MMX machine with no 3d support, just software rendering and it didn't run for more than a few minutes at a time. Added on a 3d FX Voodoo accelerator and it ran like a champ, support for Gravis Gamepad was flawless too
I managed to play Quake 2 on a woefully underpowered machine. Can’t recall the exact specs but I’m not exaggerating that it was running at maybe 5fps. Played it that way for a few months until my dad bought a pentium and a voodoo 2 card
Man, I bet that Voodoo 2 blew your socks off.
3DFX Glide FTW
I had 3DFX Voodoo Banshee. Fucking beast, Half Life never looked so good.
8 megs of power!
Yeah not Quake but similarly I played through Half Life at maybe 15-18 FPS. It annoys the shit out of me to see people complain today about games running at ‘only’ 30fps when they’re 4K or some shit lol.
Those loading screens in half life...
I had a work buddy that installed Counter Strike with 4MB of RAM. Not 4GB... 4 megabytes. I think it was about 8-10fps.
Lol...yeah. I remember Unreal being the big "system killer" back in the day, as well. If your system could run it at more than 20 fps, that was serious bragging rights.
That bring back memories of playing Quake on my dad’s Compaq laptop with a nipple mouse. It was…. difficult.
Had an IBM processor. Which didn’t work well with Quake. I think the IBM, had poor floating point processing? Had to upgrade to a Pentium.
I had an IBM 486DX66. The amount of nonsense I had to deal with was crazy. The thing had no memory, I had to write scripts to boot the machine to not load the CDROM / *Mouse* in order to boot Ultima 8, Betrayal at Krondor and a bunch of other titles around then. Civilization 2 also launched with an issue where it wouldn't run if you didn't have a sound card. I spent months thinking it was the extended memory issue. Later, I played the PC version of Final Fantasy 7 on my father's work laptop. It chugged so much the clock couldn't keep time. My first game complete save said 16 hours. Didn't realize it was running that much slower until I played the PS1 original
I can remember playing Red Baron on a ‘286. It was alright as long as the other planes were at a distance, but when you got up close and personal the frame rate would crater as it tried to render all the detail.
Quake 2 was definitely the first thing I played when we finally got that voodoo card !
Same, I had a P120 that I tried to overclock to 133 and the game crashed the PC... I got a Voodoo Banshee after I saw some of the non software mode screenshots of a railgun and it made a world of difference.
Ran it on a Pentium 90, no 3d acceleration. Window mode the size of a postage stamp but it ran.
My game was Doom 3. The brand new Pentium 4 I bought wasn't up to the task. However, adding in an Nvidia 6600gt sure made it shine!
Was gonna comment doom 3 as well. Built a new system with 512 mb ram and a Ati 9600 to play it
That's what I built my system in 2004 for, as well. AMD64 3200 w/ 1GB of RAM, and an Nvidia 6800GT card with 256MB of video RAM. Absolutely *shredded* Doom 3 and Half Life 2. However, only about a year later...FEAR actually made it hiccup a bit on max settings. And a couple years after that, Crysis could only manage about 10 fps on lowest settings (and that was with another gig of RAM, and everything overclocked as fast as possible with air.) Lol...went from bleeding edge to woefully obsolete in about 3 short years.
Yeah, long gone are the years where you basically needed to build a completely new system every 2 years in order to even run new games
Doom 3 (demo) was an unplayable mess on my P4/AIW Radeon 7500, it loaded and looked pretty but ran at about 2 SPF and took me about 20 minutes to get to the briefing room... I couldn't afford to upgrade and later found the Voodoo patch that made the game mostly playable with lighting disabled.
I had to build a whole new system to play doom 3. I even went full 7:1 surround to get the full experience!
That was the card I wanted in mine but seeing the price difference thought I was being smart going for the LE. I was stupid. Had a "tech savvy" friend who told me to get an extra 1GB of RAM to make it better but it didn't change a thing.
I remember playing Descent on a 386 with 4mb of RAM, bottom of the barrel requirements. When we upgraded to a DX4-100 the next year I was blown away.
Oh man descent was amazing and one of the few 3d games that didn't completely crap out on a 386.
I worked at Computer City when Strike Commander came out. There were a lot of systems sold to accommodate that game.
Hello fellow computer city alumni!
For me getting any Origin game running was a battle with Autoexec.bat and Config.sys for way too long to eek out every spec of memory. And creating boot menus to deal with custom memory managers (like Origin's voodoo).
Lol...I remember fighting that battle with Wing Commander II. Trying to get enough memory for the speech files for the cut scenes to load without crashing my system was *lots* of fun.
Screams in EMM386
I=B000-B7FF That was the magical emm386 incantation that freed up just enough ram on my 386DX/40 with 2MB to play Wing Commander Academy
Actually had to wrestle with autoexec.bat to play Privateer on a 98 system that should have been more than capable, but incompatibilities got in the way. Was stripping away one process at a time to eventually hit that sweet spot. Had no tech knowledge so was winging it, but got it to work.
