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?
- Jazz Jackrabbit
- Descent
- Need for Speed 2
- Witchaven 2: Blood Vengeance
- Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness
These are the games I remember best on our win95 IBM PC. My personal favorite of this era is Hexen: Beyond Heretic but that has been mentioned a few times already.
Jazz Jackrabbit
Epic game music, up there with Sonic for getting stuck in your head.
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
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.
From what I remember hardware support was weird with ME. If you had the right hardware you were golden. Also last release of MSDOS
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.
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
Great list, I’ll add some more
- Alpha Centauri (Alien Crossfire Expansion optional but encouraged)
- Bladerunner
- MechCommander 1
- MechCommander 2
- Civilization: Call to Power ( Often Neglected Cousin of the Civ games, but I always enjoyed it)
Get a modem and dial up too!
There is one installed but I don’t have a phoneline to my house >_<
Unreal Tournament 99 and Everquest. But those don’t even come close to needing a fraction of the hardware you procured :D
UT GOTY was one of my main reasons for this project. I played the hell out of that game!