Get Off Mah Lawn, Kids

So, I wonder, how many people remember what it took to be a gamer?

Imagine: today, you just click on Steam, download, click to install, play. Older gamers remember long install times from CD, tedious looking for drivers, restarting PC after installation, overclocking while hoping to not burn anything, the works.

But there was older, dark era, when games were installed from pieces of plastic limited to 720 kb (or, if you had a modern drive, 1.44 mb). An era where you had to attentively watch installation progress and swap the pieces as soon as installer told you to, but paying attention to vibrations to not swap it too early to not damage it. Since a game was on 5-20 disks, even carrying it from the store was an exercise. Internet? You were lucky if you had BBS or Gopher, with a glorious kilobyte per minute download speed.

And the real fun started once you installed game. Imagine hand-coding RAM usage using various tricks you didn't really understand to squeeze out single kilobytes of free RAM. You had 8 mb? That's cute, because game only really cared it needed 612 kb out of first 640 kb of RAM your computer had. You had 608 kb free? Tough luck kid, it wouldn't run even if next 4 mb of RAM were free. You wanted sound? You had to load drivers into memory, by hand, shaving precious single kilobytes out of that 640 kb block.

And every game had it's own everything: drivers, frameworks, dlls, everything. You could had hundreds of say DOS4gw files on your PC, all with their own program, all doing the same function, identical, duplicating each other because only really crucial files were pooled into OS common folder. Crucial files like copy.exe - yes, OS couldn't even copy or delete programs and each time you wanted to do it you needed to run separate program. Your copy.exe got damaged? Tough luck, kid, you can't copy new one into its place even if you somehow get a replacement. Better hope you did that recovery disk when asked... And hope your OS didn't have bug that caused it to move, not copy files into recovery disk when you created it. Because some did. And did I mention lack of some files crippled your OS even when it seemed to "run" properly? Heh. It did that once for me.

And it was just not memory that was hand coded. You wanted to have sound? You would better have a note to which interrupts, IRQs, and intervals your sound card was set. Because when you set up even one of these wrong, you get a big fat nothing. Same with graphics - if you did anything wrong, game could have started in 4 colours (CGA)... Said colours being cyan, black, magenta, and white, which looked as horrible as it sounds.

Then again, I suppose all of the above was bliss compared to bootleg Commodore 64 tape-disc drives and not breathing while game "loaded" for 10 minutes, hoping you won't get "corrupted" error, which happened in 8 times out of 10. Heh. There was really good reason, once, why consoles were seen as the gaming machines. It's sad inertia kept them afloat till today, being little more than DRM-crippled PCs.

Or were the games even before that even worse, and I got off easy after all? :P