Theldaran
Liturgist
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2015
- Messages
- 1,772
I don't think you know what he meant by that statement.I was just happy knowing enough to launch a game in DOS.
If you were using Windows 95 like me, you had to reboot in DOS mode to play DOS games. A hassle, but not really a challenge for an eager kid.
Many of the later-game DOS games had quite absurd base memory requirements to run (this is the first 640k of memory, before protected mode executables were a thing) - examples that pop to mind from my youth are Alone in the Dark 3 and Falcon 3.0. This was tricky because you also had to have enough base memory to load device drivers - such as MSCDEX for CD-ROM, sound card and even mouse. Although only a few games had extreme requirements (I remember AitD3 requiring something like 617kb or some stupid shit), many games wouldn't run without some optimization. The way to accomplish that was to edit your autoexec.bat and config.sys files in such a way as to sequentially load the drivers into memory in neat blocks (the order mattered because memory was allocated in 'chunks').
Later on, there were programs like MEMMAKER.EXE in DOS 6.0 which purported to do this automatically, but they never worked properly and optimizing by hand was always better.
This was a sort of barrier of entry that kept mongoloids at bay. And remember, this was the era before the Internet, so answers weren't just a search away.
I miss those times.
I was around by then, I know it full well. Look at the previous page.
I DON'T miss those times, at least if we're sticking to booting games, if I reflect upon them with tenderness it's because it was my puberty.
About digital platforms, Steam outdoes them all aye, but only because anything and everything can be sold there, and that's not necessarily a good thing, it has been criticised a lot recently. Other platforms still thrive, such as Origin, built upon the criterion of "EA games repository". The same with UPlay. Those platforms won't go away easily as long as they have such a massive following, as they offer games you won't find on Steam.
GOG does a lesser job with DOS-, 9X-era and from the 2000s games (which is their original leit motiv), but they still offer brand new games without DRM, so it's always an option to consider. Not as much wild variety as Steam, and certainly less sales, but they carve their own market.
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