nostalgic Mac/Windows games

[NoKipAr on the run]

Personally, when it comes to today's world of kids being raised by screens,

Nothing says a better alternative like 90's stuff that I grew up with!!!

I was still going outside, and I have an imagination to this day.
but ... I never saw the internet until I was at least 7 or so. I didn't fall in love with it until years later. but I digress.

I used to grow up playing with "Living Books", which was a children's book thing on CD ROM! you could click on random things and animations that would play. pretty entertaining but nobody would want that back.

.........................
Disney had a take at this market .... it was simply known in their court as "Interactive Storybooks". I think I had both the Toy Story one, and the Lion King one. then there's Nikolai's Trains. sounds like Typical Autism flaire, right? well, as I hit puberty the talking cat from that game became my sleep paraylsis
demon! he would pull out random horrendous stuff in the way of my door to my room at night.


and then we have Educational games! like Magic School Bus, Blaster Pals, Jumpstart (as scary as it was, 3RD grade will be the GOAT) and yes, even Reader Rabbit.

and my dad? he used to play this game called "Riven" sequel to Myst! yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh and then I found out about the Journeyman project trilogy. weird. live action cutscenes.

Tim Curry any one?


I also had Activity Centers; like the Aladin one, Winnie the Pooh printing press, Toy story 2 activity center, just to name a few.
and others?


going back to my old education stuff... well

look what we PUT ON A MAC:

but it doesn't end there! I had I think like 2 Fisher Price games and no they were not sugary. or so I remember..

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm lets see there was Fisher Price Castle, which was fun. I don't even know if I beat it every time, how.

I had Fisher price Pirates, which was kind of scary.... oh! and I believe was my favorite, which was never beaten ever until I don't know WHEN...Fisher price cowboys.
but oh man...I remember me and my uncle had what was practically a second langauge between ourselves it was so dang fun!

SPY FOX IN DRY CEREAL! being the autistic I am

....I used puzzles to solve the game!


hmmmmmmmmmm what else? ever hear of Edmark? kinda kiddy but I always wanted to see that whole thing turn into the Disney of that sort of thing.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand there was one game I never did play all that often, something called "Monsterology"? that one was kind of weird and stale I gotta say.

what else? any more?

any one wanna visit their nostalgia the screen of a computer?

...........................

I sure am glad I was never put in front of a tablet when I was 19 months old!


what were your favorite games? on computers that is?

 

[Judge]

In the early days of gaming, I adored DOS simulations like "Chuck Yeager's Air Combat" and "Red Baron". Later Windows simulations like "European Air War" and "Il-2 Sturmovik". Had a definite preference of flying World War 2 aircraft compared to jets in later eras. And I also like submarine simulations like "Silent Hunter" and "Silent Hunter II". And racing simulations too like "Indy 500" and "Mario Andretti Racing". And who can forget Maxis' original "Sim City" and all those early first-person-shooters like "Doom", "Wolfenstein" and "Quake" ?

Loved all the early golf games too, like Jack Nicklaus Golf for DOS. Going on to Windows golf games like "Microsoft Golf" and "Links" all the way up to "Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003" which I loved even more.

Nice to see someone recall games like "Myst" and "Riven" too. And to recall those crazy animal simulations like "Petz", "Dogz", Catz" and "Oddballz". (Computer pets to interact with)

"Leisure Suit Larry" ? Any takers? LOL....nope I avoided that one. But it's fun to think of the wide variety of those much earlier computer games. I did like having Microsoft's "Encarta" loaded on the hard drive...an entire encyclopedia and atlas in the days before the Internet.

So much fun, back in a time when you didn't need a super-duper powerful computer or monitor just to play games. When frame rates and detail levels weren't much of an issue. <sigh>

Above all, I think of a LucasArts simulation called "Battle of Britain 1940". The game that turned me into a computer geek because it required "conventional memory" to run. Forcing me to learn and configure DOS autoexec.bat and config.sys files. And how thrilled I was when my first game finally booted up.

 

[NoKipAr on the run]

I loved other games, like .....Harry Potter 1 on the computer

plus this weird version of Solitare...