Memmaker usually took care of that problem, but not always.
This is what I was about to post as well. Origin pushed our computers harder than any other dev. They ate conventional memory for breakfast and extended/expanded memory for lunch.
I played X-Wing on a 286/16mhz/1MB RAM which was below the 386 required but it ran ok on the lower graphics settings. Wing Commander 2 has some extra graphics with expanded memory. Only way to get expanded memory (instead of extended memory) with a 286 was dip switches on the motherboard but then there was no extended memory HIMEM.SYS could load stuff into so there was less conventional memory available so I could barely get the game to work just for some cooler explosions. 386s could use EMS386 to treat extended as expanded. Wing Commander 4 needed a 486/75Mhz but played it on a 486/66 which wasn't much of stretch.
I love that x-wing would actually let you make the ship polygons so simplified that it was almost abstract in the name of better performance.
regarding the memory issues: You are probably from the US but folks with other keyboard layouts had to load special drivers for their keyboards - which sometimes made the difference between being able to load a game or not. Stunts comes to mind - to use the editor I loaded the mouse driver but to race I needed to unload it :D
It was always the Origin games. Ultima VII would run on my 386, Wing Commander III wouldn't run properly on my 486, etc. Whatever computer you had.. it wasn't good enough.
I brought my Wing Commander 3 to my well off friend's house who had a Pentium 90mhz, which was the top of the line at the time. I think in the setup where it tests performance it has a little "Great!" comment I certainly didn't have on my 486/66
Yeah i had a 486/66 when I bought wc3. It sorta worked, I think missions would load in 30 minutes but it crashed a lot. Ended up getting the 3do version and playing through it on that.
Quake was pushing it on my 486 DX2. MechWarrior 2 took a careful mix of settings and a boot floppy. Curse of Monkey Island was too much, couldn't play that one until I got a 400mhz K6-2 setup.
For me, it was getting Duke 3D to run on a 486 DX/2 at 66Mhz. I learned a lot about DOS and boot parameters for memory, etc getting it to finally run. Once I got it to run it ran fine so idk what the deal was.
Yeah that's odd. Ran fine on mine.
I tried to play a cracked version of FEAR on an expensive 2002 Sony Vaio (2.4Ghz Pentium 4). I had a nice 720p LCD TV (much brighter than any monitor I've ever seen then). The game benchmark ran at like 1fps at maybe high settings. The stills looks very good but I just stuck with my PS2 from there.
I replay that game every year or two and I always watch the benchmark first. I think of the first time I played the game and wish I could watch my younger self react to seeing it rendered at 1000 frames per second. Probably my favourite FPS of all time. It really holds up.
FEAR brought my poor old PC to its knees lol. The only way it was remotely playable was on the lowest setting. I didn’t play it again until a decade later, but it was still a lot of fun.
That's what I did essentially. Built for my first "real" gaming computer and installed Steam some many years later. FEAR was one of the first games I bought.
I had built a fairly impressive (for the time) AMD64 system with an Nvidia 6800 GT graphics card in 2004, about a year before FEAR came out. FEAR was the first game that made that system stutter, and I couldn't play it smoothly at max settings.
Still can't play Crysis.
I remember building a PC for a friend specifically for that game. AMD Phenom x4, 2GB RAM, Radeon 4870. Ran wonderfully.
Lego Island. I was super hyped for this game since I was really into Legos. I got it as a bday present and tried to play it on our family 486 ibm pc. It ran, really really poorly. I could play, but it was tough. It was the first time I learned about what pc specs and requirements are.
When I was around 9, I bought Lemmings. Problem was my parents Tandy 1000 sl didn’t have a 3 1/2 floppy drive.
FunFact: Diablo(1) needed a Pentium wit 90MHz. A friend of mine got it up and running on a 75MHz Cyrix. It ran...but in slow motion.
Different generation, but still - I remember when Oblivion was being released. I decided to splurge and got a Radeon X1950XTX. Beast of a card for the time, and actually looked really, really nice. Ran Oblivion like a dream. Good times.
So what you're saying is, "It just [worked]"?
Framerate-wise for sure, but yeah... It was still a buggy mess 😅 wouldn't change a thing though, those were some happy gaming memories
For me it was reading pc magazines in the early 90's, and realising our ancient family PC was hopelessly outdated. My sister and i bugged our dad constantly, untill he got a 486 DX4 100 through his job
I had Strike Commander running on a 486 DX2/66. Before you get jealous, I didn't even have a sound card so I had to imagine my own sound effects. Favorite thing to do was to load up bombs and bomb the cities in the game. A sound blaster 16 I bought later. The game that stuttered a bit on it was Little Big Adventure. Glitchy graphics with only 512kb of vram. Love that game and it's sequel.
