Hacker News Reader

Comment by wheels | Hacker News Reader

> In the early ’90s, when id Software first began publishing games, the games had to be programmed to run efficiently on computers not designed to run them, computers meant for word processing, spreadsheet applications, and little else.

That isn't really true. Games were there pretty much for all of the PC era. I was using a computer at the time Doom came out, and there were a bajillion (obviously less graphically sophisticated) games in common circulation, and gaming was a significant and widely accepted part of home computer sales.

View on HN

Can't say I agree. I also remember the late 80s and early 90s and PCs were simply not well equipped to run video games. Home computers that did run video games had special hardware dedicated for it, like the Commodore 64, the MSX, and the ZX Spectrum, but PCs weren't geared for games.

In fact, another one of Carmack's contributions to PC gaming was porting Super Mario 3 to the PC and demoing it to Nintendo as a proof of concept for smooth pixel sized scrolling, which was something that PCs were very poor at. His approach was to basically do a graphical diff frame by frame and only render the parts of the screen that changed, whereas all the other home computers I mentioned and even gaming consoles like the NES and Sega Master System had dedicated hardware for scrolling sprites.

Nintendo did not go forward with Carmack's proposal, wanting to keep their games exclusive to their own platform, but Carmack and id Software did manage to use that technology to develop Commander Keen. Prior to Commander Keen there were maybe 3-4 PC games that had any kind of pixel scrolling whatsoever and it was fairly limited.

I'm not saying PCs were especially good for games, but that that was one of the main things they were bought and used for, at least at home. Again, we're talking 90s, not 80s. By the 1993, Windows had already won, and a home computer was almost always going to be an x86 running Windows or DOS. Saying they weren't meant for gaming is paramount to saying computer games weren't a thing in that period. We're way past Commodore being relevant by then.

That was the era of Lemmings, Prince of Persia, Dune, Sim City, Wolfenstein 3D, Leisuresuit Larry -- plus a bajillion other smaller games. It wasn't the best gaming platform, but it's bonkers to say that computer games weren't really a thing then, or that the designers of computers were blind to that.

We're at that point at the era where "multimedia" was a buzz word, and I remember getting CD-ROMS with edutainment stuff that had real video in it -- that was a big deal around then.

I think you're now shifting from your original claim that games were always a part of PC sales, which I disagree with, and a cursory review of market share supports my stance, to now focusing on 1993 and beyond. To that end I think the article is fair to point out that DOOM was programmed to run on computers that did not have the kind of hardware support for gaming that many other home computer systems had, and because of that techniques had to be carefully engineered to get such games to run on them.

Consider that many of the games you mentioned such as Lemmings, Prince of Persia, and Sim City were not even released on the PC originally and were ported to the PC often times years after their initial release.

In 1990 PCs including clones made up only 15% of market share, whereas by 1994 they made up over half of the home computer market share. The 90s were a wild time and a lot of things changed over a small period of time.

I think you read more into my initial point than I was trying to say -- there are two things:

- PCs were always used for games (softening that: at least by the 286 era that was already true)

- By 1993 PCs were also designed with games in mind

But it doesn't follow that PCs were always designed with gaming in mind. They weren't, but since they were always used for that, even if they weren't designed for them, after a decade of such usage, it became a design concern.

The turning point I recall being the "multimedia" era. Sounds cards, video cards, and CD drives took things to another level and leap frogged many consoles.

I would estimate my parents to have bought a 486dx back in 91/92 in Europe, I remember we had https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/44379/Sound-Blaster-... with Indianapolis 500 and lemmings. And I remember to have played wolf3d at a neighbor before we had that computer.

Atari/Amiga were better but I'd say it was indeed the turning point.

So yeah your comment is spot on.

I think it is difficult to pinpoint the turning point, but I would say it was the launch of the 3dfx Voodoo in late 1996, and the release of GLQuake the following year. Up until that point you could argue that consoles were more powerful or adequate for gaming, but after that point there was no discussion.

It was already with games like Comanche (voxel graphics) and Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, which weren’t possible on the home computers of the time. Basically, it was with the advent of relatively affordable 486 PCs with VGA cards. Next came the CD-ROM based games like Rebel Assault in 1993. At that point it was literally “game over” for home computers.

I was thinking more about consoles. I remember reading some articles about the PSX and the N64 and how they would kill PC gaming, and then the Voodoo happened...

But if we are talking about home computers like the Amiga, Ataris and such, then I fully agree with you. My first computer was a 486 with the big Creative Discovery CD 16 kit, so many good memories...

> PCs were always used for games (softening that: at least by the 286 era that was already true)

You had graphical games available on a PC XT with Hercules monochrome, people. Mind, not all of them but you had them.

