ORIGINAL: Nikademus
The most sub-bing i did was with Silent Service II, using CGA graphics (4 amazing colors!) on an old 8088 PC with a 40MB hard drive that my dad brought home from work (surplus) ah those were the days. It was my first personal experience with a "PC", having graduated from an Atari 800 with an Indus Disk Drive. The concept of a computer having an internal disk drive with what was then an amazingly huge capacity (40.....***40 MEGABYTES!!!**** [:D] ) gave me goosebumps as by that time, the 8bit computer was largely dead and no new wargames were being made that they could run.
Also played lots and i do mean lots of Second Front for the PC (later changed to "War in Russia" for better branding by SSI). A combat phase took well over 15 minutes to run through [:D]
By the time i got Silent Hunter....I either was using my first purchased PC. (A packard Bell 486/SX33.....the one and only time i ever bought big name brand)....or I was using my first custom built PC...a Pentium 90Mhz.
lol.....amusing side note. I recently found an old Packard Bell "Legend" 486/SX 20 sitting by the side of the road. After cleaning it up and re-configuring the 380 MB hard drive (the BIOS battery had long died....so you had to configure the HDD every time you booted up the machine)....i was awarded with the welcome screen for Windows for Workgroups 3.11 Memory lane! Loaded the original X-wing and Out of this World on it. (yes....i still have the 3.5 floppies for these games). The former in particular forced me to relearn how to configure DOS expanded and extended memory to make it run. Lol....good thing i kept my old Packard Bell DOS 5.0 book for reference. [:D]
Ah, memories!
Packard Hells--if that was your first big label I understand. Absolute donkey fazoo.
My first PC after the Apple IIe was a PCs Limited 286 (they later became Dell; Michael's ego wasn't big enough when he moved the business out of his dorm room.) I was in B-school and couldn't afford a real IBM PC, and a study group-mate reccoed this "mail order" thing and PC s Limited. Pretty big risk at the time. No info at all. Nada. No Internet yet for sure, and I never saw a print ad. Just an 800# that took Mastercard, and a price 50% of IBM's. Hercules monochrome amber graphics, a 6Mhz CPU WITH A TURBO SWITCH (!!!) you could flip in emergencies to go screaming up to 8 Mhz, and, wait for it, a 20 MEG HD!!!! I had been dealing with Apple floppies for years, so a HD was paradise. The whole time I owned that pig I never filled up more than 5 Meg. Today 20 Meg is one PowerPoint file.
Some of my best gaming time was playing the original Microprose Stealth Fighter in monochrome without a joystick. Try playing a flight sim with the arrow keys, kids.
I bought probably 75 games while I owned that guy, all on 5in floppies. I still have every one, and most of the boxes. When I euthanized my 486 years ago I cut out the 5-in drive and put it in an anti-static bag just in case, someday. I don't even know if the rails or power plug would still work, but I still have it. Probably 50% or more of those floppies have de-magnetized by now, but I still have the manuals. [:)]
Configing DOS . . . The horror! Along the way a company named Quarterdeck came out with a utility program called QEMM (I think.) I paid about $40 for it. It configured the expanded and extended memory and wrote custom config.sys and autoexec.bat files for games, interpolating and tweaking to get the optimal mix. Many a Saturday I went to BestBuy, got a game, came home, and spent three or four hours trying to get that last 12k freed up so the sound would work. Try after try, batch file after batch file, until finally the game intro music burst forth in its tinny brilliance and those VESA graphics jumped out at you sitting surrounded by manuals, tools, and boot floppies. I like it better now, but there's not the same sense of big game hunter involved.
