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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

What a time to be a kid. Computers and games were absolute magic.

Some of us were lucky enough to have a 386 and if we squished the screen down far enough we could get a reasonable framerate. Some of us were lucky enough to have mates with a 386. I was particularly lucky in that my mates dad had a small pc store in his shed. So we also had a laplink cable for transferring software and a serial cable for multiplayer gaming.

Again, it was magic.

Edit: without wanting to sound too “get off my lawn”. I was loading up some games on a tablet for a flight with the kids today and they just don’t care that much. They could get a new game at any moment. For us a new game was a rarity. If one of us got a new game from somewhere we’d bmx over to our mates so they could copy it. I recall a friend getting the quake demo and zipping it on to 8 disks for me, the 6th of which was corrupt. It took a week of back and forth before I finally got to play it.

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I fondly remember playing Doom with my brother. Our dad had made a serial cable for us. One of us was playing on the PC and the other one on a laptop with a grey scale display and terrible ghosting. We had so much fun and it felt like magic indeed :)

My dad had a similar laptop. Playing video games on it was pretty trippy with all the ghosting.

Back then a cousin and I found a cheat exe on some BBS that gave you infinite ammo in Doom 2, it also gave us a virus (Michaelangelo, I think?). My dad somehow disassembled the exe to remove the virus so we could keep our infinite ammo cheat. I'm spoiled - I would struggle to do the same without online resources.

In the original Doom you could use IDKFA and IDDQD for infinite ammo and godmode (from memory!)

IDKFA: I Did Kill Fucking Alien

I think it's id-Key-Full-Ammo

IDSPISPOPD!

Got it right!

Back then cheat codes were hard to find, especially if you found doom on shareware floppies and didn’t have BBS access to the DooM FAQ.

> Back then cheat codes were hard to find,

And a couple of years later we had dlh.net

Hah, while I had a 386, it was an SX, as in without a math co-processor. I managed to find a TSR program on a local BBS that would emulate a math co-processor though, allowing me to play Doom.

It was not a playable experience. Even at the smallest screen size, it still ran at about 1 FPS.

But, I was playing Doom!

Maybe it was Quake. Doom didn't use math coprocessors.

Doom used fixed point math, not floating point math. It didn't run well on a 386 SX simply because 386 SXs were slow, but it would run without FPU emulation, and at better than 1 FPS.

The dx didn't have an FPU either - the difference was the size of the data bus (sx had a 16 bit data bus, dx was 32). It was the 486 where the sx/dx notation indicated floating point support.

Another part is the reach for hardware was harder/impossible. At a far far later time I recall waiting for 1 year to upgrade my pc to 4mbs of ram so I could play Mortal Combat 1. I kept the MKI floppies more precious than Gollum's. If I am not mistaken it was a 386dx or 486.

When Doom was released I had a Gateway 2000 4DX2-66v tower. It had a 486DX2-66, ATI Ultra Pro VLB video card and a VLB connected IDE controller. Doom was nice and smooth on it without having to reduce the screen. My brother had an IBM PS/2 Model 90 with a 486DX2 at home which belonged to his employer. We would play via modem.

Thirty years ago, computers were magic. Forty, too. Haven't you noticed, though? They're still magic.

I do not miss the nonsense with unreliable media, however. Loading Elite from tape took five minutes and if humidity or temperature were unusual or the moon occluded Santraginus or whatever it'd be spewing endless CRC check errors. Some hardships are valuable learning experiences, but this one is just trauma.

The magic now is so beyond that it doesn't feel special anymore. Maybe it's because I read about new games more than I play them. Seeing what Ureal can do makes me think anything is now possible so loses some shock factor, though I'm sure first hand in-game would still be Wow! I'm still waiting for the killer immersive VR game.

Watching footage from, let's say, GTA V or such makes me realize that I fell so far behind in gaming that I'm best off sticking with nethack...

Similarly, I play StarCraft II on a Surface Go 3 (i3 8GB).

If you’ll allow the unsolicited suggestion: one excellent way to rediscover the joy of computers is to write a game. Even something simple for yourself, like a Tetris clone or a cattery simulator. Back in the day, that meant hand-rolled hardware gymnastics on an 6502. These days, there are many excellent engines and tools available, but you’re still never far from cutting real code.

Yes thanks. I was just thinking along this path. Started looking at SDL2, then found raylib which seems a better fit than SFML for my sensibilities.

I agree they’re still magic. Ever since I had my first Amstrad coming up to 40 years ago, I’ve been enamoured with them.

My point sort of drifted off into nostalgia a little, but I think there was something in the scarcity of it back then - probably helped somewhat by growing up in rural NZ.

This magic feeling. Can we find it in modern games ? I was searching and just couldn’t.

Did you manage to find something ?

Did you feel it with Quake too?

If you were to find it today, it'd probably have to be an indie game. It's a bit of a jump, but if you like exploring alone you could try Scanner Sombre.

Did you feel it with Quake too?

well, With Quake not really :) It’s hard to explain why. I’ve seen nothing as satisfactory as shotgun in Doom. ;) More realistic - yes. Better rendered - yes, but nothing of the same level of satisfaction :) I think I know the answer but like with any art it’s difficult to put into words. Easier to make something with the similar energy. Perhaps one day …

>… Scanner Sombre

Thank you for the advice. I’ll take a look. I recall Elite was also nice once . I’ve made computer that was able to run it with my own hands which involved soldering and debugging it with oscilloscope for the first time in my life. So it was a double pleasure once it worked :) Or double magic :)

I didn't really get Quake either. I don't think it really belonged anywhere; it was too strange, whereas Doom mixed the foreign and the familiar very well. I think Scanner Sombre does that too. Most games are too familiar these days considering that the story is told to you, but I think the best stories are the ones you live through.

Making dedicated hardware seems amazing. I wish I had the time for it.

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