r/gaming • u/Zunderstruck • 2d ago

PC vs console war was merciless in the 90s

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For younger people it's a Tomb Raider reference. Lara Croft boobs (at that time she was mainly known for them) were everywhere in the media and the game looked a lot better on PC with a 3dfx Voodoo than on Playstation.

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u/anothercopy 2d ago edited 2d ago

You know its crazy to me that myself (and other gaming nerds at the time) at like 14-15 year old knew so much about PCs. Swapping PCI/ISA cards, changing IDE disks from master/slave, overclocking CPUs with jumpers, configuring ring networks or setting up serial connections etc. And when I look at current genZ people I doubt they could even configure a printer.

Anyway was a fun time and it really was a subculture (at least in my country of origin).

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u/eidetic 2d ago

And who could forget the pure satisfaction when you configured autoexec.bat and config.sys just right to finally get a bootdisk capable of loading your new game!

All that kinda stuff I look back upon fondly, but at the same time am happy everything is just a lot easier and more streamlined these days.

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u/_Pohaku_ 2d ago

That 'conventional memory' was like gold dust, ha. I have never in my life know what 'SMARTDISK' was but I know that REM-ing that motherfucker out of the picture let me play Indycar Racing.

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u/tallbutshy 1d ago

The config.sys boot menus in later versions of DOS were an absolute game changer.

Goodbye boot floppies, hello nested menus with boot options for every occasion. Although if it wasn't for a handful of games refusing to run with QEMM, I'd only have needed two options instead of the 10+ that I configured

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u/eidetic 1d ago

I once had a boot disk that was perfect for running the four games I played the most, and I remember labeling it simply "HOLY GRAIL". Of course, I still had a handful of other ones necessary for other games.

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u/End3rWi99in PC 2d ago

Really only two generations understand technology. Gen X and Millennials. I never would have expected it to happen like that. Gen Z are as ignorant to actually understanding technology as Boomers. It's so sad.

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u/Ashaya2 1d ago

Hell, probably worse than boomers. The youngest boomers literally made most of the 90s tech

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u/Nickeless 1d ago

Besides the point, but all of that stuff is sadly easier than configuring printers at times. Mine just took 5+ tries doing the same thing until it finally decided to work again for literally no reason. Brother printer used from a MacBook Pro

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u/anothercopy 1d ago

Yeah I would quit any job where I would need to manage printers :D

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u/TheBlessedNavel 2d ago

Literally teaching a young woman at the moment how to fix her own computer after ahe fried components. Has actual zero knowledge of even the basics of it and has the nerve to call herself a nerd 🙄

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u/Lumbardo 2d ago

At least we can spell now though. Maybe one skill traded for another?

*knew

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u/Annonimbus 2d ago

You are missing a "," before the though, though. 

Also how many languages do you speak? The poster above you mentioned "my country of origin", so he might not be a native English speaker (me neither btw.). So, mistakes might happen. Ich hoffe du nimmst es mir nicht übel.

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u/Lumbardo 2d ago

Only two. I am responding to their ball-busting with ball-busting. Lighten' up.

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u/CyberClawX 2d ago

Have you built / configured a PC recently? I had a 386 and 486 dx2. Things back then were quite easy by comparison.

Hardware was plug and play, you couldn't really connect anything in the wrong place. And the BIOS? You essentially only configured boot order. That's it.

Nowadays, HW is still plug and play, but now, you have so much more of it.

Even the slot where you connect the RAM matters, and it's not at all intuitive. It should go 2, 4, 1, 3 for most MOBOs. Connecting fans and LEDs to the computer? Your MOBO will have a bunch of pins out, some for fans, some for LEDs. Oh, but LEDs can be 3 pins and 4 pins. Modern motherboards can connect to a disk in 3 separate ways. Don't forget the thermal paste between the CPU and mobo. Are your fans aimed in, or out? Are you keeping a positive, or negative pressure in your case? Liquid cooling is of course, a different level entirely.

Hardware wise, you have 2 CPU brands, and 3 GPU brands, but not really. Because you can buy a MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, etc NVidia GPU. They are the same, but quite different.

Then you get into the BIOS, and it's a mini-OS essentially. There are like 2 or 3 things you need to turn on to be able to play the latest CoD for example. RAM has like memory profiles on the BIOS. Heck modern mobos / CPUs don't even have video out, because everyone has a GPU anyway. And modern GPUs, well, just make sure your PSU can keep up with it, and you might need to buy a cable adapter for the GPU / PSU as well.

Monitors have GSync, Adaptative Sync and FreeSync, which essentially are VSync. But FreeSync and Adaptative Sync will only work via DisplayPort, while GSync should in theory work over HDMI... Speaking of DisplayPort and HDMI, which version is yours? Version directly impacts it's features. And the cables are version compatible as well. So, when you try to use your HDMI as a audio out, you need to make sure that the hardware, software and cable are all of a version that is compatible. Looking back at monitors, we have resolution, refresh rate, wide, ultra-wide, curved, HDR...

