gerry wrote on 2021-09-14, 09:01:
how about you - were there any periods in PC development that you missed out on during a lull in interest for example? Have you wanted to close the gap by getting things from that era now?
I'd imagine that applies to about half of the people in the hobby 😀
As for me: I've started gaming in 1996, but had very crappy hardware and missed most of the cool stuff of the DOS era — first and foremost, everything about sound, music, multimedia CD-ROM craze and early Internet.
I've first played Doom, Quake, Hexen and Heretic on much newer hardware under Windows and didn't even consider them to be DOS games. Basically I've only played very basic puzzles and platformers like Supaplex, Blockout, Prince of Persia — and not in their best form (no sound except for the PC speaker). And in my childhood most people had NES clones (very popular in Russia, called "Dendy"), so I just somehow assumed that most games in early 90s and 80s very simple "kiddie" platformers and so on.
About 6 or 7 years ago I've learned about adventure titles like Harvester, Phantasmagoria I/II, I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream and others. Dark, gritty, often dealing with pretty mature themes, even if some of these games have B-movies level of writing. I also love FMV in games because you can see that a lot of the actors are just regular people that were in the office that day. Kind of cool to see a portal into a different time and culture.
Then I've learned about AdLib and most importantly, MT-32, SC-55 and other premium sound devices that I had no idea existed.
Ever since then I got hooked on this hobby. I've tried a lot of eras in retro computing, from XT to late Pentium III, but I keep coming back to mid-90s (early Win95 era) on hardware ranging from late 486 to Socket 5 and Socket 8, because for me it's just interesting to see what was actually possible in games when I was just a kid. There's just something about building a computer that cost $5000-7000 in 1995 and would probably be used for some professional environment. But here I am just playing Doom on it 😀
I've also missed most of the late XP and Vista era, but I don't think it was particularly great for PC gaming