![]() Does your machine support high-dynamic range lighting? Can it run a new game in 4K? Is switching ray tracing on going to slow everything down to a grind? You have to configure the performance parameters of any new title to align with your own specific PC build. I like that people are so incredibly invested in their builds and the craft that went into them, like car fanatics, or wine connoisseurs.Įven now, when we have digital stores such as Steam and Epic to manage and streamline theprocess, PC gamers still need to get their hands dirty. I like the camaraderie it creates between gamers as they desperately attempt to solve each other’s hardware incompatibilities. I secretly like this process, even though it is often frustrating. I knew how they interoperated, I knew how to install drivers. Even before I built my first PC, I knew about the basic structure of the machine – the role of the motherboard as the sort of nerve centre, the CPU as brain, then the system memory, the hard-drive, the graphics processor. It’s a different sort of relationship than console gamers. What I’m trying to say is, PC gamers have to be tinkerers, and this has always been the case. The original Doom, released on PC in 1993. The supernatural adventure game Phantasmagoria came on seven CDs! Seven! It was crazy. Unfortunately, developers started filling them with video clips and CD-quality sounds, birthing the craze for “interactive movies”. And there were still issues with multiple disks, even in the new era of CD-Roms, which stored a lot more data than floppy disks. Instead, 3D graphics accelerator cards such as the 3Dfx and PowerVR arrived and we had to learn a whole new set of exciting compatibility and performance paradigms. Microsoft launched its Direct X technology, a group of applications designed to standardise how games were developed and played on PCs. When Windows 95 became more stable, things started to change. Chances are very good that the two will not work together.” That counted as tech support in the mid-90s. I still have a copy of the 1994 classic Colonization, whose instruction manual states: “This game has not been tested under Microsoft Windows therefore we suggest you do not use it with Windows. The confusion ramped up when Windows became more popular because not all game devs were totally on board. Oh and you had to intricately configure your sound drivers and your graphics card, usually through a never-ending cascade of option menus. In the days before Windows 95, most games ran on MS-DOS and you had to install them by using a command-line interface to enter DOS prompts – yes, you typed into your computer to make it do stuff! Then different games required you to manage different types of memory and sometimes create boot disks with custom autoexec.bat and config.sys files. This was just another oddity of being a PC gamer – having a drawer full of magazine front cover discs crammed with shareware and public domain mini games. It’s rumoured that there were once more copies of the shareware version of Doom (pictured below) on PCs than there were copies of Microsoft Windows 95. Comparatively few people had the internet back then, so as a distribution model it made a lot of sense. Once you’d played the sample, you were supposed to contact the publisher to get the full game sent to you. That’s how a lot of games were distributed – the famed shareware model. I first played Wolfenstein 3D when my friend got the first couple of levels free on a magazine cover disc. Not that you necessarily bought complete games back then. When I started playing in the early 1990s, they came on multiple floppy discs – The Secret of Monkey Island was on eight – and you had to keep swapping them in and out of the drive, like feeding a voracious robot. While games consoles have always been pure plug-and-play experiences, PC games have definitely not. The thing is, I figured it out because when you have played PC games for as long as I have, you know that figuring technical stuff out is a key part of the experience. I’ve done it once before and wrote an article about what a nightmare the process was – although the issue turned out to be with the USB stick I used to install the motherboard update patch and … well, don’t get me started. N ext week I am going to build a gaming PC.
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