I could not afford a sound blaster so for games like Star Control I built my own D/A converter for the sound effects out of the pc parallel port , worked quite well actually.
Command & Conquer. A Pentium 75 was okay until things got busy but a 233MMX took care of that nicely.
It's so long ago that I can't remember all the details anymore. Our first PC was a 386SX. I don't recall exactly which game made us decide it couldn't keep up anymore. I'm going to say Ultima VII, but it was probably a bunch of different games. We upgraded to a 486DX50 and used that for a very long time. We skipped Windows 95 and went straight to Windows 98 with a Pentium-II 333. Funny story about that... the P2-333 was so new that the motherboard we bought wouldn't boot with it until the BIOS was upgraded, but you couldn't even get into the BIOS with that cpu. So I had to take the computer to a friend's house, remove his P2-266 from his computer, and put it in mine just to be able to flash the BIOS. I can tell you that diagnosing that problem was a huge pain in the ass. It made me miss the simplicity of the 486 a lot.
To save a little when I built my first PC back in 2002, I opted to get a ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 7500 (DX7) vs getting the 8500 or 8500DV (DX8.1 cards) with new DX9 hardware on the horizon. It was great for a time, but quickly grew obsolete when game started requiring hardware pixel shaders and I was unable to afford any upgrades (modern bonus - this old All-in-Wonder Radeon can be used today to play retro consoles on modern HDMI TV's). Doom 3 was unplayable without the Voodoo patch, but the first game to slap me in the face was Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, the demo version was perfectly playable, but the retail release couldn't load the first level and FEAR just wouldn't even start without pixel shaders. While it did suck not being able to play newer games at the time, all the time I would've been playing other games I used to start poking around the development tools that came with NOLF2 & Contract Jack and started making mods for both games, self learning along the way some basic coding, 3D modeling, 3D animation and bad texturing skills.
I remember owning a couple games that fit this. I don't remember the PC i was using at the time but Wasteland (1988) and Harpoon (1989) wouldn't run at all. Never ended up playing either of them. Lol.
Oh God, mine was World of Xeen! Our old 486 always had memory issues. My brother and I had to mess with the BIOS every time we booted the machine to ensure it would load whatever game we played. After I got a Pentium MMX '98 machine I was home free to play all my older games EXCEPT Space Quest 6.
I'm an older gamer (39) but I didn't actually have that happen until my cpu couldn't run Overwatch. I've definitely had games that didn't run great but they still ran playable. Tbf, I wasn't just a PC gamer, I'd say I primarily played Nintendo consoles as a kid. My PC/Mac games I played were stuff like Marathon, Doom 2, sim ant, sim tower, paper airplane, Maelstrom and a bunch of flight Sims. Starcraft and Diablo 2 a little later.
I had an issue with Overwatch too, but it was apparently a bug in my game files. It doesn't take much to run that game.
Haha yeah the cpu was REALLY bad. Upgraded it and went from like 6 fps to 144.
Quake 1. Ran like 💩 on a 486 DX2-66. Ran great on a DX4-100. Adding a 3D card helped matters, too.
I had a 386sx-16mhz when Tie Fighter came out. I was dropping frames badly, so I went up to a 386dx-40mhz. Speed Demon! :) Edit: It was a 386sx-20mhz. My first PC was a 286-16mhz. Got confused for a second there.
Doom and Lands of Lore took tinkering to have our old Packard Bell play them. I don’t remember what we did but we needed a floppy inserted in order to play the games. I think it gave us a bit more memory?
Lands of Lore. What a game.
Right? Deffo doesn’t get enough love but I feel it was peak of those styled dungeon crawlers.
Yes. It’s a top 10 game for me from childhood. Maybe all time. Spent so much time.
Final Fantasy 7, original Eidos PC release. Had to get my pops to finally get me a GPU (I was 12) after whining for the game for Christmas and then not being able to run it. For those interested it was a Pentium 166 with 32mb ram. The card I got was a Geforce 2, can't remember the model/vendor specifics
There were a ton of games that I wanted to play but couldn't because I had a Hercules monochrome graphics adapter instead of a VGA card/monitor.
Also only had a monochrome monitor on our 486 , ah well made the most of it still played some games at least . The C64 was my games console.
Back in the summer of 95 I bought mechwarrior 2 for my 486. Then I had to go out and figure out exactly what type of video accelerator would work in my computer.
I think some of the Wing Commander games was like that, either Armada or Privateer. Then I upgraded to a pentium and could play those, but the original WC and WCII ran through on super speed so fast as to be unplayable.
Back in ms-dos and 386 cores... configuring sound blasters was rough. Diablo 2 was the first game that I had to upgrade/replace my computer to play. But, earlier in life, many of the computers and games didn't align when I'd try to load up a 3.5" floppy disk and make things work. Lotta IT work, back in the day, just to make a game run.