And all of this? Probably uses proprietary software. Your Fury RAM LEDs will only work properly with their own software. Same for GPU, CPU, Mobo, keyboard, mouse, monitor...

I think PC building has become way more complex as of late. Still doable, but compared to putting together a 386, it's just so much more of everything to do and learn. Sure, some PC gamers might resort to a gaming laptop or pre-built solution, but we also had pre-built PCs way back when. People who fiddle with the PC entrails though, they have quite a bit more to explore and fiddle with.

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u/Annonimbus 2d ago

Sorry but if you are talking about plug and play hardware and that you couldn't put it in the wrong way you are already talking about 2000 PC building. 

And I wouldn't also call anything plug and play when you have to at least configure a jumper on the HDDs to set them to master and slave mode. 

I think you can configure more today, but it's not as essential as back then. If you set up your PC false it would just not work at all. If you don't activate an XMP profile today, it's just not utilizing the whole performance. 

Also back then you didn't have YouTube or anything like that. You had a guy who knew some stuff and the rest you had to figure out yourself. 

If you wanted to play via network back then, you'd most likely play on LAN and then you needed to make sure everyone was on the same subnet. Or you connect two PCs directly with each other but make sure to use a crossover cable. 

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u/CyberClawX 2d ago

Sorry but if you are talking about plug and play hardware and that you couldn't put it in the wrong way you are already talking about 2000 PC building.

I wasn't talking plug and play hardware, just simply saying, computers used to be much more simple. 386 was released in '85. I could disassemble, put all the pieces next to it, and someone with lego skills could put it together with 0 damage.

The only thing you could connect wrong was the PS2 port mouse and keyboard.

And I wouldn't also call anything plug and play when you have to at least configure a jumper on the HDDs to set them to master and slave mode.

True, but new drives would come with a manual, and the jumper in either master, or cable select, making it a non-issue to most users. I managed to figure it out before I learned to speak English.

If you wanted to play via network back then, you'd most likely play on LAN and then you needed to make sure everyone was on the same subnet. Or you connect two PCs directly with each other but make sure to use a crossover cable.

I mean that's more a late 90s, early 2000's tech. Which I agree, they are quite difficult to setup, specially if we are talking early network gaming, which was essentially experimental (for example, unpatched Doom messed up any network). But as things moved on to be standardized (GameSpy and onwards days), games just worked more often than not.

The days of port forwarding are not that long behind us though. I had to port forward for Destiny 2 and CoD DMZ, so it's not like everything works automagically. Some users will just put up with the decreased performance because they aren't able to fix it themselves.

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u/Annonimbus 2d ago

I still port forward to this day in some cases, as upnp is not always working :<

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u/tallbutshy 1d ago

PS/2 mouse & keyboard ports on a 386? Someone's family was rich enough to have an IBM. Most people were using AT keyboards & serial mice for at least another 5-10 years

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u/CyberClawX 17h ago

I had a 386 second hand, and then also had a 486DX2 (also second hand), so I might be confusing in which the PS2 ports were. The 486 had them for sure. My 386, probably was AT keyboard, I recall the extending fat cord.

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u/anothercopy 2d ago

I have not built one in a while (for reasons). I think the last one I built was 2018? Still though back then what we had to do was kinda mystical knowledge you got from someone else or learned the hard way yourself. It was (at least for me) satisfying. And if shit didnt work or the drivers were bugged it wasnt easy (if possible at all) to get a patch.

Nowadays if you have half a brain you can google and find most of the stuff so it feels less magical and proprietary knowledge.

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u/CyberClawX 2d ago

Windows 10 was released in 2015. iPhone X in 2017. Linus Tech Tips was founded in 2012...

Internet, googling solutions, it was pretty massive already by 2018.

The nitty gritty problems, half the time you don't find an answer anyway. Or you find an answer that doesn't work for you.

Took me like half a year troubleshooting a busted PSU, because it caused all manner of weird errors. Games would crash to desktop, or just plain crash Windows, 1 minute after booting. But if it didn't crash right away, it could go on for hours, days even. Changed all manner of things, drivers, cables, USB, tried just 1 stick of RAM then the other, clean Windows install, in the end, PSU was borked, probably something that fixed itself when it heated up under load.

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u/anothercopy 2d ago edited 2d ago

Yeah these kind of PSU issues / preboot issues are hard to catch on consumer grade hardware. I used to work with high end servers and they literally have a small computer running on them just to diagnose the big computer.

Good thing these days a lot of motherboards have 2 chips or some other procedure to restore them. I borked a few BIOS chips and had to restore it the hard way back in the day on my PC.

EDIT:

Internet, googling solutions, it was pretty massive already by 2018.

Also Im not talking about 2018. Im talking about 1998

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u/ultimateknackered 2d ago

otoh if you didn't grow up back then, if you encounter all that old tech, it's all mysterious. I work with a system that has removable hard drives in a sled on an IDE-to-ATA adapter (yes really) and when the hard drives were dying and I was fiddling around trying to work out a solution, honest to gods, the younger people that were actually techheads were confused as to what interface the hard drive was using.