When I'm multiboxing Eve Online have three on generally just game audio. Gaming something like Pathfinder mostly play on the Alienwware OLED and have some kind of video streaming on the LG Oled. Sometimes YT stuff. Generally not much game music at all.
OT: Video Games VI
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CapitalsCupReality
It’s Go Time!!
- Feb 27, 2002
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Had a work friend somehow ended up buying an extra 4080 (MSI) during his latest new system build so ended up buying the extra one off of them.
-For retro PC gaming, usually listening to the Roland MT-32 or Sound Canvas SC-88 modules.
-For modern games, game music on the headphones for first playthroughs.
-In expansive MMOs or sandbox games or second playthroughs, I'll often have the game on My Alienware OLED and my second 1440p panel rolling through YouTube clips (or Comcast Xfinity TV, or ESPN+ for a hockey game), and I'll be listening to that while grinding.
Always listening to something while gaming, though. No music at all would be weird for me.
Should probably stop watching RTX 4090 videos.
I remember the Dragon Age: Inquisition had an amazing soundtrack probably played that game with mostly it on. I guess I'm trying to multibox different content at the time. Gaming on one side and trying to finish a series/podcast/music on the other.
I can relate to that. Started out with generic CGA and EGA cards in the mid-80s. I had 1MB Trident and Cirrus Logic and generic VGA/Super VGA cards by the late 80s/through the mid 90s. I'm not sure I ever had a 2MB card. We didn't have bleeding edge computing at home.
In 1996, I got a 3DFx Voodoo to play Tomb Raider, and I think I ended up getting a Voodoo 2 to replace it within 18 months or so. What was nice there was that 3DFx's secret sauce meant that you needed no drivers. Plug it in and it just worked, whether in proprietary Glide or early Direct3D modes.
At some point, 3DFx was stubbornly sticking with 16bit and I ended up grabbing an nVidia card for 32bit color, and loved those cards. By then, drivers were a thing for good, but nVidia's drivers always served me nicely. I had 2-3 cards in a row, and the TNT2 sticks out as an excellent card from that era.
By 2002, nVidia was slumping badly, though. At the same time, ATi's Radeon tech was just kicking ass. I had a 9700 Pro, 9800 Pro, X800 and X1300 through about 2005 (for two barebones, networked gaming PCs I built to maintain a Starcraft LAN). I loved their performance and f***ing hated the Catalyst drivers. They often glitched, and they needed frequent replacing at a time when the download sizes were no joke with contemporary download speeds. I missed nVidia's drivers, but couldn't deny ATi's performance lead.
As soon as nVidia got its shit together, I went back and have never left since that circa 2005 period. AMD merely bought out ATi and is for all intents and purposes a different company, I guess, but continuing to use the Radeon and Catalyst brand names turns me off to this day. Screw ATi.
It'll be interesting to see if AMD can close the gap or not. They're pissing me off lately, and I'm not even a customer (except for CPUs). Better GPU competition might give nVidia something to think about with its pricing lately. Right now, nVidia can charge anything it wants for 40xxx series cards because AMD has not been competitive in ages.
Get your shit together with ray tracing, Team Red. I don't want your cards, but I want you to make it interesting to drive down the prices on the nVidia cards I still prefer to buy.
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Cush
Registered User
Those were the days. Man, VGA was such a big breakthrough
. And then you had speech packs for games like Wing Commander
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Yeah, those leaps were incredible. My Dad would bring home his Compaq 'portable' from work, with the screen built into the bottom, and the keyboard serving as the bottom of the case. Then we had a rudimentary 286/386. Monochrome color, I think with a white / amber / green selector option. Finally seeing CGA was big, but EGA's 16 colors was a massive jump. California Games and Arkanoid and Winter Games.Those were the days. Man, VGA was such a big breakthrough
Then VGA just gave developers such a palette to work from... those hand painted backgrounds in games around 1990 were incredible. Conquest of the Longbow is a favorite for those painted backgrounds. Played a lot of Sierra then.
I don't know that anything compares with my first Adlib card, though. Going from PC speaker to that was amazing. Then speech with the original Sound Blaster, and buying speech packs haha... it seems like a rip off today to pay $20 to add speech, but at the time that was such a feature. We all pirated so much software back then that it seemed like a way to give back, anyway.
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Devil Dancer
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- Jan 21, 2006
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CapitalsCupReality
It’s Go Time!!
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I think it was our 2nd PC. 
ChaosLord
Registered User
- Jan 16, 2010
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Looks like one of those "Radio Shack" clunkers my friend had during the early 1980s.
Jags
Mildly Disturbed
We went from an Apple IIe clone to a Commodore 64 to a Commodore 128. LOAD "*",8,1 FTW!