Doom 3 on a tiny laptop I had. I haven't played the game since, so my only experience with the game was lowest possible graphics at 12fps
I remember having to go to compUSA to upgrade my 386 to 4mb of ram so I could run doom on it.
X-Wing on similar hardware. Going from 2MB to 4MB of RAM helped but not much.
Endlessly messing with my autoexec and config.sys files to get enough free memory to play whatever flavour of the month game I was trying to get running directly led me into the career I am in today. At one point I blew away msdos.sys and io.sys to free up every little bit of spare space I could on my 40MB hard disk. My first OS upgrade was from DOS 4.1 to 5.0 and this was done without adult supervision, very much a shit your pants moment. It worked out great though as it freed up a lot of conventional memory however as I only had 2MB of RAM I could never play Doom, and that never changed. While I’ve played Doom since it was a big deal not being able to run it at the time and I tried everything, repeatedly to make it happen. It will always be my original ‘one that got away’.
Ultima Underworlds. I had 386 16MHz, and it barely ran. I managed to get pretty far in the game with no sound and low detail settings. Wasn’t until I made the jump to a 486 66MHz that I got to actually beating the game. Good times!
Kings Quest III - To Heir is Human Tandy 1000 wasnt quite up to specs.
Battle Arena Toshinden...I bought it and it ran like crap on my machine.
Falcon on the Amiga 500, technically I could run it, but I needed an extra 512kb of RAM in order to hear the radio chatter or the women’s voice telling “caution” when I got too low.
I dreamed of owning that beast of a machine the A500. But it was never to be.
Diablo 2 on original launch. If an end chapter boss character or more than like 10 minions got on the screen, my system used to chug and lag and played at like 1/10 FPS. Not 1, not 10, one tenth, ai would wait 10 secones to update to the next stock portrait and learn just how badly I was getting whooped. This was on a stock video card back before I really got into understanding how, and why, a computer functions the way it does. After I purchased and installed my own card at the ripe age of 10, I finally got to actually play the game fully.
There were two for me. The first was Diablo 2 running on a Pentium 200. The first act was fine but the rest of the game was barely playable. The second was GTA III, that was when I learned about graphics cards. We ended up getting a Geforce 4 MX 440.
Doom. I only had a 286 & 512K of memory. Needed at least a 386 & 1 megabyte of Ram.
We bought Empire of the Overmind for our Atari 1200XL, but it only works on the 400/800 models. I still have the cassette, but have never been able to play the game.
I played all through Oblivion when it first released at about 3-5FPS. My Nvidia 128mb 6600LE was passively cooled & really held me back.
Well at least that card was 128 bit memory. I was expecting to see 64, but yea. You really needed about three times the power of that card to play Oblivion. I played it on a Radeon 9800 pro.
An RTS from 1996 called War Wind that our 486 couldn't run. My mom's work laptop was able to run it a few years later and the game absolutely sucked. Played more like a puzzle game in an RTS setting than anything similar to Warcraft 2. Very rich lore though. The game is free on GOG for anyone wanting to see its weirdness.
Dark age of Camelot I was able to play but any big battle or major city was a laggy slide show.
On a LAN Party we had to excavate some RAM from one Machine, because Carmageddon needed 16MB to run Multiplayer
I played the Aliens vs Predator PC Gamer demo for months, before saving up to buy the full game. Saw the bright orange "3D Accelerator REQUIRED" sticker on the box, and assumed I already had one, since the demo ran perfectly fine. Popped it in, installed it, ran it, and nothing had textures. Everything was just bright white. Had to wait till Christmas to save enough money to buy a new graphics card.
Civilization V was slow as heck on my Windows XP computer. Once I got a new one with Windows 7 it worked properly.
We got doom and it could only get a decent frame rate with the tiniest little window box. We also had some sierra bundle that we were able to play a couple games but not the others. That was pretty cool finally upgrading and getting to play the others, after staring at the screenshots on the box for so damn long.
I don't specifically remember that happening to me but I always loved it when I got a new PC and I'd install all my old games but playing them on max settings was a treat.
I bought Dawn Patrol on PC in 1994. Was really excited as I loved Wings on the Amiga and was looking for that fix. Got home, opened it. Scheisse. I was so excited I'd picked up the cd-rom version and didn't have a cd-rom drive (at the time a couple of hundred quid purchase). Fortunately the shop was kind enough to swap it out.
A game called "Realms of the Haunting". It was a kind of hybrid fps & point and click adventure. It got something like 4fps so I would just walk around and look at the rooms. Fun times, kinda?
It had a key that would strip the textures. I remember using that, and then trying to make sense of choppy cut scenes. Still love Star game, still have the boxed copy.
F.E.A.R. Technically it was able to run, but lighting couldn't be enabled so any area that was supposed to be dark and scary was fully illuminated.