 

[Princess Viola]

When I was in elementary school and we first got access to the computer labs in 1st grade (this would've been the 2002-2003 school year), the iMac G3s they had in the computer lab all had the games Bugdom and Otto Matic on them and I was completely obsessed with them. Sure, I never got past like the second level on either game and it wasn't like I'd have hours of free time to play them but I always looked forward to going to the computer lab so I could play them after I finished my assignment for computer class or computer club.

And also I gotta love how the company behind Bugdom and Otto Matic are still around and they've released basically all of their old games for free. Not only that, but since a lot of their games require either a PowerPC-based Macintosh capable of running Classic Mac OS applications or a version of MacOS X capable of running 32-bit software, they also fully approve of this one fan's free and open-source ports of some of their games to modern Windows, macOS, and Linux and will link to those downloads, if available, so you can play these games on your modern PC.

It's rad as hell and of course I have both games downloaded on my laptop.

 

[NoKipAr on the run]

actually, I loved to play games in Grades kindergarten tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I wanna say grade 5 or 6?

chances are if I wasn't making "Peak Cinema" with Windows 3D movie maker (the one
with McZee the purple guy??) I was probably playing Majong. the game with the tiles?

 

[Shamar]

Personally, when it comes to today's world of kids being raised by screens,

Nothing says a better alternative like 90's stuff that I grew up with!!!

I was still going outside, and I have an imagination to this day.
but ... I never saw the internet until I was at least 7 or so. I didn't fall in love with it until years later. but I digress.

I used to grow up playing with "Living Books", which was a children's book thing on CD ROM! you could click on random things and animations that would play. pretty entertaining but nobody would want that back.

.........................
Disney had a take at this market .... it was simply known in their court as "Interactive Storybooks". I think I had both the Toy Story one, and the Lion King one. then there's Nikolai's Trains. sounds like Typical Autism flaire, right? well, as I hit puberty the talking cat from that game became my sleep paraylsis
demon! he would pull out random horrendous stuff in the way of my door to my room at night.


and then we have Educational games! like Magic School Bus, Blaster Pals, Jumpstart (as scary as it was, 3RD grade will be the GOAT) and yes, even Reader Rabbit.

and my dad? he used to play this game called "Riven" sequel to Myst! yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh and then I found out about the Journeyman project trilogy. weird. live action cutscenes.

Tim Curry any one?


I also had Activity Centers; like the Aladin one, Winnie the Pooh printing press, Toy story 2 activity center, just to name a few.
and others?


going back to my old education stuff... well

look what we PUT ON A MAC:

but it doesn't end there! I had I think like 2 Fisher Price games and no they were not sugary. or so I remember..

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm lets see there was Fisher Price Castle, which was fun. I don't even know if I beat it every time, how.

I had Fisher price Pirates, which was kind of scary.... oh! and I believe was my favorite, which was never beaten ever until I don't know WHEN...Fisher price cowboys.
but oh man...I remember me and my uncle had what was practically a second langauge between ourselves it was so dang fun!

SPY FOX IN DRY CEREAL! being the autistic I am

....I used puzzles to solve the game!


hmmmmmmmmmm what else? ever hear of Edmark? kinda kiddy but I always wanted to see that whole thing turn into the Disney of that sort of thing.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand there was one game I never did play all that often, something called "Monsterology"? that one was kind of weird and stale I gotta say.

what else? any more?

any one wanna visit their nostalgia the screen of a computer?

...........................

I sure am glad I was never put in front of a tablet when I was 19 months old!


what were your favorite games? on computers that is?

I started losing interest in computer games when they became too realistic. They were no longer FUN, and instead stared to become work.

 

[NoKipAr on the run]

ouch i feel ya man.

 

[FilterFreq]

I have so much nostalgia for these ^^ two because they were the ones I played in my school's computer lab as a kid.

But on my own time (and quite a bit later)...

 

[Misery]

I grew up with ancient DOS machines (and Windows later)... my first computer when I was a kid was a Tandy 1000 from Radio Shack... so I played a gazillion games on PC in the 80s, 90s, and beyond. Since I'm really into emulation though, I wouldnt really describe it as nostalgia. The last time I played something from that era was like, last week, so....

