The old time of Computing.. and gaming!
Day 14. (Day 13).
Old time, good time!
I remember buying my first PC ("Compatible PC") in the late 1990s. I had owned an AMIGA 600 for a few years and it had suddenly broken down. An infinite sadness for me, because the Commodore Amiga was a dream machine! No matter what you wanted to do with it. This will probably be the subject of a future article because I am sure that some of you loved this wonderful machine. But let's go back to that first "IBM compatible". It was a big tower with an AMD DX 40 that I bought second hand at a reasonable price. A nice machine that ran Windows 3.1 and was functional for office work. But for games it was not really the case! First because Windows 95 had just been released and was a real revolution for multimedia, and I was still running Windows 3.1, a very unstable system and rather capricious with games. But the limitations came mainly from the technical characteristics of the machine, a modest processor: 40Mhz, very little Ram memory: 8Mb, and a graphics card nothing more basic. For example, when I ran DOOM for the first time, I had to disable the sound to get an acceptable frame rate.. haha ha.
For a better reading journey: one of the more expressive guitarist, Carlos Santana. With Revelations and Europa, two beautiful instrumental compositions. Here, Live at Hammersmith Odeon in 1976. One of my favorite guitarist! :0)
Shareware?
There was this CD I got with a magazine that was a compilation of the best Shareware games. The principle of Shareware was to offer you the beginning of the game, generally one episode out of the three or more of the complete version. You could then play enough to get a good idea of the game and become addicted. At the end of the free episode, the contact information to buy the full game was displayed, and you could order by mail, or by BBS (a dinosaur that still hasn't died out). I was able to discover a multitude of gems of all kinds while playing enough to want to continue the adventure. This was the case of DOOM that I bought in boxed version afterwards. The Internet was just emerging, slowly. France often having a train of delay.. (It's what I feel, sorry) difficult to find an offer proposing services, moreover affordable.With probably 56k (?!) per modem! It was easier to buy magazines that offered CDs with contents. There were myriads of them compared to today. That was cool too! Do you remember games like Eye of The Beholder, Wolfenstein 3D, Bio Menace, God of Thunder, Duke Nukem (the first and the second) before Duke Nukem 3D, and many more..
A rabbit named Jack!
Among the most outstanding discoveries was Jazz Jackrabbit, a Sonic-like platform game, incredibly fun and with a fine tuned gameplay. A cool green rabbit named Jack, a colorful universe, with crazy races, well thought levels with hilarious enemies. It was really a good slap on the PC. Jazz Jackrabbit is a game I still play without any problem today, and still with as much pleasure! It has not aged a bit. Jack Jazzrabbit, it's Epic Megagames. For the record, Epic MegaGames became Epic Games better known for the Unreal series, but also for the Unreal Engine, etc.. Today, they have also launched the Epic Games Store, which regularly offers free games. It's really worth it, just for that! Feel free to download the client if you like gaming.
Today you can find the complete saga of Jack Jazzrabbit on GOG at an affordable price. This Jack Jazzrabbit Collection includes Jazz Jackrabbit CD-ROM version and Jazz Jackrabbit Holiday Hare '95. A preinstalled version of DosBox allows you to run it on any recent system: Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, in one click. And even more more fun, the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Collection including: Jazz Jackrabbit 2 - The Secret Files and Jazz Jackrabbit 2 - The Chritsmas Chronicles! My favorite platform games, before Sonic (yes, it is!) or Rayman.
Thank you so much to @foryoubtc09, a new sponsor! You Rock the Bitcoin Cash galaxy! :0)
Command lines
It was quite an era with this computer, because games that used MSDOS had no problems. Well, let's say not much.. comparatively speaking. Haha. You had to be quite a tinkerer and try to understand the problems to find solutions. And often the creation of special DOS boot floppies was necessary for some applications or games. You said "Floppies"?! :0)) Note that this was an excellent school for the initiation to computers. I owned some Amstrad computers before the Commodore Amiga 600, a CPC 6128 and a PCW 8256, the CPM they had on board was a system relatively close to DOS in terms of commands. So I easily swallowed the DOS. MSDOS 6.22. I still have the floppy disks install. Today, I have built two dedicated PC for retro gaming, and old software archives. Once is enough, but I have two. Opportunities at really low prices. An another article to come about it. Keep in touch!
From my last EP: In Slow Motion. The track Orbital Phase I.
Friends, see you soon..
Thank you very much for your support reading me! :0)
Find my music everywhere: https://songwhip.com/solar-phasing/moon-dance
Your article reminds me of the early days in college. Computing and computers were quite different in the old days. We had to use punch cards and submit small programming jobs to the university's computer center. The output (prints) used to come the following day with our roll numbers. If there was an error, correct the line again by replacing the punch card and resubmitting it for an error-free output!
Life changed with the IBM compatible desktops. People were so happy then.