FUCK PC gaming

[Ed Oscuro]

I haven't bought a new PC game (aside from Steam) for a few years now. I think Left 4 Dead 2 was my last purchase to date. That wasn't full price either.

In my experience, nVidia was just as likely to break games with drivers. So far I haven't had a game break due to ATI drivers. I've not been able to run the original Mortyr, but that's a DirectX problem. I recall that years back (only around 2007 or even earlier) the original Alien vs. Predator wasn't working on nVidia drivers, so that's not an ATI-specific (or AMD-specific) problem.

[ED-057]

DirectX felt like a godsend when it finally arrived, but even though I never had to mess with jumpers, I still had to spend a fair amount of time guessing at IRQ settings and launching into MS-DOS (and some stuff still would play too fast).

In the 486 days, performance and stability under Windows was generally terrible. It wasn`t until some time later that gaming under Windows began to not suck, not only because of DirectX but better hardware as well. 32-bit DOS games (using a DOS extender like DOS4GW, CWSDPMI, etc.) didn`t have too many issues and ran better than anything could under Windows at the time. You just needed a sound card that was compatible (hard to identify sometimes because of vague advertising/labeling) and in some cases a video card with a decent VESA BIOS. Older stuff had issues with memory configuration (EMS vs. XMS vs. conventional)

Games running at the wrong speed was a plague that lasted until such time that the Pentium CPU could be in the list of system requirements for every game allowing for the use of the Time Stamp Counter. That was the first time all target systems actually had a suitably accurate clock that could be used without breaking the OS. Until the CPU makers accidentally FUBARed this later with variable speed CPUs with a TSC that also changes speeds, and multicore CPUs where the TSC doesn`t run at the same speed across cores.

PC gaming has always been problematic but IMO it has been less-bad than (contemporary) console gaming for some time now.

[louisg]

DirectX felt like a godsend when it finally arrived

DirectX was a complete mess when it finally arrived, though I don't know that I can argue that it's more of a mess than the PC is in general. It was slow as hell compared to almost anything else (Pentium 75 needed to play Pitfall kind of slow), and I remember the first versions (which ran automatically with some game installers) would install over newer versions and destroy your Windows 95 install. Good times.

[Ed Oscuro]

DirectX felt like a godsend when it finally arrived, but even though I never had to mess with jumpers, I still had to spend a fair amount of time guessing at IRQ settings and launching into MS-DOS (and some stuff still would play too fast).

In the 486 days, performance and stability under Windows was generally terrible. It wasn`t until some time later that gaming under Windows began to not suck, not only because of DirectX but better hardware as well. 32-bit DOS games (using a DOS extender like DOS4GW, CWSDPMI, etc.) didn`t have too many issues and ran better than anything could under Windows at the time. You just needed a sound card that was compatible (hard to identify sometimes because of vague advertising/labeling) and in some cases a video card with a decent VESA BIOS. Older stuff had issues with memory configuration (EMS vs. XMS vs. conventional)

Well, it's important to note that Microsoft's first "task" was getting something out there into the market as a standard that wasn't DOS (which would incidentally roll plenty of cash their way), so compatibility was the first step.

I think that the first DirectX versions that had wide enough distribution that I ran into them were either 5.X or 6.X versions (about 1997-1998). Before that it was all about the DOS extenders. So I can't say that I was terribly inconvenienced by earlier and buggier versions.

DirectX felt like a godsend when it finally arrived

DirectX was a complete mess when it finally arrived, though I don't know that I can argue that it's more of a mess than the PC is in general. It was slow as hell compared to almost anything else (Pentium 75 needed to play Pitfall kind of slow), and I remember the first versions (which ran automatically with some game installers) would install over newer versions and destroy your Windows 95 install. Good times.

Again, I never ran into this.

For what it's worth, there were some really, really terrible Macs for gaming at this time, too.