Like this here:

"The Chase on Tom Sawyer's Island". Sort of a bizarre Pac-man kind of thing. Played this the other day, just about went mad trying to beat it (again). I can get a lot further in games like this now than I ever could as a kid but dagnabit I still cant get through this one all the way.

Some other things, hmmm.... Well, while I really dont at all like most modern FPS games, I do like traditional "corridor" shooters, stuff like Doom, Wolfenstein, Hexen, so I've played those A LOT. I was actually playing through Hexen somewhat recently but got distracted away from it halfway through.

Other stuff like Simcity 2000, anything Lemmings, Worms... Mechwarrior 2 was another big one, though that one, I tell ya, that one didnt age well. It was awkward back then, it feels even more awkward now.

Also a lot of things also that were a lot less well known. Day of the Viper was a particular favorite, I thought I might sit down with that one soon, that's an "I never quite beat this" game. And some games are not very well known now simply because of how incredibly old they are. Kroz, for instance.

That's all DOS stuff, specifically. The Windows-specific section of my emulation archive hasnt been transferred to my current PC yet because I'm lazy. I mean the previous PC is literally sitting right behind this monitor. Not much excuse. As it is, much of the drive on my current PC is dedicated to the overall archive. I could also ramble about older console games or arcade games, they're all on here. I use Launchbox to play any of these things, including the DOS games, trying to navigate the archive without that would be ridiculous.

So much fun, back in a time when you didn't need a super-duper powerful computer or monitor just to play games. When frame rates and detail levels weren't much of an issue. <sigh>

You dont need that though? That hasnt been the case in ages. Even something like Baldur's Gate 3, I went and looked at that, the bottom specs, according to Steam, are:

Processor: Intel I5 4690 / AMD FX 8350
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia GTX 970 / RX 480 (4GB+ of VRAM)

And that's freaking Baldur's Gate 3!

Back in, say, the early 2000s, yes, PC gaming was a giant pain because of necessary specs and such. But that was a long time ago. I do have a beefy machine myself, and it does get used for gaming a lot, but all that power is actually just for fractal rendering... the games dont need it.

These days, big budget games tend to have 5 millionty settings options and such, to make sure they can run on as many things as conceivably possible. I mean, think about it: The harder it is to run a game, the harder it is to sell it. Not to mention that these games need to also be capable of running on consoles, too, so that's another reason for companies to make sure the minimum specs are low.

And of course that's just big budget stuff. Indie games, and AA games, will almost always run on half a potato chip.

The idea that you must have the latest most advanced upgraded gizmos in your PC to play games at all is seriously just a myth. Even my busted trashheap of a laptop... which is old... will still run most things (it sure wouldnt run that simulator though). Yes, having a weaker machine means you wont be running the games in question with maxed-out settings, but... you dont NEED to do that to 100% enjoy whatever it is. And frankly most things seriously look just fine even on low settings.

The only time when all those specs and framerates and that stuff comes into play is if for some reason you just NEED to run everything perfectly maxed out at all times always. The online gaming community would have you believe that this is super important. It isnt.

As for monitors, well, just a typical 1080p monitor will do. Ya dont need any of that 4k nonsense.

 

[NoKipAr on the run]

you had a Tandy??

my dad found Strong Bad's references to old computers hilarious!

DELETED!

 

[Judge]

As for monitors, well, just a typical 1080p monitor will do. Ya dont need any of that 4k nonsense.

Agreed. The tradeoff for higher resolution versus lower frame rates seems a poor one for most people involved in computer gaming. I'd much rather have those higher frame rates at 1080p than see my gameplay potentially compromised just to attain a sharper picture.*

* Scary though to see manufacturers pushing much higher res monitors. Hope 1080p won't disappear from the shelves any time soon!

And levels of detail within most individual applications don't come down to a matter of life and death anyways. Though in my own case being so involved with flight sims was a real reason for wanting to keep up frame rates rather than visual details and effects.

