Special Edition also had Win3.1 and DOS builds on the disc. Are you sure you're not confusing it for the Win95-only Network Edition?

leileilol wrote on 2021-07-23, 21:01:

Special Edition also had Win3.1 and DOS builds on the disc. Are you sure you're not confusing it for the Win95-only Network Edition?

Nope, not on the release I bought back then. European "CD Collection".

I was always an OS guy and liked new stuff... tested beta on my 386DX-40 with 4MB of memory 🤣 probably a year before release. Also tried Win 4.0 workstation beta before release on a 486DX2-80 and 8MB memory 🤣 Also downloaded many different builds of "Memphis" - Win98 and also Win2K. Those were the fun times 😀

My computers were always behind time... lagged 2-3 years at least. So new games were not much fun to play - played Doom and Descent in a mini screen window.

Back in those days I never upgraded to Win95 but directly to Win98 from Win3.1. I usually worked with Win95 in labs or friends computers but I jumped directly from the 80386 to the K6-2. Not the best choice anyway.. 😀

386SX wrote on 2021-07-25, 16:15:

Back in those days I never upgraded to Win95 but directly to Win98 from Win3.1. I usually worked with Win95 in labs or friends computers but I jumped directly from the 80386 to the K6-2. Not the best choice anyway.. 😀

Nah, it could have been worse! 😉
Imagine you had Win95 running on the K6-2 instead of your thrusty 386!
PCI, ACPI/APIC.. On early Win95! Yikes.
By comparison, Win98 was so much more mature in this respect.

Jo22 wrote on 2021-07-25, 20:15:

Nah, it could have been worse! 😉 Imagine you had Win95 running on the K6-2 instead of your thrusty 386! PCI, ACPI/APIC.. On earl […]
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386SX wrote on 2021-07-25, 16:15:

Back in those days I never upgraded to Win95 but directly to Win98 from Win3.1. I usually worked with Win95 in labs or friends computers but I jumped directly from the 80386 to the K6-2. Not the best choice anyway.. 😀

Nah, it could have been worse! 😉
Imagine you had Win95 running on the K6-2 instead of your thrusty 386!
PCI, ACPI/APIC.. On early Win95! Yikes.
By comparison, Win98 was so much more mature in this respect.

Eheh yeah it could have been worse.. 😀

I always found Win95 to be a bit "tricky" to configure for a long term stable and expandable config and Win98 sure improved many steps and even stability. It's still impressive how much Win95 has been important for every other versions and even other o.s., in terms of concept and it's still impressive how light it is compared to Win98 or later.
I suppose patches improved something even if I don't remember how many or how much they did for it.
But my regrets were also about buying a whole new assembled (the only one ever bought assembled by a PC store) pc with that K6-2 and payed too much for those times, for what I really needed (study, games, office, a usual late 90's home machine) when ANY Pentium 200 MMX or a K6 (I didn't even know back then about this alternative until the second version, I don't know why but I only had Intel memories until the K6-2) with any Voodoo1 or 2 card was more than enough for everything.
And to buy that brand new middle end K6-2 350 with those impressive 64MB useless PC100 ram, still make me think about how many configs we could have simply not needed. And to make things even worse I did buy a just released Voodoo3 2000 AGP like a month later...that was a bad choice too.. money spent for nothing when even a cheap Riva128 ZX was more than I would have asked for (with modern drivers I suppose).

My first computer came with Windows 95.
I picked up Strike Commander but could not get it to run. I called the 1-800 number and a guy (I presume in Texas) talked me through the whole process of making a boot disk.
Since there were few Windows-only games I learned how to get around DOS...

I had worked in a lab that used Windows 3.11 for workgroups but they were few and being upgraded as well.
When I started working after college I found a lot of people had perfectly usable computers that had DOS/Windows but they had no clue how to use them.
Since the Internet was not thing yet I taught myself how to get the most out of whatever they had with only the occasional upgrade (usually memory)...
So I sort of retro-ed into DOS....

Does the Internet count? I did play around on the net after all?
We got our first PC a DX2/66 early '95 that came with Win 3.11 and I became really into computers.
a few months after it's realise a mates who's dad was in the business had a bunch of OEM copies from somewhere and sole me one for $30
A lot of money for a 15 year old me but an absolute bargain as the hype still hadn't died down yet.

I tried Hover and Doom95 but they weren't playable so still did all my gaming in dos mode.
Diablo was the first 95 only game that impressed me, so much so I suffered a few games of the spawn copy after a mate came over. That was a painful game. 3 player serial link.
Mate who owned the game had a Pentium 75? other mate had a DX4/100 but I was the only one with a PS/2 mouse and 2 free serial ports. so the slowest PC that could hardly run the OS was also a server! some things I don't miss.
On the plus side that's what prompted us to buy the hardware for a 10MB coax network, Still had to wait till 98 for a new PC though

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chinny22 wrote on 2021-07-26, 16:01:

Diablo was the first 95 only game that impressed me, so much so I suffered a few games of the spawn copy after a mate came over.

Those spawn installations were great. I loved that you could play with a bunch of friends with just one copy of the game. And usually, they would get interested and buy the game for themselves too.

Sadly, this behavior is unthinkable for modern game developers.

Early important Win95 exclusive games I enjoyed? Subspace betas probably. I was already a fan of Star Control 2's melee so this clicked. No idea if Continuum's still compatible with old windows and machines.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-07-26, 17:03:

chinny22 wrote on 2021-07-26, 16:01:

Diablo was the first 95 only game that impressed me, so much so I suffered a few games of the spawn copy after a mate came over.

Those spawn installations were great. I loved that you could play with a bunch of friends with just one copy of the game. And usually, they would get interested and buy the game for themselves too.

Sadly, this behavior is unthinkable for modern game developers.

I know, it's actually better (from a money making view) then shareware that you could play as much as you wanted.
Where as this way the free copy of the game was useless after the owner walked away.
Not to mention multiplayer gaming is soo much more common then it was in the late 90's

For me it was QuakeWorld in 1997. I was happy with running my BBS on OS/2 Warp 3 until then.