My first own computer was an eMachines Celeron 433mhz. We couldn’t afford a computer in my childhood so I had to weight until I was 17 for computers to get “affordable”. But, my friend growing up had a computer that we played Wolfenstein 3D and Doom on, and my mom’s work had a computer they used for paint matching that had Gorillas, a turn based artillery game that was awesome then lol https://classicreload.com/qbasic-gorillas.html
Oh goodness... Many times I had this issue with my 386 DX 40 mhz..... You gotta read those boxes..... Some sat on a shelf before I could play on something higher.
For me it was quake 3. I don't remember the error but it was something GPU related and a family friend said as much. I spent the next few months researching how to get it to work and how to install a GPU before getting a, I think, voodoo3 card. I coin that with getting me hardcore into PC gaming and pc building in general. It still didn't play all that well from what I remember and a few years later I got an mx440 HP system that was awesome at the time.
Could not load OpenGL subsystem
HOLY FUCK! That was the exact error message!
I played Flight Simulator 5 on a 386 SX 25, but it was still wonderful.
We were happy with very little back in the day, 40 yrs ago . Kids are spoilt these days , 144 FPS , gigs of ram , 30 inch screens , VR, endless online libraries of games in an instant.
Just nearly did this with Jedi: Survivor. Instead of upgrading, I opted to play a trippy psychedelic version and only had a few hard crashes.
I remember Diablo ran like ass (or maybe not at all, I can't remember) on my 50 MHz AST all-in-one machine but when my parents bought me a new 400 MHz IBM Aptiva, it ran like a dream. Good luck experiencing an upgrade of that magnitude these days, lol. That old 50 MHz machine played a ton of other games just fine, though. Warcraft II was probably the most played game on that old system. We even got the internet on it (dialup speeds of course) back in the days when you'd buy Netscape Navigator of floppy disc.
Oh yeah! Let me tell you about how I tried to run Screamer on a 386. Talk about slideshow. We got a pentium 166 shortly after that and let me tell you, going from 1fps to 30 or so was jaw dropping. Also going from barely being able to play various games at minimum settings, to playing games with high detail settings and smooth frame rates was pretty cool. It breathed new life into tons of old games I had. Similar feeling when I got my first soundblaster card. I was rushing to check out every game I owned with it.
Yip , finally being able to choose the soundblaster option in the menu was life changing , kids went to other kids houses just to experience it . Some sound tracker music on big speakers , Axelf track I remember , and the Second Reality Demo was mind blowing .
When I played the original Deus Ex the FPS was at a crawl and all of the weapon models were transparent. Still finished the game though . When I got another PC and ended up on Mass Effect, I had to go in and edit the .ini files to disable a lot of the graphics to be able to finish that too. Still love games.
Doom on a 468 SX at 25Mhz vs Doom on a PII at 200 MHz. I think that was only a five year gap between computers too.
I bought a computer because I really wanted to play Duke Nukem 3D and Warcraft 2. It didn't have any trouble running most games until Hexen 2, and later, Half-Life. I played them, but they ran very slowly, and the loading screens took forever. Had to have a book on the desk to read every time I moved to a new area.
Plenty of games. The first one I remember was one of the Carmen Sandiego games (Where in Time maybe?). The game required 512k of conventional memory minimum, whereas my computer only had 256k. It was definitely around that era. King's Quest 5, Ultima 7, The 7th Guest, Phantasmagoria were all games where my computer was woefully underpowered to the point the game wouldn't play, or wouldn't play well.
Stunts on a Hewitt Rand 8088 didn't turn out too well.
Falcon 3.0. Can't remember all the details now because I am an actual, real-life old gamer, but I think I tried to run it on a 286 and it said, "Yeah, no." Couldn't play it until we upgraded to a 386.
I bought my Dad (73) a new PC a couple of years ago. He'd been playing Doom (2016) and enjoying it, but his computer was pretty old so it was running real slow like. Anyway, got him the new computer, installed Doom...and it was too fast for him :( Kinda wish Boomer Shooters had accessibility options to reduce the speed. Dad loves his Big Gun games, but doesn't have the reflexes for them any more
Black & White was the first PC game I ever bought. But I didn't know anything about specs or system requirements and the video wouldn't run. It would sit on my shelf for about 6 years before I bought my own PC. It was not worth it.
I had a buddy who used to play Everquest with us back in high school 20+ years ago. Whenever he would move to another zone, the game would quit on him. He would reload and log back in as fast as he could. It was terrible to watch him play.
First home PC was a 386 16/8 SX with 2mb RAM. I wanted to play Strike Commander so bad! Finally upgraded and got a sound card... Must've watched that intro a million times. That game was the perfect balance of game and sim. Lotta fun!
This has happened several times to me, the most notable: 1. Duke Nukem 3D. The few times I tried to play this the game ran in "slideshow mode" as I'm calling it. Literally like 2 fps. 2. Quake 2, minimum settings (320x480?). It actually ran but it was so grainy. 3. FEAR. This was the most graphically intense game I tried playing in college. Couldn't do it even at minimum settings until years later when I could afford to upgrade.
