I found a box of CD-Roms and floppy disks in my mum’s basement and damnit, I want to play them! I could use emulators, DosBox or VMs but it’s never quite the same as having the real thing, so between an eBay mobo and a box of old parts I managed to build my new gaming rig to cover 1990-2005.

Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory. As I didn’t want to run an old IDE drive with a million hours on it, I tried an SATA-IDE adapter, it caused some issues during the install but that just felt like the standard Windows experience.

Though unpopular, I went with ME for 2 reasons, the first was Dos support, the second is that I went from W95 to ME as a kid, 98 wouldn’t have felt the same. The install bricked twice with video drivers but I finally got it up and running with the default drivers and an 18" Samsung flat CRT (runs up to 1600x1200 at a nauseating 60hz).

So what were your favorite games from the 90’s and early 2000s?

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    ME is a bold choice regardless—those installs always seem to destroy themselves before long in my experience (admittedly from quite a while ago now)

    As for games (in no particular order):

    • Command & Conquer (basically all of them up to including RA2)
    • Diablo 2
    • Warcraft 3
    • Dungeon Keeper
    • Theme Hospital
    • Rollercoaster Tycoon (and RCT2)
    • Unreal Tournament 99
    • Fury 3/Terminal Velocity
    • Z
    • Age of Empires 1 & 2
    • Pharaoh & Caesar 3
    • MechWarrior 3
    • Serious Sam
    • Sim City 3000
    • Quake 2 & 3
    • Half Life
    • Deus Ex

    I’m definitely forgetting some

    • Donut
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      13 days ago

      Great list, pretty much my childhood. I’ll add some more:

      • Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1/2
      • Empire Earth 1/2
      • Civilization II
      • Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines
      • Theme Park (World?)
      • Populous: The Beginning
      • 9point6@lemmy.world
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        13 days ago

        Yes to all of those, though I never actually played empire earth, so that goes on my modern day list

    • ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee
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      13 days ago

      Fantastic list and love that you put Z on there. Gotta add some classics like Wolfenstein, Doom, Descent, Quake 1, Mechwarrior Mercenaries, Kings Quest… damn guess you could go on and on…

    • Nik282000@lemmy.caOP
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      13 days ago

      When I had ME the first time around I do remember there being some stability issues but I never had it totally brick, even with the assload of sus softeware that came from Kazaa and Morpheus.

      • Pacmanlives@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        From what I remember hardware support was weird with ME. If you had the right hardware you were golden. Also last release of MSDOS

        • DarthBueller@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          I had an entirely different experience with Windows ME than seemingly everyone else. In my experience windows Me fixed a ton of hardware issues. I preferred it over 98 SE back in the day.