That lit the fuse for me, went on to a career in tech. My family didn't have another computer until I built them one years later. I come from luddites, so I'm probably adopted. Or my real dad was some closet geek whose day job was mailman.
That lit the fuse for me, went on to a career in tech. My family didn't have another computer until I built them one years later. I come from luddites, so I'm probably adopted. Or my real dad was some closet geek whose day job was mailman.
Haha, it was something very similar to this. That looks a little too compact, but it's the same idea. The memories are probably just hazy and that's the one. His came from work so it was an actual Compaq. We had an IBM AT from his work for a while too. Those things were really built to last.
The Compaq had that screen jammed in at the bottom, two enormous floppy drives, and the keyboard becomes the lid, or base, or however you want to look at it. The handle was the most ruggedly built thing on that computer, which is good because it was so heavy. I was young, but I believe that thing weighed 18,000 pounds. Milled steel. Felt like it could survive a bomb. Good times.
It was terrible for gaming, but hilarious. The AT was much better.
CapitalsCupReality
It’s Go Time!!
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just wanted to post a visual for others lol….I can remember playing Zork, Zork 2, and there was an Olympics game I loved….damn there was some dungeon game I loved early, then playing Ultima then eventually Ultima 2, etc……
ChaosLord
Registered User
- Jan 16, 2010
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It was all about the choices you made back then. I remember our family debating whether to go Apple IIe or Commodore 64 and at the time (early 80s), the choice seemed obvious: Apple was the answer. Then the C64 took off with its near infinite supply of games. Not that the Apple IIe didn't have any, but I was pretty jealous of my friends and their Commodore 64s.
Our family made another mistake in this respect with the Sony Betmax vs the JVC VHS. We went Sony -- a more reputable company and their cartridges were sleeker, smaller and generally looked more advanced than their VHS counterparts. Unfortunately, we made the wrong choice there as well
Cush
Registered User
Loved the old Sierra games, especially the Police Quest series. Would love some sort of reboot. Remember being blown away with some of the speech in Conquest Of The Longbow (think it was some sort of singing) Strike Commander was also a blast. Then you had all those old Microprose sims like Gunship 2000. Still maintain that the orginal Sid Meier's Pirates is one of the best games ever made (VGA version from the early 90s wasn't too bad). Add in Tie Fighter, X-Wing, WC Privateer, Ultima, etc....good times
Yeah, those old Epyx sports game were great
Oh, can't forget the old Lucas Arts games: Sam & Max, Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, etc (some of those were on CD-Rom)
Our first computer was Colecovision, then we had a Tandy 1000hx, then a Compudyne, which I believe was 25mhz 386 (could have been 33mhz), then just continued over the years.
Do not miss the days of having to create boot disks, installing 7-10 floppy disks, setting up the sound depending on sound card (sound blaster, roland, etc).
and for the record: we initially had a Betamax as well
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Jags
Mildly Disturbed
Yes to all of those. I bet the Olympics one was Summer Games. I remember diving was the fun event for us. But yeah, Zork was great. My first Ultima game was IV, and my brother and I were all about just stealing from the chests in cities, and killing all the citizens, running from the guards. I don't think we even remotely came close to beating the actual game. It was the first game I played that had a first person mode (in dungeons).
Then I remember Quantum Link and my parents having no idea how it worked and me having either no idea either or just no concept of money, cuz that first bill came and it was something crazy. So that got shitcanned and we had to settle for figuring out through the grapevine where BBSs were that were local phone calls so we wouldn't get in trouble again.
Good times, aaaaaand now we're old.
Commodore 64 that we bought from a family friend was the first non-console for gaming. Still remember loading multiple 5 and quarter floppy disks for game. Can't recall the RPG game. Then a friend got a newer actual PC and I remember playing one of the early ultimas all summer.
Family finally bought PC and for some reason it went to my brother's room which was the one wired for phone modem right around Quake 1 (CTF/grapple with the asymmetrical maps) and watched him play a ton that was sort of the first "holy hell playing a game online against real people".
I only played occasionally in the beginning of the shooters was way too busy with music/bands. My college graduation present was a new PC for gaming right before Q3 test was released as well as the spread of DSL and beginning of cable modems there were a plague of latency issues. Can't remember the DSL provider but they dropped their residential side and went business so was grandfathered in so if there were any issues I'd would instantly get some high level support person. I remember a couple of years literally would get home around six and play till 2am Monday through Friday then like 12 hours each Saturday/Sunday.
I distinctly remember initially only getting like 20 to 35 frames in Q3 and then upgrading to some voodoo card and getting up to 50 fps was sweet.
I do recall the period with the Radeons where they were best for a bit. Those AMD cards still though could be finicky with games I just had no tolerance for that back then.
Family finally bought PC and for some reason it went to my brother's room which was the one wired for phone modem right around Quake 1 (CTF/grapple with the asymmetrical maps) and watched him play a ton that was sort of the first "holy hell playing a game online against real people".