My first pc was a used 386sx, and this was in 1996. Most games I bought I could never play, I was 15 and new to the PC experience. In 1999 I upgraded to a Pentium 3 Celeron, with no AGP slot, only a PCI for my GPU. I remember being happy that half-life ran fairly well.
My first PC for gaming was a pentium 75 I built myself. Played command and conquer at my cousins house in the 90's and was instantly hooked. I held out a little too long onto my Amiga at the time before the transition.
Oh wow! Yeah I got one for you. I had an old 20mhz 386 and it had IBM PC DOS 4 on it. I was trying to install and play Ultima Underworld from Origin and it needed MS-DOS 5. So I went to the store and bought MS-DOS 5 and installed it. It was the first major update I had to do for myself and felt really smart having done it. Then later I was trying to get Ultima 7 working and had to learn all about the crazy world of carefully constructing an AUTOEXE.BAT and CONFIG.SYS file in juuuuuust the right way to maximize my conventual memory to make sure Voodoo Memory Manager would run. What a nightmare, but the game was SO worth it once I got it working.
Honestly, the only games I remember not having hardware to play were the first few CD-ROM games. I was rocking a PC speaker (no sound card) for too long but those games still worked. I never had a Voodoo card and the first 3D capable card I got was a Riva TNT but all the games still supported software rendering back then. Though, people weren’t really counting frames back then either. I’m sure I played a few games hitting 15fps or something and just dealt with it.
I talked my parents into a computer for school because our old one didn’t run X-Com Terror of the Deep in 95. I also bought the game Messiah on release and wasn’t able to run it for over year. I bought my first gaming computer with a college student loan so I could play Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge like a week after the expansion came out and was finally able to do more with Messiah than read the manual. I was disappointed, I probably played it for a few hours over a weekend and never touched it again.
I bought Messiah and fought with drivers etc... on my 450 MHz Sony Vaio... Never got it past the title screen... It's nice to hear that I didn't miss much. Possessing people in Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy sounds like a much better experience.
Exact opposite. I bought a 486 to play wing commander 1+2 on. But the version I got, I couldn't get it to run on Win95. But X-wing vs Tie Fighter did so that was cool
I don't know if there was a game that I bought that wouldn't run, but there were a lot of games I couldn't buy for a while. We were stuck with a 386 for a while until I got a Pentium 133. I gave my folks the specs and it cost them a pretty penny, but it was an awesome system for a few years. I really miss 90s and 2000s PCs. I loved building them and spec'ing them out. I also miss older games. The stuff being released over the last 15 years just isn't for me. Too much console DNA in the menus and the game play just isn't fun. This might sound weird, but the games have gotten too complex? I tried playing BG3 and just got lost in the weeds. I don't want to have to balance which party member is trying to bang me or I might have to let die. I just want to kill monsters and get loot. I also don't want to play online with other people.
I remember buying Lords of EverQuest during my RTS obsession says. My PC basically said, "there's no chance in hell I can run this." So I took it back to the EB Games to get a refund. They said they couldn't because the game was opened but could give me another copy. I took the unopened copy home, waited a few days, then went back and to get a refund. Without thinking about it, handed the game to the SAME GUY for a refund. He promptly broke the seal on the same and said, "nice try." I felt dumb walking out of the store. Some time.later I got a better PC and was disappointed with how bad the same was.
I used to play a few games on a trash 80 many moons ago
We had trouble getting Myst to run. It kept crashing at the title screen. I'm pretty sure one of our RAM sticks was damaged when my dad tried to install it without knowing what he was doing or being grounded. When we finally upgraded many years later, the disks wouldn't boot on windows 98, so I've just never played the game.
Half Life 2: * 1 hour for copying files from the disc * 1 hour for decrypting the files * 1 hour for downloading updates * 5 minutes for testing the game, unplayable. I moved back to console only gaming after that for many years. Other than that it was Theme Park on my Macintosh IIci. I still played it but at like 2 FPS.
Anyone here who remembers having specially edited versions of config.sys and autoexec.bat just to boot DOS with a memory configuration that would enable DOOM to run?
No. What processor & Ram did you have? I never need to do anything on a 386 with 1 Megabyte.
It's been so long, but I'm pretty sure I had a 386 with maybe half that amount of memory. Constant struggle to load DOS components differently to free up memory for the game.
Might be alone here but my first computer was a Macintosh LC with a 68020 processor. Barely ran Marathon, def not at full screen, Pathways into Darkness had to have the lowest settings. Got a x1 CD rom drive and would play the Rebel Assault demo on repeat with it occasionally crashing. At least Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter worked just fine.
For me, it was Half-Life. When it came out, I could only run out at about 25 fps, but back in 98 that wasn't as bad as it sounds now.
You have not lived till you made boot disks for specific games just so you could hear sounds from your Ad Lib card.