Though when I eventually stopped such gaming, at the time 800x600 was the default resolution. An era when most PC users didn't have to spend a fortune on upgrading their hardware just to play a certain game, often defaulting to 640 x 480 pixels. As for the oldest games running at 320 x 320 resolution, yeah....I admit they became a turnoff to play.

You dont need that though? That hasnt been the case in ages.

LOL....that's my point. I'm 68 years old.

It was "ages ago" that I first got into gaming back in the 80s. When you didn't need a powerful computer or video card. Before the World Wide Web even existed.

I still recall circa 1981 when our company started putting these things called "computers" on our desktops. (Proprietary IBMs) And it took a while before seeing them as anything other than work-related. A little sad to recall how I once enjoyed my job at a much more relaxed pace before computers.

"Halt And Catch Fire"

 

[NoKipAr on the run]

my old mac was constantly magnitized after a while lol

 

[Misery]

you had a Tandy??

my dad found Strong Bad's references to old computers hilarious!

DELETED!

Oh yeah, I had two of them. Originally the Tandy 1000, and later the 2500.

They were pretty simplistic, really. Their big gimmick was that they ran Deskmate, which would run on starting the machine up, as per the batch file with the name I cant freaking remember.

It looked like this:

These were DOS machines, which is why that even exists. No Windows yet.

Actually, funny story related to Windows: When I "graduated" from middle school to high school (edit: No, it was grade school to middle school) my parents bought me a gift to celebrate. Ya know what it was? Windows 3.1. Which came in a big box. Holy heck was I excited. But this was OLD Windows, nothing at all like what there is today. Technically, it still ran off of DOS. Windows 3.1 was... something special, really. It's one of those rare pieces of software that has it's own really memorable "feel" to it. I think anyone who used it enough probably knows what I mean. I actually have occasionally used it in the years since... before I had proper emulation running, getting the old Windows going was the way to run old games, rather than get in a shouting match with modern Windows. The most surreal thing of all though with that is running Windows 3.1 in VR, on a big CRT screen that doesnt exist in a room that also doesnt exist. Been there, done that, it was very, very strange.

Also, Strong Bad, one of my favorite things with him was that time the voice actor found "THAT game", the one where you cannot get ye flask. It's rare that I hear someone get THAT excited about a game.

Text adventures, that was another wild thing from that era. I had something ancient temple something something... its probably in my archive somewhere, I'll have to look.

Agreed. The tradeoff for higher resolution versus lower frame rates seems a poor one for most people involved in computer gaming. I'd much rather have those higher frame rates at 1080p than see my gameplay potentially compromised just to attain a sharper picture.*

Yeah. What really gets me though is like, how far does it go before the eye stops being able to perceive an actual difference? Like, I DEFINITELY wouldnt be able to see a difference, I'm too nearsighted. But like... how much "better" can it even really look, compared to 1080p? And isnt there something like 8K now as well, I could swear I heard of that somewhere. That one just sounds stupid.

I'm totally fine with my simple Samsung monitor, thanks. It doesnt exactly have too many features though. It occurs to me suddenly that I have numerous Samsung products at this point. Which all string together.

LOL....that's my point. I'm 68 years old.

It was "ages ago" that I first got into gaming back in the 80s. When you didn't need a powerful computer or video card. Before the World Wide Web even existed.

I still recall circa 1981 when our company started putting these things called "computers" on our desktops. (Proprietary IBMs) And it took a while before seeing them as anything other than work-related. A little sad to recall how I once enjoyed my job at a much more relaxed pace before computers.

The funky thing with gaming back then though was... er... "clock speed"? Is that what it was called? Where games would work just fine... technically... but they often didnt run at the right speed. Some might run too slow, if your computer wasnt QUITE at the right level... others might run at light speed if your machine was TOO GOOD, which is definitely something you dont see these days, hah. Unless of course you try to run one of those ancient DOS games on a modern machine without proper setup, then it just goes bonkers.

The other thing I ran into a lot was that with the Tandy 1000 in particular, it often couldnt quite handle some games in EGA mode, so I ran a lot of games in CGA. A lot of younger gamers probably cant even imagine that one... only 4 colors at once! This might sound really odd, but it's actually one of the reasons I like the trans flag as much as I do. Not just because of my being trans, but also because it directly matches one of the most frequent CGA palettes: White, magenta, light blue. And then black as the background. And a lot of my favorite old computer games were ones that ran in CGA. All 3 of the most common palettes from CGA stuff is like, permanently burned into my memory.


