Reply 120 of 159, by 386SX
Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-11, 16:40:To me it's either the hardware that the developers had used at the time or the target platform they had been developing for. […]
386SX wrote on 2024-11-11, 12:19:Period correct for PC gaming to me means a config that was supposed to exist and run the same period correct software so it's not really necessary to have a single month/year period release of each component but more a config that in a certain range would have sense to exist in those couple years. At the end like a late Am386DX-40 config with 1995 hardware.
To me it's either the hardware that the developers had used at the time or the target platform they had been developing for.
The latter is the cross-compile concept.
You have a higher-end system you develop your applications with.Just like how DOS 2.x had been developed on a DEC system or how MS Windows 1.x had been developed on a more powerful Tandy 2000 (featured 80186, 640x400 8c graphics).
What I also think is a must-have is a CRT monitor or a simulation of it.
Otherwise, the games look just horrible. LCD is not period-correct.
- Except for those vintage LCDs or gas plasma screens used in late 80s/early 90s.
(Or 15" LCD panels used in early flst screen monitors or NTSC flat screen TVs from early 2000s.)Why? Because of their native resolution being fitting.
VGA was 640x480 pels which these 286/386/486 laptop screens had featured natively.
Ideal for Windows 3.0 using Standard VGA driver and typical DOS applications.
320x200 graphics were being displayed as 640x400, with small black borders on top and bottom.The aspect ratio maybe wasn't correct for 320x200 because of square pixels vs non-square pixels, but the scaling was integer without interpolation, at least.
Games using ModeX in 320x240 looked fine, also.
By comparion, modern LCDs always must scale/interpolate pixels on a typical DOS system.
Except if Windows has a driver for matching resolution.Edit: You could also say that "period-correct" is what's listed on the game box. 😉
If a game says "386 or higher" a slightly newer or older generation might be still within period-correctness.
Say a 286 at 20 MHz (if game is still 16-Bit) or a modest 486DX with sufficient cache and RAM.
Let's remember, the recommended requirements are not seldomly the true minimum requirements. So there's always a bit of tolerance.Edit: Last but not least, there's another factor that's often being forgotten.
Trends, pop culture and fashion aren’t around same time across the world.
Some countries do lag behind a few years, sometimes.Here in my place, fashion and films was about 2 years behind when it comes to stuff from over the big pond. Music excepted, maybe, because radio was international (shortwave).
I mean, let's look at eastern Europe of the 90s.
They had just started in ca. 1995 to adopt western 80s fashion and music.
Their computers at home were older models, from what I read some countries just had started to try to build 286 PCs in 1992.
In such places, period-correctness was different altogether.In China, for example, they had home computers based on the japanese Famicom platform. With keyboard, mouse and 1,44 MB floppy drive.
The company Sobor had created them. The OS was SB-DOS, an MS-DOS 6.2 look a like that ran on 6502.
And these computers weren't cheap to ordinary citizens, still.
I suppose it also depend on the game and the memories we have running it. Similar things about audio accuracy through old cheap PC speakers or internal speakers. I remember the mentioned Stunts (1990) I played infinite times on a friend's Compaq Presario 433. The game running on it is basically my "period-correct" version of how it's supposed to appear. For many many years I didn't even want to play it with Sound Blaster options for example because I only accepted THAT specific or similar PC speaker sound that computer had and it wasn't even easy to simulate because that computer had a specific PC speaker sound inside that case. At some point I could even tell the smell that computer make when its plastic heated from the hardware running in such compact space and that even added some "accuracy" to the gameplay considering we were running that game for entire days in epic competitions.
Sometimes even period correct highest end hardware supposed to run a specific title doesn't feel really right. A Pentium 200 running the original Doom is maybe a bit late and too fast even if frame rate would only benefit from it.