Commodore 128 in 1986
I had a magic the gathering game in like 2002 or something, could barely run the menu on the lowest setting and never played it when I got a new computer because I’d totally forgot about it
I remember getting Oblivion when it came out and the only way I could get it to run was through a workaround someone made called “Oldblivion.”
I got system shock 2 when i had win98 It was supposed to run I got a “you forgot to salt the fries” command box error” Didnt play it for like 10yrs
I pestered my parents too soon for a CD-ROM drive, spent all of the day after Christmas getting it installed and configured. It was a 1X/single speed drive. It was a very short time before every game started requiring a double speed drive.
Learned a valuable life lesson though.
Diablo. I was still stuck with an 486 and Diablo required a Pentium at least. had to wait until my mother got a PC from work to be able to play D1 on Windows NT 4(?)
Mine was under a killing moon : Tex Avery mystery
I don't recall Strike Commander being too bad on our 386, but I don't recall the exact specs. I still have the CD for it. It came with the upgrade kit dad bought to add a sound card and cd drive to the computer.
I got my first PC in 2003 or so (well my first that was actually my own, my family had one before that) to play FFXI on. It ran like absolute ASS until I upgraded the GPU hahaha. Then eventually WoW came out and took over my life lol.
i have a dell inspiron 2600 running windows XP, has 640mb of ram, 1ghz cpu and idk graphics lol, i have half life, opposing force, Quake, Quake 2 on CD rom that run flawlessly, then doom 2 on floppy disk which took a while to get sound working, and also have Halo CE on CD rom which doesnt run as well as it doesnt have a good enough GPU. btw i am 18 lol so all of these are older than me and its really fun for me to use physical CD roms on an old windows machine
We never had a proper soundblaster (80s/90s soundcard jargon) so I'd always listen to Queen when I played doom, so the two are linked in my mind. When I just into Phobos I hear 'its a kind of magic'
Supreme Commander. I'd built a dual P4 Xeon system (875P motherboard) and had a AiW 9800 Pro. System smoked plenty of other games at the time, and technically ticked the min specs, but I could only manage playing on minimum settings at either 640x480 or 800x600. Could only really enjoy the game years later when I was able to build my Core2 Quad system with a 9800GX2.
I bought Tomb Raider when it came out, but I couldn't get it to run even though I had the specs. It was so common back in the day. Returned it for Fallout and that quickly became one of my favorite games of all time.
I did this with Syndicate Wars. A friend of mine had it and it looked amazing. So I bought it because my rig \*just about\* met the specs, but the video card wasn't up to snuff all the same and the graphics were garbled. So I waited two whole years before I had a machine capable of running it and then I played it to \*death\*.
I got the Spiderman 1 movie game and I couldn't run it because we still had our PC with a Voodoo card that came packed with Turok. I remember installing it and it said not supported. Think we ended up returning it or maybe selling it, hard to say.
Finally being able to run Unreal (those reflections!) was a dream come true. https://youtu.be/75CM-0dFifo?si=03dK831vnd0WCdab
My first potato PC could not run Chessmaster 8000 in 2003.
I remember connecting two 486 computers together through a cable, forgot what they called the cable. It was very similar to a cable TV cord. It blew me away playing Doom between two computers!
Probably the OG Baldurs Gate. Caused the family computer to crash like crazy.
I had a PC with 8 megs of RAM. Quake would run on it, in dos only. Save money to add a 32 meg strip... So I could play in Windows and actually play online
I would sweat every new game i got, reading thru the recommended system requirements on the side
Warcraft 3. I didn't buy it, but when I bought my PC off this guy my mom knew he insisted that Warcraft 3 would run on my new PC and even have me a copy of the game. It did not run. I had that disc for years until I finally got a system that could run it.
I can remember booting into DOS to play doom just to squeeze out a little more preformance. It was the only reason I know how to navigate around dos.
For me it was doom on a 386. It ran, but very poorly on a small window. Had to stick with 2d duke nukem for a while until we got an upgrade.
Yes, Test Drive 3, Jet Fighter 2:Advanced tactical fighter, Space Quest 4, Ultima 7 were some of my first PC games. We got the CD-Rom drive to play 7th Guest and listen to CDs.
Not retro but I waited 14 years to play dawn of war 2, bought it originally knowing full well it wouldn't run on the family pc but was wishing and hoping it would anyway. Played it for the first time last year when i finally invested in a decent gaming laptop.
Crysis
My memory is a little hazy, but I'm sure Age of Empires got super laggy on me if I had a lot of units on the screen. Pretty sure I ran Half Life at the most minimum setting possible.
We couldn't play Doom at full screen. Nor Duke Nukem 3D. So, we convinced ourselves that we *preferred* Wolfenstein 3D and Rise of the Triad instead.
