3dfx. 🙁

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

3dfx. 🙁

Good riddance.

Even if they had the performance cards in the '90s I always think of them as a jerk company, with Glide API exclusivity, anti-wrapper stance, and aggressive SEGA style PR.

leileilol wrote:

Even if they had the performance cards in the '90s I always think of them as a jerk company, with Glide API exclusivity, anti-wrapper stance, and aggressive SEGA style PR.

When 3dfx first started there was no standard 3d API yet. Their only initial choice was a proprietary API. Later, when Carmack released glQuake with OpenGL support, 3dfx did help somewhat with a gl mini port. I do not recall them ever being jerks about glide being the be-all-end-all solution.

Remember that 3dfx guys were ex SGI guys. Glide and OpenGL aren't exactly completely dissimilar. The problem was that back then OpenGL wasn't really ideal for games. The cheap game cards were way too basic to support much of the library, and that wasn't even unreasonable because OpenGL was meant for CAD-like apps. Hell even the miniGL, with its tiny subset, was too much for most of the crap cards of the day. 😁

Proprietary API wars suck. The consumer is the one who loses every time with that stuff. It's reminiscent of the stupid modern physics hardware war.

btw i liked your old anime avatar better, leileilol.

🤣 I thought it was the lawnmower man

leileilol wrote:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

3dfx. 🙁

Good riddance.

Even if they had the performance cards in the '90s I always think of them as a jerk company,

Oh, I never love a company --not even 3dfx. It is the products, not the company.

Of course, even the products started losing their grounds after Voodoo2, but whenever a game supports both GLide and Direct3D, it always looks better in GLide. Furthermore, many GLide games like Jane's Longbow and The Elder Scrolls: Red Guard also happen to have good gameplay, hence my endless hunting of 3dfx hardware on ebay.

Ah, back to the topic, another thing I miss from the 90s is MIDI music; more exactly, games with MIDI music that changes dynamically according to the action. Wing Commander is probably the most prominent example of this, TIE Fighter is another.

and lucasarts/lucasfilm "imuse" too =D

Passwords that were the word "PASSWORD".

Having a nice PC before it was common to own a computer. I blame the common idiot for the death of adventure games.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I blame the common idiot for the death of adventure games.

And wargames, simulations, puzzles, and FPSes with actual depth... Tom Clancy's name is as soft as GI Joe nowadays.

The re-release of CD Talkie versions of previous floppy-based adventure games for DOS, most notably by Sierra On-Line and Lucasarts.

I really wish some talented people will take up the challenge and create an authentic voice-over for the Monkey Island 2 : Le Chuck's Revenge.

Ah, why didn't I think about it on the first place?

You know what I really miss from the 90s? Game manuals! Thick, chunky, meaty game manuals, filled with disbelief-suspending materials, and supplemented with colorful game maps and other feelies.

I really miss you, Origin.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

You know what I really miss from the 90s? Game manuals!

Yeah those manuals added a ton of atmosphere to the game experience. It was even more important back then because the actual games themselves were rather simplistic and the manuals really added a lot of "brain candy" to fuel the imagination.

I think it also said something about the people making the games. They loved the little details about their universes.

You can still find this sort of thing today sometimes. Oblivion's CE came with a rather fascinating little historical book, the cool Imperial coin, and a map-poster. I don't usually buy CEs though. Most of today's games aren't worth it IMO. Oh and with World in Conflict they packed in a History Channel documentary about the Berlin wall and this wasn't a collector's edition at all. That impressed me.

swaaye wrote:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

You know what I really miss from the 90s? Game manuals!

Yeah those manuals added a ton of atmosphere to the game experience. It was even more important back then because the actual games themselves were rather simplistic and the manuals really added a lot of "brain candy" to fuel the imagination.

The thing I love about Origin is that they kept the "manual and feelie tradition" even after graphics and sound got better. Anyone remember the full-color tabloid in Crusader: No Regret?

Manuals are cool, but I never really do read any of them, then or now....Still want them for some reason.

Good old-fashioned DOS shells! Not command prompts, but straightforward menu programs. Pick what you want to run from the list and away you go. No desktops, no Explorer, no System Tray, no Start Menu.

I'm not sure if such simplicity could possibly work with today's systems anymore; maybe it's just the simplicity I miss.

CRT Monitors, FM Synthesis, IBM Model M Keyboards, VGA graphics, 2D graphical adventures, Sierra Online, LucasArts, Origin, Roland GM/GS Modules and Roland MT-32 & CM series.