Anyway, as those machines go... yeah, I aint old enough to actually remember when they showed up, heh. But my father somewhat recently told me about when we got the first Tandy, he had gotten the idea that home computers would end up becoming very important someday and wanted me to be able to get in on that tech as I got old enough to do so, so he bought that thing... which was crazy expensive at the time... and that, plus the Atari 2600 (which is still one of my favorite things ever, I play those a lot) was my intro to tech as a whole.

I also remember that these ancient things did not have hard drives. One favorite memory of mine, was when I really wanted a copy of SimEarth, got ahold of it, only to find that it needed to be installed... the first game I'd ever gotten that had such a requirement. I badgered my mom to get a hard drive, using the logic that it's such a waste to have this thing that cant even be used. And then came the days of having to install games only a few megabytes big using a ridiculous series of like 7 separate install disks.

Also, weird copy protection nonsense, remember that? Those bizarre decoder things.

 

[UFO]

I missed C-64 but my computer history was Spectravideo 328, ZX Spectrum 48k, Amiga 500 + 1200 and only after that PC. So I miss the actual point of this thread by advertising how cool Spectrum games looked because of machine's real strange video chip (notice how one 8x8 pixel box can have only two colors: pen and background) and poor buzzer sound (sound was produced by PWM-modulation, not by D/A-conversion): Compilation of 50 Spectrum-games gives you a good impression what I am talking about (check 0:52 location for demonstration of awful color scheme of machine's video chip)

Spectrum games really had that strange dark and neon colored feeling that other machines didn't provide (because of their better graphics and possibility to actually use background images that didn't turn game ugly). PC's CGA (and EGA) had almost same vibes.

But I really couldn't play most of the games of that era. I hate anything that requires reflexes and (arcade)adventure games back then didn't come with any kind of instructions, so I just walked around, collected items and wondered what I was supposed to do with them.

So... Text adventures were my favorites. Usually from companies like Magnetic Scrolls, Level 9, Infocom, Sierra On-Line...

Even thought text adventures were ridiculously hard and surreal back then (Secret of the Monkey Island's "monkey wrech"-puzzle -stylish stuff, except less obvious even when you figure them out). And because you had to write your commands to protagonist ("get blue ball from green chest") you could spend hours trying to find proper sequence of words... only to realize that you are not supposed to open a door with a key you have been carrying...

Thought I did manage to play thru Sierra's games Space Quest 1 and Leisure Suit Larry 1 (Amiga versions) without any kind of walkthru instructions. I don't know how I managed to do that. Those games were not forgiving: if you didn't manage to do something early in the game, you ended up stuck in late game and had to start over again - often not even knowing what you did wrong. I must have been really patient back then. Today I won't even play games that don't have internal mapping system and detailed quest log...

Yeah. What really gets me though is like, how far does it go before the eye stops being able to perceive an actual difference? Like, I DEFINITELY wouldnt be able to see a difference, I'm too nearsighted. But like... how much "better" can it even really look, compared to 1080p?

I can notice the difference, but it is so insignificant that I don't care if I can't see what monster is at 10 km distance from me.

Besides, keeping low resolution in games also allows full graphics settings: My current machine is about 8 years old and still runs games (at least couple years old) fluently with around 60 fps if I just keep resolution at 1080p.

The funky thing with gaming back then though was... er... "clock speed"? Is that what it was called? Where games would work just fine... technically... but they often didnt run at the right speed.

Clock speed or clock rate.

Before PC there was usually just one or two models of machine from different brands (Apple, Oric, Spectrum, Commore...) with absolutely no variation or customization. Machines were guaranteed to run always in same speed, and different models were not always even compatible with each other, so programmers were lazy and created timing just by waiting a certain amount of processor cycles rather than using actual real time clock (RTC) based interrupts to trigger things to happen. Actually, early processors didn't even have separate RTC circuits, so just having a processor with higher clock rate messed up all timing solutions. It took a while for programmers to start realize that PCs with their third party parts are whole new thing and nothing under the hood of the machine is any more guaranteed and it is time to start to rely on part vendor specific drivers instead writing all low level stuff yourself.

