Get Off Mah Lawn, Kids

And we thought we had it so good, laughing at the people who were nostalgic about PONG. Not in any way realizing that the same would happen to us with today's generation. Karma is a beeaatch.

... "dark era, when games were installed from pieces of plastic"...
Um, I also installed games from tape drives. Back when monitors where monochrome.
Edit: oh, I just saw you're talking about tape drives later on, too.

at least back in the days, games had fun (mostly paper based) copy protections =)

anyway, I never thought installing games was a chore ... but when it came to printers, now those things were evil.

IMO the most annoying was the diskette/CD swapping during gameplay.

I remember my first PC game. Batman, came on like 6 or 7 of the big floppies. That game was dope.

I'm happy to say I never lived this time. I only ever used two discs to install a game. :P

Who actually read the whole thing?

earliest thing i can remeber is running first Need For Speed on DOS... don't remember if it was on floppies or something else, tho :(

I guess I have to consider myself lucky since I never had to do that. But changing all those discs...oh boy was that annoying.

Arw ... :>
Good old days ...
So much memories... had been a great time :)

The earliest memory I have from pc related stuff was my dad downloading stuff from eMule, back in 2002, and pirating games like Lego Racers, BF1942, BFVietnam(my fav of all time) and Midtown Madness 2.

Never actually followed that path of pirating. Some of the games he pirated and I enjoyed playing as a kid, I bought it later in life.

mmm, I remember having some games on couple of floppies, largest taking space on 6 of those. Soon after the CD era came, anyone remembers how many CDs Baldur's Gate 2 was on? I cannot quite remember but I believe it was a lot. Imagine trying to instal some nowaday's games that take up up to 40 GBs of space from CDs or even floppies. :O

Before that we also had some chinese NES rip-off using cartridges, it had everything that one would want to play on one of those 1000 games cartridges (Mario, Contra, Arkanoid and sooooo on).

Age of Empires II and Diablo II. gooooood times.

?LOAD ERROR
READY.

Otherwise you were free to have a single dos4gw.exe in use, just had to put it in the PATH. Also, copy has always been an internal command, xcopy.exe is what you mean, the one copying directory hierarchy. (It still exists, Windows\System32\xcopy.exe)

pfft! lawns?

In my day we had savage, untamed wilderness extending as far as the eye could see and just waiting to kill us in a million different ways. And, old-timers were damn glad to see the few of us kids who'd survived past infancy show up on their land 'cause we were hard-working, family men.

Ha, i've been playing games that fit on one 1.44MB floppy. And PC had 1MB RAM, 16Mhz clock, 80MB HDD (thats right, MB not GB) and sound from (in)famous PC Speaker.

True, games looked ugly by today standards, but at least noone sold beta versions as full product and there were no friggin DLCs

Cool story, I'm a similar generation.
A "funny" thing I notice a lot is a multitude of "console plebes" trolling PC gaming sites/threads insinuating PC gaming is still essentially this same way.

LOL! Didn't read!

IRQ 5 DMA 1.

I was 4-5 when I started playing on my father's PC (a powerfull 286 with a black/green monitor he had for work... one of the few back then). I learned that I needed to launch a batch file before playing, so that I had enough free RAM to run the game.
At that time the games for me were split 50-50 on 5.25" and 3.5" floppies.
Funny thing about black/green monitors: figuring out the colors of powerups with similar shape. Moraff's World had a race of enemies (the Puffballs) that would explode on you, half good, half bad... their color was the key. :D

Of course you had to know your exact video/sound card models + ports used, to even correctly run the setup.
Later you also had to check manually for patches.

I remember my uncle getting Win 95 on floppies 'cause CD drives were still way too expensive. It was a 20-30 regular-1.44MB-floppies installation.

The CD era... The Ripper and Blade Runner anyone? :)

Dam I'm glad Steam keeps track of everything now. It leaves me with more time to tweak the ini file. ;)

I remember getting my games on 360k floppies and having to boot with the disk because is had it's own format and you couldn't see the files from a DOS prompt. I remember playing King's Quest IV from 9 floppies, flipping disks when moving from an area to another because I didn't even have a hard drive back then.

Before that I was saving and loading games from a cassette tape on my Radio Shack's TRS-80. The good old days when you could copy games with a dual tape deck. (and 80% of the time the copy wouldn't work)

On my 4 MB 486, I had a deeply optimized config.sys and autoexec.bat with multiple settings that gave me optimal free memory. I had a piece of software what moved drivers around in EMS and spent hours fine tuning the load order to maximize every free byte. I ended up with 3 configurations: default (XMS+EMS+deeply optimized load order), XMS Only (because Comanche wouldn't run if EMS was turned on) and clean (no drivers, no memory manager, nothing)

Oh, maaan

I don't consider it a dark era. I had endless fun back then, and getting the games to work right taught me a lot about computers... like installing my first Adlib/Sound Blaster card and configuring IRQs ports and DMA lines in the config.sys so that nothing conflicted. Like Zomby2d said, you also had to optimize the autoexec.bat and config.sys so that you still could load all your drivers and TSRs in the most optimal fashion to leave plenty of memory open below 640K for the games, and still have EMS or XMS memory available above 1MB for those games that used it. Ultima VII: The Black Gate was the worst because it had it's own memory manager, so I had to create a special boot config just for that game.

Ohh man...even that monitor i had back in the days works now...and this LCD's are broken not often...but they are.

Like this DX386 4MB RAM, HDD 150MB and FreeDOS 1.1 (can't find working diskettes to install MS-DOS :-s) my first PC :')

My First PC - Working today since 1994

I remember how I had to quit Win 3.1 and go back to DOS to play games because they were DOS Compatible only :')