I only played occasionally in the beginning of the shooters was way too busy with music/bands. My college graduation present was a new PC for gaming right before Q3 test was released as well as the spread of DSL and beginning of cable modems there were a plague of latency issues. Can't remember the DSL provider but they dropped their residential side and went business so was grandfathered in so if there were any issues I'd would instantly get some high level support person. I remember a couple of years literally would get home around six and play till 2am Monday through Friday then like 12 hours each Saturday/Sunday.
I distinctly remember initially only getting like 20 to 35 frames in Q3 and then upgrading to some voodoo card and getting up to 50 fps was sweet.
I do recall the period with the Radeons where they were best for a bit. Those AMD cards still though could be finicky with games I just had no tolerance for that back then.
Jags
Mildly Disturbed
My first online play was Doom. I worked for Erol's Internet (Erol's the only company I can think of to screw up two huge acquisition deals) and it was Duke Nukem on the LAN after hours (and secretly during work if you could keep a straight face) most of the time, a bit of Command and Conquer or Warcraft RTS. Never got into Quake, but my roommates (two of whom worked on the Caps changeover crew) and I were all about the first Half-Life, first with deathmatch, then TFC and Counterstrike.
By then the NHL series was on PC, I was into Wing Commander Prophecy for a while, Descent, then my roommates got way into EverQuest. All downhill from there for me, way more of a casual gamer since.
By then the NHL series was on PC, I was into Wing Commander Prophecy for a while, Descent, then my roommates got way into EverQuest. All downhill from there for me, way more of a casual gamer since.
CapitalsCupReality
It’s Go Time!!
- Feb 27, 2002
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Doom and Duke Nukem are my earliest online shooters, a dusting of Quake. Duke blew me away…on dial up lol.
There's so much good stuff here, but...
Spending a couple of hours, if you were fortunate, trying to free up 624K of base 640K RAM to play a game with all its bells and whistles by writing autoexec.bat and config.sys files, without any programming experience, and you're 12. Everything crammed up in 4MB of expanded memory in Load High (LH). No Internet to find a better answer, just figure it out all on your own.
Back in the day we got two games every time we played a game. There was the game, and then there was the diagnostics game you got to play before you could play the game. Lucky!
Spending a couple of hours, if you were fortunate, trying to free up 624K of base 640K RAM to play a game with all its bells and whistles by writing autoexec.bat and config.sys files, without any programming experience, and you're 12. Everything crammed up in 4MB of expanded memory in Load High (LH). No Internet to find a better answer, just figure it out all on your own.
Oh man Erols even a reference is mad respect for the NOVA peoples.
CapitalsCupReality
It’s Go Time!!
- Feb 27, 2002
- 67,328
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Lol omg….the memories….this thread has been great of late! I recall the similar game trying to illegally copy game disks from my buddies…..boxes and boxes of Memorex or TDK floppies…
I can remember going with my Dad and getting the large laser disks….and you had an option on VHS or Beta……we also chose wrong and went Sony Betamax…..and large laser disk player…..good times.
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I grew up in Montreal, where our computer lab at school had Apple IIEs. I eventually learned a little bit of Basic and TurboPascal; that might have come later at computer labs in the States.
As a kid, my buddy's Dad drove down from Montreal to Plattsburgh, NY frequently for work. Every time he'd come back, he had an enormous cardboard container (5.25" x three feet long) packed to the gills with hundreds of copied, pirated games for my friend. I'd spend the next however many days going through the stack and finding things to copy.
Some of that worked and some of it didn't... and then you had to figure out if there was some ludicrous copy protection mechanism tied to the games, and then determine how you were supposed to replicate the feelies or the manual or the deep red cardboard with only slightly less deep red text on a cheap copier at the local place where you could make copies. Gaming was pretty wild west back then. Tough time to try and sell software to kids.
Spent a lot of pocket money on blank disks back then. All of that media has died now. Evidently the 8" floppies for the really old machines, before my time, were really well made. Yet 5.25" floppies were mostly garbage and only had a few years of reliable use in them. My retro Dos computer now uses a GOTEK floppy emulator for the A: Drive. It makes no sense trying to use 5.25 floppies any longer. Same for storage. Just use swappable compact flash cards for hard drives, which already use the IDE standard. That makes the machine entirely solid state.
Erol's! I remember Erol's from the 90s in this area, haha.
(Our cunning plan to win the videotape format wars was to be the last house in the neighborhood to get one, and simply waited until VHS had already long won out to buy one.)
Devil Dancer
Registered User
- Jan 21, 2006
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You raise a good point -- I remember doing all that stuff, but how did I know how to do it? Who taught me to edit an autoexec.bat file? Where did I learn LH?
I was on a few BBSs, maybe I learned from there?
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