I finished Prince of Persia on that.

Of course, games exploded when the VGA and Sound Blaster were out. But not having 256 colours or sound didn't stop people.

I suppose I assumed you were objecting to the article saying that PCs were not designed to run games. No one is disputing that games did run on PCs, but PCs did not have the kind of hardware nor the kind of architecture that computers at that time had which were designed for games.

If your argument is simply that PCs had games, then sure, and the article isn't disputing that. The article is explicitly saying that games were on PCs, and the way you got them to run on PCs was by making use of careful software techniques to compensate for the lack of hardware support.

If you still object to this, then by all means let us know what features did PCs have that supported gaming. I can tell you numerous features that other home computer systems had to explicitly support video games, but I can't name any that the PC had prior to around the mid 90s. Maybe the Sound Blaster?

My parents bought PC in 1993. 95% of the usage by me were games. 100% of the reasons for upgrades for next decade and a half were only due to games.

Doom made folks want PC, it just didnt work that well on consoles. Then multimedia and windows 95 in PCs steamrolled everything else, even with high prices and famous MS instability.

If you needed all-in-1 solution, PC was the way to go.

Absolutely if you bought a PC in 1993 it would have been suitable for gaming, but that was not the claim I replied to which claimed that PCs had always been suitable for gaming and that games were always a significant part of the PC market.

If you bought a PC in the 80s, you didn't buy it for gaming and PCs did not have hardware support for gaming like other home computer systems did.

Finally, and I would have thought a website like this would be aware of this fact, you don't develop video games to run on the latest hardware. DOOMs official system requirements was a 386 with 4 MB of RAM.

"multimedia". Just hearing the word makes me the smell that era.

Ahem, MPC-1 was defined in 1991

it's simple: Sprites!

even the most hardware-deficient gaming systems had them. The PC didn't.

Systems with hardware sprites include arcade video games of the 1970s and 1980s; game consoles including as the Atari VCS (1977), ColecoVision (1982), Famicom (1983), Genesis/Mega Drive (1988); and home computers such as the TI-99/4 (1979), Atari 8-bit computers (1979), Commodore 64 (1982), MSX (1983), Amiga (1985), and X68000 (1987). Hardware varies in the number of sprites supported, the size and colors of each sprite, and special effects such as scaling or reporting pixel-precise overlap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(computer_graphics)

the pc had: VGA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array

> even the most hardware-deficient gaming systems had them

Not quite! The Apple II didn't. Neither did the IIgs nor the Mac.

I wouldn't call them gaming systems. still don't :)

Not only sprites, but also scrolling backgrounds! There is no question that those machines were much more suited for 2D games, at least until the 486 could brute force them.

On the other hand, the simple framebuffer of the VGA was much more flexible, and was the better approach for those early 3D games. Mode 13h for the win!

Those computers were designed by International Business Machines corporation.

The fact that they could run games was great for a lot of us. But they weren't designed to do it.

That's not really true. The era of IBM designing computers was like the 8086 era. Clones were already dominant by the time the 286 came out, and Doom came out about half a year after the Pentium, or 586. That was very far into the era of "IBM compatible" machines being gaming machines.

There's more than a decade gap between "IBM compatible" clones taking over, and Doom coming out.

I wanted to correct you but after fact checking I feel like Nathan Fillion from the meme.

Doom and pentium come out at the same time. I guess my xUSSR got the latter much later, as I remember struggling on my 386

Pentium arrived at the same time as Doom, but wasn't something you could reliably target as your minimal requirements until Quake, and even then it was controversial a bit.

You can always check the prices eg: https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/uqk1z9/the_be...

But even the clones, until the mid nineties, had at most a SuperVGA video card, which was little better than the annoying IBM VGA video card, which was certainly not designed for games.

Also, the clones had nothing better than the PC speaker for audio, even if that could be used very creatively by games like Monkey Island. The PC speaker was most definitely not designed for games.

The SoundBlaster cards can be said to have been designed for games, but they were a separate product that could be bought as an add-on for IBM PCs or clones.

Only during the second half of the nineties, after Windows 95, IBM PC clones with video cards and audio cards really suitable for games have become common.

The computer my family bought about 1-2 years before Doom came out (and which I eventually played Doom on) had Soundblaster, stereo speakers, SVGA, a CD-ROM drive. I feel like folks are mixing up eras a bit here.

I don’t think the author meant that computers weren’t designed for games, I think they specifically were referring to 3D games.

Wolfenstein only worked, as the article pointed out, by significantly constraining the problem. While Doom wasn’t as unconstrained as Quake it enabled a significant amount of complexity compared to Wolfenstein.

It is true, games were present but it wasn't in the objectives of the hardware manufacturers to have "better game support" at this time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com