Interesting, I knew there was a push by retailers to move to smaller standardised cases, but I had no idea it came from a single retailer working with a single publisher. And everybody eventually relented.
I’m of two minds regarding big boxes. I love it when they are actually used to hold stuff, but so many times, especially in the later years, it held nothing more than a CD-ROM in a jewel case and a leaflet. It was basically full of air. I would have much preferred to have a small box for such releases.
I stopped buying PC games physical when it was empty with a steam code inside. I miss the old big boxes with the glorious manuals that were required to play alot of the games.
The book Console wars and now this article really drive home just how powerful Walmart was in the 90s video game market.
So many good memories of when I first got into PC gaming. Our first computer was a Windows 3.11 which couldn’t run anything - but eventually I ended up with a system that could play Worms 2 and later on Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
I’m still mourning the loss of my big box PC games. Figures Walmart would be involved somehow. I agree that they lost their magic when the boxes were filled with Steam codes and/or air.
found my old 2009 model MacPro (the one that can be opened) that was given to me back in 2015 and discovered that it can dual-boot to Win10 so now I got a PC too! It’s a bit sluggish by today’s standards so I’ll be looking into upgrades but still cool that I can get back into classic 90s gaming. Would love to try and run old Win 95/98 type games on it and relive 90s PC gaming. Is Dos-Box still a thing?
I’ve recently dug up two old PCs that I’m working on setting up. One is a Dell desktop with a 1GHz P3 and 256MB (I think?) of RAM running XP. I had no issues doing a clean install there and it runs better than my 2003 self could imagine XP could.
The other is a Fujitsu Laptop with a Pentium I (MMX). It had XP on it as well but it was obviously struggling hard with that. I’m trying to figure out how to get Windows 98SE on there now to try it out (never did this before). I made a boot floppy and it works fine, but I can’t seem to get a CD-R to work after trying a few ISOs. Does anyone have experience installing Win98SE without the original install disk? No USB boot option in BIOS.
DosBox is alive and well, most GOG games run on it with per-configured settings just for that game. I haven’t used DosBox standalone myself, just because I can get most of the games I am interested in from GOG with little to no tinkering necessary (though you can still change settings of course).
Sweet. Great to see GoG are still going and if they got some of the big DOS titles then I’ll definitely check them out. It’s just I still got a few DOS CDs kicking around and wondered if they can still be used.
I’m willing to install 98 on the Dell, my main problem is that I’m not sure how best to make a disc. All the tutorials online seem to either gloss over the burning method or only assume you have a retail install disk, which seem to be climbing in price on Ebay.
You mean burning an iso on a CD? There’s nothing special to do, the disc isn’t protected in any way. Burn the image like you would any other image, the copy protection is via a key.
I have burned a couple so far and they are not recognized by the laptop CD drive (may be a problem with the drive, now that I think about it). I’ll try them in the Dell tonight ad see if they work.
Ideally you want to format the hard drive and make a directory on the c drive called windows/options/cabs and copy the files from the cd over. Then run setup from that directory and it won’t ask for the cd.
As far as the cd-r goes a lot of earlier cd drives can’t read burned cds. You may have to buy a second hand original copy.
I have not tested a factory CD in that drive unfortunately, since XP took (literally) 15 minutes or so to boot up, I went straight to trying to install Win98 like a dummy.
@Addicted I will try again tonight and see if I can access the disc at all. So far every disc I have tried has come back with an error like “CD Read Fail, No Disc in Drive … ®etry or (A)bort” or something close to that. This is a mid-90s laptop and the CD drive is one that you can swap in and out with a small release lever, so I’m betting either the drive is damaged or it doesn’t recognize burns.
I think what I’ll do is just try the install on the P3 machine, if worst comes to worst I can always reinstall XP.
I wonder if anyone out there has a bunch of PCs set up to one screen, each with its own period - accurate OS for gaming similar to how a lot of us have a bunch of consoles set up in the same way. I’d love to have old PC hardware on hand to play old games that way but it sounds like too big of a hassle at this point for me.
Maybe I’ll tackle it if I ever move into a place where I can have a dedicated video game room.
From what I see from people making videos or posting photos on vogons, they tend to set everything up as separate working stations, with their own display and peripherals.
I myself currently have three computers and only one usable monitor. The monitor itself has two inputs, one that I’m manually switching between the two old computers, and I’m using a cheap USB manual switch to connect the mouse and keyboard to everything. Not ideal.
I want to give the old computers, DOS and WinXP, their own shared monitor and peripherals. I have a cheaper 17" monitor that has not as defined scan lines as the modern monitor I’m currently using, as well as PS/2 mouse and keyboard. I’ll need to find a switch for all that. And the space for the second monitor.
