First post, by Ribbicipp
Hi all,
I would like to share my experience returning to Win98 after around 25 years away from it.
As a now 38 year old fart, i've realized that the old Windows versions wasn't as glorious as I remember in my head. I remember being able to play almost whatever I wanted on my P3 800Mhz with a TNT2 back in the day without many issues.
Although, coming back to that exact machine 25 years later after a restoration and a fresh Win98SE install, I started diving into the deep djungle of drivers in order to get everything working properly. This was when I started to realize that the old way of doing things wasn't as easy as I remember. That's probably because I mostly relied on my dad to fix things for me whenever an error occured on our PC as a kid.
The next five days I spent many hours switching hardware like graphics cards, sound cards, memory, CD-ROM drive, trying a SD to IDE adapter and installing countless drivers in order to see what worked best. After around four re-installations of Windows I finally started getting to where I wanted the system to be: just a simple Windows 98SE PC without any bloatware or unecessary programs filling up the disk. A Win98SE gaming machine with all the proper drivers needed to play games of that era.
So far the experience with using vintage hardware/software was a mixed bag. Many errors that needed solving or workarounds in order to work properly, wierd crashes coming out of nowhere etc. At the same time it was kinda enjoyable getting something to finally work after many hours of ripping my hair out, even further receding my hairline.
So after all this headache mixed with a wierd masochistic enjoyment I decided to finally try out some games.
As a big box collector I have around 200 big box games on my shelves from around that era of gaming, so I wanted to try some of them out and relive those nostalgic memories from when I was kid.
I quickly realized that there are lots of compability issues with games from this era. First I tried out some proper DOS games like Commander Keen 1-5, all working fine. Blake Stone, working fine, Wolf3D fine, Doom 2 also fine.
Then I moved on to the Windows 95 era. Full Throttle, one of my absolute favorite games of all time ran really slow with super choppy sound no matter if i ran it win Win98 or DOS. Ultimate Doom 95 ran "fine" but didn't detect my mouse for whatever reason. Outcast self-uninstalled itself for god knows why, MDK2 played fine, C&C Tiberian Sun fine.
Was it really this hard getting games to run properly or even run at all during this time? For example, Full Throttle was a Win95 title, but W98 wasn't exactly that big of a difference from 95, right?
Are these issues OS or hardware related or even both? As someone who hasn't used hardware or software this old in over two decades, this is new ground for me.
Any interesting tips, ideas or experiences you guys could share with me that might help me out?