geertjanb wrote on 2025-01-20, 09:19:

One of the things that hinders me from having fun is the lack of concentration or the so called tiktok brain.
I start a retro game which I have been looking forward to for years but i get bored so quickly (within a minute), it's not healthy.

But I've noticed that when i push through, for like example doom 1, I'm starting to have fun, I just need to remember this.

Sounds like you have Attention Deficit Disorder. I am pretty sure I have that too. Even when having a conversation with someone I often find my mind wandering and have to snap myself back and hope they don't notice I wasn't listening for a while. Haha.

geertjanb wrote on 2025-01-20, 09:19:

One of the things that hinders me from having fun is the lack of concentration or the so called tiktok brain.
I start a retro game which I have been looking forward to for years but i get bored so quickly (within a minute), it's not healthy.

But I've noticed that when i push through, for like example doom 1, I'm starting to have fun, I just need to remember this.

I actually attribute this to abundance of choice

we recall from childhood that when we get one toy we play with it, but we probably also saw other kids getting lots of toys and just rushing from one to the other.

Back when younger we would have bought a game and because of that we would have played it, even if it wasn't that great

Now, due to various factors (our collections, thrift stores, gog and so on) we can have 100's even 1000's of games to play and so we don't just settle on one game

i remember this happening to me when i discovered MAME back in the 90's, at first i was able to play a few early 80's games and so i did, but soon enough there were so many games it was perhaps too easy to just stop and look at another. Same with emulation of consoles as it developed in the late 90's, and it is similar with PC games now

however i note some things - i am happy now just to forego some older games that, classic or not, just don't seem that good or that i have played enough and also happy to replay something i really liked rather than grind through a new game experience that isn't rewarding enough.

Maybe that is part of having fun - don't put every option on at once and be overwhelmed, its ok to pass over a game if it isn't that great (and let go of ones that were), be happy to play the same game again if you are really enjoying it.

Like others i also enjoyed building machines (but don't so much now), but tend to do any playing on newer machines - typically and early 2010's machines with win 7, modest graphics card and more than enough power to play anything on dosbox, most windows games (esp from gog) and quite few games from 10+ years ago (fallouts, gta 4,5, skyrim and so on), just not the latest ones.

Detoxing from social media is the key to solving this problem. I suspected this immediately after seeing the title. I experienced it too, and detoxing from social media was the key to restoring my gaming enjoyment and getting the fun back. For me, Twitch/Youtube was the issue. You see hundreds of games being played, and with each one, you think, 'I should play this too.' As you accumulate more 'should plays,' it becomes overwhelming, and it starts to feel like you don’t have time to play because there’s a huge list of games in your head. This can lead to anxiety, and the fun disappears. Any thought that begins with 'I should' can cause problems in the long run.

I've tried this, too! After about one week without a smartphone I was back to my old self again.
Unfortunately, pressure from the environment, especially family, makes it hard to live without a smartphone.
Occasional tablet pc use was also a factor, but not that much by comparison.

I have far more fun building the machines and getting all the kinks ironed out myself.
Once it comes time to actually play the games.....I realize that I don't have that kind of time to dedicate to it after all.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-01-20, 17:22:

I've tried this, too! After about one week without a smartphone I was back to my old self again.
Unfortunately, pressure from the environment, especially family, makes it hard to live without a smartphone.
Occasional tablet pc use was also a factor, but not that much by comparison.

Yes, its not easy, friends and family are like "are you crazy since dont use smartphone etc." 😁
Lots us have the same issues but maybe succeed one day 😀 I guess its different project for each, for me it took 3 years to finally destroy addiction and get peace back.

What? These old computers can play games? Wow, that is so cool! I'll have to check out that game called timedemo that everyone here keeps talking about.

douglar wrote on 2025-01-20, 18:48:

What? These old computers can play games? ...

It's kinda weird eh?

Even *really* old computers (like from the 70's) can play games!

Experience gaming (and other things) on an Altair - a very historic, very old system (from the 70s)

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

douglar wrote on 2025-01-20, 18:48:

What? These old computers can play games? Wow, that is so cool! I'll have to check out that game called timedemo that everyone here keeps talking about.

Timedemo is really good, you can just sit back and enjoy. Also does not waste a lot of time.

The issue I had most of the games I own are from the early 90s to mid 2000s and little did I know that down sizing to a 64bit laptop and getting rid of the tower I would never be able to play them again my collection of enjoyment was rendered useless with one purchase and getting a tower back again wasn’t financially viable at the time nor any space to set it up.
Luckily there are clever people out there that have made things possible to use some of my collection but still need half a brain to get them to work properly.
And now certain tech is old enough and useless enough that a lot of people don’t see the value of it dispose of it cheaply or ewaste It now gives me the opportunity to get back into it within a reasonable budget once I get them working right.

My 12 year old son hacked his TI calculator to play translated gameboy roms during class. Should I be proud or worried?

Don't limit yourself to retrogaming. That's the common problem when you want to have fun from the games of your youth only - that won't work.

Modding, reparing, soldering something new, ordering, assembling, cleaning and restoring, testing, coding - there is plenty of much more interesting activities than playing Doom 2 after you've played something modern.

