amdfangirl :
I wish I had old stuff... never experienced anything older than Pentium I...
When it comes to LIF sockets, you didn't miss much.
Seriously, if it need liquid anything at sub zero temps to get to that speed, it doesn't count. Only realistic air or normal water cooling overclocking counts.
Who's back on track. Let's talk about old games!
The games can be had at sites like Home of the Underdogs. Most play under Dosbox. I own The Elder Scrolls Daggerfall and still play it on occasion. TES Arena's still fun. I have the CD version of that, which has my favorite voice acting in any old game. When you die, Ria Silmane's spirit hovers in a video cut scene and intones "With you has died our last hope..."
Also on the PC, I enjoyed Magic Candle II and II, Star Control II and III, and (best of them all) Betrayal at Krondor. Both Betrayal at Krondor and TES: Arena were released free and other titles were either abandoned by no longer existing developers or released free as well.
In the Commodore days, games like Ultima III and the original The Bard's Tale came on one diskette that was C64 on one side and Atari 1200 on the other. You'd have to make backups of the games to play from otherwise you'd wear out your disks. I played all the Gold Box AD&D games on the C128 except for Dark Queen of Krynn, which I had for the PC.
Years later, I bought several different shovelware editions of the classic AD&D games. The SSI Gold Box plus later games like the two Dark Suns and two Ravenlofts. Then there's Menzoberranzen, which was an okay game but had the worst voice acting of any game I've ever played; Matron Malice scry's the party as part of the character creation process intoning "Show me the attributes of the next character" quite badly.
Copy protection back then was a translation wheel, or words taken from a journal. In game, there wouldn't be enough room for the dialogue so you'd get a message to read journal entry 12 for example. That sort of copy protection asked for word 7 on line 3 of page 6. They'd have fake journal entries for fun in case people read the journals before being told to. In "Wasteland" (more fun than Fallout, if you ask me) there was a journal entry where the cult priestess gave away her secret plans to win the big college football bowl game while her acolytes hummed "On Wisconsin".
Here's a real life story that's funny. My room mate and I were at a Chinese restaurant with friends and he was talking animatedly to the hostess. A cook looked out of the kitchen door holding a big knife at his side and frowned at them. The hostess said "that's my husband" and then stopped talking to my roommate and went back to the register. I leaned over after she walked away and said "you face one Chinese chef".
There's a cult complex in Wasteland where your party's attacked by the French chef in the kitchen, and the line setting up the turn based combat is "you face one French chef". That practically had all of us rolling on the floor laughing as we all had either played Wasteland on my C128 or watched someone else play it.
Those were the days. College and graduate library school with no sense of real life. Recession proof and not worried about anything beyond the next exam, the next paper, or the next pen and paper RPG or home computer RPG that took us away from our studies.
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