Ulujain's Golden Age of Gaming
Armed with my mighty 486, I went out and bought a huge number of games my sad old 286 couldn't handle. Oh boy, those were the days; Wolfenstein 3D, Blake Stone, Betrayal at Krondor, Lands of Lore 1, Elder Scrolls: The Arena, X-wing, just to name a few. A little while later I got hold of 5 3½ inch diskettes that forever changed the way I did my computing. On those diskettes was the 16-bit marvel known as Windows 3.1.
I soon found that most of my games wouldn't run under Windows 3.1. Wolf 3D did, but the rest all had major complaints. After finishing whatever I was doing in Windows, usually playing a Memory game that came bundled with some sound software I bought, I'd quit out and return to DOS. The sound of tada.wav is forever etched in my memory as the end of work and the beginning of fun.
The memory of running memmaker and making bootdisks is equally etched in my mind as well. Until Rational Systems devised their DOS 4GW extender thingy, it really was pot-luck whether you had enough base memory to run a lot of games. Big offenders in this regard were the two Dark Sun games. I agonized over a bunch of games to get them to work. To put it mildly, the edit.com command and the output of mem /c really were your friends. MSCDEX and the SB16's drivers were always memory hogs. The former is/was MS-DOS's CD-ROM drivers.
Hallmark games in my 486 years were: the two Underworlds, System Shock 1, Doom, Descent, the SSI Gold Box games, both Ultima 7's, Wolf 3D and X-Wing. I intend to expand on a few of these titles in essays in the near-future.
It was during this time that I experimented with IBM's OS/2 operating system. Well, very few games were made for it, but one thing Warp 3 and 4 could do was run most 16-bit DOS and Windows apps natively, in a window or full screen. Most, not all. A few games that used bizarre memory configurations wouldn't work. Both Ultima 7's were in this class. I still remember surfing the Web using IBM's hoary old Web Explorer while playing The Elder Scrolls: The Arena in a window.
I loved OS/2 for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it was stable. A lot of people have slammed IBM and OS/2 over the years for many things, but being buggy and crashing a lot are two things they'll never say. The operating system was rock-solid and I mean Unix rock-solid here. If any offending app crashed (always Windows or DOS ones), OS/2 would go "ding ding" and politely kill it. I'd love to get hold of OS/2 again. I really did love playing with it. Warp 4 didn't run well on my 486, but Warp 3 ran brilliantly.
Then Windows 95 was released and everything bad and good about PC computing suddenly came true. It took me a while to ditch dear old 3.1 and install Win95. When I did, I found my parity 8MB of RAM didn't cut it any more running Netscape and other stuff, so off I went and bought another 8MB stick for like Australian $150. Yep, RAM was a ripoff back in those days.
Armed with 16MB of RAM I went out and bought Wing Commander 3, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Realms of the Haunting, Rise of the Triad, Dark Forces and a few other classics. Wing Commander 3 barely ran on this rig, but the game was a blast. Heretic and Duke Nukem 3D rocked as well. My jaw had hit the ground the first time I'd played Doom shareware a couple of years earlier too.
My local newsagent was a big time gamer and I got all this shareware stuff off him. After playing Blake Stone and Wolf 3D, Doom was a revelation. Still, there's a billion places out there that laud this game as the start of the next big thing, so I won't go into it here.
After 5 years of yeoman service, my 486DX was finally and utterly in the obsolete class. I looked around, shopped around and bought my next fun-time machine. A Pentium 200, a 4MB S3 PCI video card, 64MB of RAM, a SB16, a CD-ROM drive and a 5GB hard-drive. Oh boy! Did I go nuts with the games after that!
Yep, Diablo, Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret, Close Combat, Jedi Knight, Hexen, Gabriel Knight 1, Quake, etc. I played Diablo to death. Wasted many of my after-work hours on this game on Battle.net, same with Quake. It was around this time that I started to fool with Linux seriously, partitioned my drive and got Win95, OS/2 Warp 4 and Linux all going in a multi-boot setup.
The next innovation I got was the Voodoo 2 accelerator card. I'd heard about all these people going ooh aah at hardware acceleration and decided to see what the go was. Wow...I never looked back. Jedi Knight, Hexen 2, Mechwarrior 2 all looked superb. Mysteries of the Sith looked superb. Space battles with Wing Commander 4 and 5 suddenly got a lot better. It was about this time I met my future wife and emigrated to the United States.
Onto the last page.