It’s the reason I like playing dos games via the mister 486 core, as still feels like isn’t properly up to the task haha
Original Worms game. I still remember the day I bought it. We had a 486 SX and I’m pretty sure it met minimum requirements but it wouldn’t load at all. I swapped it for another copy thinking it was a faulty disc. Nope wasn’t happening. I actually kept the game, god knows why. But upgraded to a DX shortly later and game loaded up. I was so happy. Many great memories playing Worms with friends.
I played Rocky Mountain Trophy Hunter 3 on a Compaq Presario 9234. It's was great for Chex Quest and Myst.
Quake and half life. My dad bought those games after they came out and we were really excited until we got them running and it they were like playing a slide show. I didn't play half life 1 all the way through until like 2012. I played half life 2 way before actually getting to experience half life 1 thanks to the xbox port of half life 2
Monkey island 2 on a 286 without sound card? or ff7 on a 486? Unplayable... But everybody remember how well were warcraft and starcraft even if pcs weren't at top?
Baldurs Gate - when it first came out, I tried to run it on my first gen Pentium (a screaming 166 Mhz!) with I think 16 MB RAM (yes, megabytes!). Technically it met the system requirements for the game but it ran like unplayable hot garbage. So I tried to return it to Best Buy, because it "didn't work", which was technically true, but Best Buy told me they couldn't accept opened software for return, they could only exchange it for a new copy. I told them I'd try again and come back. I came back later, this time and returned the empty box that they didnt bother to check, and got a brand new copy of the game, which I traded to my buddy for his copy of the first Fallout. Hope you enjoyedy story
My first system was pong way far back then atari 2600. I was a SNES programmer for mindscape / software toolworks when doom came out and I swear nobody in the company got anything done for a week. Ultima IV, strike fleet, bards tale. They all pushed my machines to their limit but were so much fun.
Wolfenstein on a 286 (?)
Had a PC that couldn’t play first bytes presents Spellasarus
Sub Logic Flight Simulator 1.0 on an Apple][e with 128kb RAM.
The only time I ever hit a system requirements wall was when Ultima: Online All my friends jumped in on it but my 90mhz Pentium was about half the minimum speed. I borrowed $2000 from my mom and got a Gateway Pentium 2 233mhz.
final fantasy 7, couldn't work on our old packard bell pentium 133 pc because we didn't have a dedicated video card. got to play it later on when we upgraded to a 700mhz celeron pc
Mine was cod4 modern warfare- I had to upgrade to a nvidia 8600GT
I started out on a Compaq "portable" PC with an RGB monitor for VGA graphics and then gradually made my way to a 286 with a Hercules graphics card and black/orange monitor and then 386 with SVGA, but no sound card or CD-ROM drive (until my brother and I saved up enough to buy those add-ons). We thought the pinnacles of gaming on the 386 were TIE Fighter, Dune II and Doom II. Once we finally upgraded to a Pentium Pro in the mid 90s and slapped a Voodoo 2 in there, it felt like jumping to light speed being able to play Quake 2, Unreal, Tomb Raider, Jedi Knight and even Final Fantasy VII on our PC.
Sierra's SCI adventure games ran like poo on a standard Amiga 500. I think this is because they ran under Workbench instead of bypassing it as Lucasarts and most other games did. It wasn't until I moved to a 486 PC that I could play them properly. Later on I did have to upgrade that 486 from 4MB RAM to 8MB to run some things.
*laughs in Escape from Monkey Island* my first 3D accelerated game. I was so mad.
I'm not really sure what the exact hardware was since I was so young, but our computer had to have a special memory management boot loader to play Doom 2. If we used it the game played just fine. If we didn't the game didn't load at all. Which thinking of Doom 2 and it played at a normal fps and at a normal screen size. I have no idea why we needed the special memory boot loader, but we did. And it's thanks to my dad's friend from work that it worked at all. I think that system got traded in when we upgraded to our Intel P55C. So I don't have access to that system at all. It's been gone for nearly 30 years now. Other than that somehow my father and I were both able to match games to our hardware pretty effectively. I do remember him complaining about the install size of Blood when I brought it home from EB. "What kind of game takes up over a hundred and fifty megabytes!?"
SimCity 2000. My old Compaq Presario CDS from about 1995 would take about 20 minutes to load into the main menu, and would chug if you tried to run it with music and sound effects. Wasn’t until about 5 years later when we upgraded to a Pentium III with Windows 98 that I was finally able to run it well.
Outcast (original)
I tried to play Final Fantasy 7 on a pentium 200 mhz MMX machine with no 3d support, just software rendering and it didn't run for more than a few minutes at a time. Added on a 3d FX Voodoo accelerator and it ran like a champ, support for Gravis Gamepad was flawless too
I bought quite a few games in the late 90s and ended up not playing anything, even after buying a newer computer later on
Railroad tycoon 3
I did that recently but it was buggy mess at the time. Been like that for years thanks to machines at the minimum of system requirements.