For me, it comes down to mainly two things:

First: Those games were new back then. I didn't know them, so I experienced them as new, had to explore them, etc. When replaying them nowadays, yes, they give me that nostalgia, but at the same time there's less to explore as I already know them so well. Though I have to say, there are games like Dune II, that I like so much that I still enjoy them (and I do play them from time to time, maybe every year or so) even though I've played them a lot.
So I set out to find games that I didn't play (or not much) in the past, but appeal to me. And those I have enjoyed as well.

Second: Time. As a kid it was much easier to immerse in a game, which added to the experience. Nowadays there's this to worry about, that to do, etc. which causes my mind to wander off more easily. Though I'd like to play something like Monkey Island 2 Normal Mode, I mostly end up playing DynaBlaster 😁
And yes, distractions can also play their part here. At least in that regard I'm lucky as I don't have a smartphone as my friends and family either also don't have one, or aren't addicted to them.

Visiting the first level of each game can be interesting.

But to me, Starcraft still holds up... sound effects, gameplay still the best.

I built a K6-III+ 600 MHZ machine running W98SE for late DOS & early Windows games, then a P4 3.4 GHZ Prescott machine running WXP for early - mid 2000's games, a 486 DX5 133 MHZ (AMD 5x86 P75) machine with turbo functions for the entire DOS era, and finally a new Ryzen 5 7600x machine running Linux for modern titles and video editing. It is definitely about the journey and not the destination as it was a huge blast building and configuring each.

What I like to do for gaming is to play and finish one game on one PC and then move to the next.
For example:
Beat Descent 1 on the DOS machine.
Beat Thief 1 on the W98 machine.
Beat Return to Castle Wolfenstein on the XP machine.
Beat Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order on my Linux machine.
The cycle repeats.
Beat Tomb Raider 1 on my DOS machine...

At some point though you must be content with what you have, especially if you live in a smaller house and your hobby starts to take up a lot of space. If you find that your PC building itch can never be fully scratched, then consider applying for or starting your own PC building and customization business; or reconfigure older OEM machines from a few years back and give them to your young and elderly relatives.

MikeSG wrote on 2025-01-22, 16:53:

Visiting the first level of each game can be interesting.

But to me, Starcraft still holds up... sound effects, gameplay still the best.

I remember when I picked up StarCraft on my lunch break in 1998. I sat in the back of the meeting room for an all hands work meeting that afternoon, reading the fat, future history packed, tone setting manual that came with it, getting excited, thinking that this isn't your average near waste byproduct from the windows game mill.

Recently kids were looking through a bookshelf of old PC game boxes at a friend's house. My older son has been playing Civ6. He looked in the Civ4 box and found the 190 page manual and laughed at how absurd it was that it came with a book. A book! How silly! Why?

p.s. "It's a Zergling, Lester."

Massive manuals also remind me of dragon wars and dungeon master and elder scrolls arena

douglar wrote on 2025-01-22, 15:12:

My 12 year old son hacked his TI calculator to play translated gameboy roms during class. Should I be proud or worried?

I don't know, but he'd probably get on like a house on fire with my (also 12-year old) son who has a decent PC (which he built), but spends most of his time messing around with Wii-U and Wii homebrew, including running Gamecube stuff on them.

As for the original question, I'm inspired by Lemmy: "The chase is better than the catch". Yes, it's fun to do things on perfectly working systems, but nowhere near as much fun as getting the systems working, if not getting the parts to get the systems working.

I can relate to this issue. I have thought about a solution that might actually work for me. I would need to get away from all modern devices, lets call it retro day, the day of rejuvenation. I need to have a second phone that you can only call with, and just allow myself to watch movies from vhs or dvd and play old games games on original hardware. I think if I managed to get into the mindset I would be bored enough to play old games..

I think it would be quite healthy to do this maybe once a week to get away from addictive modern media.

3dnow wrote on 2025-01-22, 18:52:

I built a K6-III+ 600 MHZ machine running W98SE for late DOS & early Windows games, then a P4 3.4 GHZ Prescott machine running W […]
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I built a K6-III+ 600 MHZ machine running W98SE for late DOS & early Windows games, then a P4 3.4 GHZ Prescott machine running WXP for early - mid 2000's games, a 486 DX5 133 MHZ (AMD 5x86 P75) machine with turbo functions for the entire DOS era, and finally a new Ryzen 5 7600x machine running Linux for modern titles and video editing. It is definitely about the journey and not the destination as it was a huge blast building and configuring each.

What I like to do for gaming is to play and finish one game on one PC and then move to the next.
For example:
Beat Descent 1 on the DOS machine.
Beat Thief 1 on the W98 machine.
Beat Return to Castle Wolfenstein on the XP machine.
Beat Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order on my Linux machine.
The cycle repeats.
Beat Tomb Raider 1 on my DOS machine...

At some point though you must be content with what you have, especially if you live in a smaller house and your hobby starts to take up a lot of space. If you find that your PC building itch can never be fully scratched, then consider applying for or starting your own PC building and customization business; or reconfigure older OEM machines from a few years back and give them to your young and elderly relatives.

I'm really into challenges and rewards. It has done wonders for me in the gym for example. I will definitely give this a try as well.

I like the idea to finish Doom 1, Duke 3D, Redneck Rampage before I can move on to a next generation of PC.

Great idea, thanks!