Also, weird copy protection nonsense, remember that? Those bizarre decoder things.

Lenslok - One of the biggest reasons not to play games

Thought it was a necessary evil if you wanted to play the best space game ever (back then):
Elite (spectrum version)

 

[DrBadStrings]

I miss the original Duke Nukem3D. More specifically the level builder that it had. For the time the thing was surprisingly advanced. A buddy of mine and I along with some blueprints did our Highschool as a level to play at network lan parties we used to have.

 

[AuAL]

“You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.” Yes, I played Adventure. It wasn’t my first “computer game”. We had a punch-card coded moon lander program on the one programmable desktop calculator our high school owned. You had to enter appropriate thrust values at prompts to achieve zero velocity at the moon’s surface. (The output was numeric-only, as it only had a bank of Nixie tubes for the display.) I also played moon lander on the DEC PDP-8. As I remember it, this was a later version of the game with graphics output on a CRT terminal, possibly at a DECUS Symposium. And who can forget “Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards”? Or, indeed, who wants to remember that?

 

[DrBadStrings]

It's weird, the more I think about it the more I can't really recall any specific "Windows" nostalgia games. I can remember loads of classic DOS games from growing up but the "Windows" transition which I know I went through is just a blank. Feels like I went DOS to console even though I've been gaming on PC all my life as well.

 

[UFO]

I think it wasn't until Windows 95 when games began to be Windows-only. I mean really, of course there were some rare examples that wouldn't start in plain MS-DOS since Windows 1. Mostly games that came with Windows itself, I bet

I can't name any specific games either. Besides, listing all good ones would take forever. Picking just few favorites would be pretty much randomly choosing from hundreds of equal choices, and I would still forget to mention something that deserves to be remembered more.

waiting a certain amount of processor cycles rather than using actual real time clock (RTC) based interrupts

Eeh... Editing not allowed, and nitpicking perfectionist mind are not a good combination. I just have to correct this:

Actually, one does not use RTC to determine how fast game runs. RTC is meant only for knowing date and time of clock. You are lucky if you get any triggers even in 1 ms interval from RTC. What I really meant is that there was a little bit more sophisticated systems, like waiting for vertical synchronization (ie. draw a frame, wait for a new frame to start, draw a frame, keep repeating...), and programmable counters and timers, which might have had their separate clocking source separate from processor's own oscillator.

 

[Judge]

It's weird, the more I think about it the more I can't really recall any specific "Windows" nostalgia games. I can remember loads of classic DOS games from growing up but the "Windows" transition which I know I went through is just a blank. Feels like I went DOS to console even though I've been gaming on PC all my life as well.

I remember a series of games that made that transition. Sierra's "Red Baron" was originally a DOS program that while visually primitive at 320 x 320 resolution, was superseded by "Red Baron II" in Windows which was ported to a higher resolution and much more attractive, yet operated somewhat clunky compared to its earlier DOS version.

I must say, I had so much fun with the original version, at a time when one didn't need a necessarily powerful PC. Though the second and third incarnations in Windows as I recall required a VESA driver. The beginning of having to keep up with endless hardware requirements that many of their DOS equivalents didn't seem to share.

And then came "Red Baron 3D" which was in Windows of course, but operated smoother and had somewhat better detail, although I thought it was still on the crude side with polygon landforms and simple horizons. But it was also customizable with third-party extensions that made the simulation even better. Sadly the only other advancement was yet another Windows-driven version (Red Baron Arcade), but it was just that. A very condensed arcade-style version which I thought was terribly disappointing.

The whole reason I have thought about getting back into gaming was wanting to play wildly better World War One flight simulations such as IL-2 "Flying Circus", and one or two others I've seen. A far cry from the primitiveness of Sierra's "Red Baron".

 

[NoKipAr on the run]

hmmm Red Baron 3D seems to have improved in the GlLlLlLlLllLlL aphics department.