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SvennoJ on 09 October 2023
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Pemalite said:

This was such a banging year... But as a PC gamer it is extremely hard for me to walk past Descent.

It's also a sad reminder of how dead the franchise is these days, despite being such a brilliant game.

SvennoJ said:

DOS gaming mostly just worked. Sure you had some config.sys and autoexec.bat things to configure, but that was nothing compared to the frequent crashes and incompatibilities with early DirectX and openGL.

Just run Memmaker for DOS.

I am running a Windows 98SE retro computer with a 3DFX Voodoo 2+Radeon 9500Pro as my retro PC... Once you get around all the little nuances and limitations, it's actually a solid platform.
I don't get many crashes. The API's (Glide, DirectX and OpenGL) aren't the source of crashes.

It's when you do stupid shit like ejecting the DVD Rom drive while it's accessing the DVD that you will get a blue-screen and a crash.

SvennoJ said:

Windows 95 and 98 were horrible for gaming, it got better with Windows XP. Windows NT drove me crazy with all the updates but at least had a good interface and was very stable. Windows 8 yuck, now I'm on 10 and had to disable updates as it's broken again. Win 11 doesn't look any better. (Win 10 was supposed to be the last one?) My next desktop/laptop will be a Mac, no more Windows. It's the same every time, works the first year, starts slowing down the next couple years, becomes a pita by year 4.

Windows NT was on the market around 1993, so before Windows 95... But it wasn't until around Windows NT 4.0 that it started to adopt the foundations that would define Windows 2000/XP and the modern operating systems of today.

It was always a far more stable OS, but it also had far less compatibility with software and hardware, which was actually a massive issue with Windows XP when that OS released... Thankfully after many years/decades on the market, Windows XP ended up being supported by everything eventually. (Minus older software.)

Windows 8 was a great OS. Just not for desktops, I had it on my convertible tablet/laptop and it was a brilliant OS.

If you are getting slow-down with your system after a few years, you are likely the issue, it's simply not a thing anymore... And if you are worried about compatibility, then you are definitely going to have a fun time with a Mac.


Yeah see 'blame the user' culture is exactly why I'm leaving Windows behind. I can do a fresh install of Windows, do all the updates again and hope it comes out better, but I'm not going to spend time on that nonsense anymore. I generally keep my installation mean and lean, remove everything I don't need right at the start and uninstall everything I don't use anymore. Always make sure I have plenty disk space free on both system and data disks, got 32GB RAM plenty for the OS not to have any issues. Still there are always problems.
With win 10 I had my screen not willing to turn off anymore for months, which finally fixed itself after trying dozens of suggestions from the web without any luck. Now it's the opposite and often the screen won't wake up and I have to hard reset my laptop to get a picture again. (Mouse and Keyboard turn back on, screen remains black) Basically boot from cold to fix it. Then I had a long streak of a mandatory update failing with a useless error code. I have searched for weeks for a solution, nothing worked. Every restart, finishing updates... 96%, something went wrong, 5 minutes undoing changes before it came alive again. So eventually I cleaned out the update cache and disabled windows update.

I'm not worried about compatibility, I'm worried about stability and longevity. And Windows doesn't have that.

I don't know if Mac is better but taking 24 hours to copy the 120GB of pictures of my wife's iPhone in small batches (to back up), can't be worse on Mac... Dunno what Windows does but I every time I have to copy in small batches as selecting multiple directories or even one of the bigger ones just leaves Windows calculating remaining time to copy for a long time to then give up copying after 10 minutes. Not to mention the pita it is every time to get Windows and iPhone working together. Some weird sequence, having to start iTunes multiple times, rebooting my laptop and phone all in the right order before iPhone allows access and Windows actually sees the data directories on iPhone. User Experience 1/10.

I've been on MS live chat support for other issues which usually takes hours. They do help and go through a lot with remote desktop control, but often also can't find a full solution and kinda agree Windows sucks... It's great when your support technicians have little faith in the product and just try random things hopingn to find something out of order. The built in troubleshooters are a joke.

iPhone so far has managed to survive my wife lol. She doesn't leave a single byte free on her phone and has to make room for updates. See what happens to Windows when you fill up the system drive... My wife does the 'maintenance' for her parents' PC. That requires intervention on a near monthly basis. They let the system drive get too full once, what a nightmare. But usually it's them clicking on the wrong things and turning the browsers into a mess or something gone wrong again with their MS account on the PC. (My kids use that PC as well and Windows is not kid proof) I do the maintenance for my kids, well one now, the oldest one already switched to Mac and hasn't needed any help since!

And BTW, yes now Windows 95 and 98 are 'complete' with lots of resources available now. It was a PITA at the time, with DirectX and OpenGL still being new, needing lots of updates and having lots of compatibility issues with the various early graphics cards which didn't have all their driver updates yet either. Some games simply wouldn't start, some crashed a lot. Alt-Tab had many problems, likely leading to a crash or like Everquest, input still ending up in the game while typing in Messenger.

Things are better nowadays, I 'only' had to restart FS2020 109 times during my Covid world tour. Which comes down to about once every 24h of run time. (It was a long tour with lots of auto pilot) Mostly due to memory issues. Yet still a long way to go.