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Forums - General Discussion - Who here experienced the amazing 4th gen console wars ?

S.Peelman on 30 May 2020

I’m old enough to remember living that generation, but not old enough to have been involved in console wars.



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Hynad on 30 May 2020
SvennoJ said:
Pyro as Bill said:

My first system was a C64 but I didn't have a computer science degree so I had to get my older brother to type in the code everytime I wanted to play a game then pray for the next 10 minutes that it would load. Then I had to work out how to get the joystick working instead of using default keys. Every game had a different setup. The NES/Master System were a godsend for us console kiddies. Yeah, the games cost 10-20 times the retail price of C64 games but they loaded every single time (apart from the occasional blow) and you could play half an hr of Mario or Tetris before school while the C64 was still deciding whether it was gonna load up. And most importantly you got the old TV. My early NES years were mostly in black and white but the games still loaded.

Once Street Fighter 2 arrived on the next-gen consoles, every older brother had to concede that consoles were superior to their geekboxes. So while you were having your copy parties and talking about kilobytes we were having real parties where everybody played SF2 because consoles were portable enough to go anywhere we damn well wanted them to go. The older boys used to invite me to parties because us 'console kiddies' were the only ones who could do the Capcom code fast enough to register.

Haha, let's have a pc/home computer console war 90's style :)

Portable was no issue, we were young, pc's were light, monitors only 14inch, couple boxes of floppies, a power bar and you're all set.
Over time it grew from this


To this


While you console kiddies were enjoying street fighter 2, we played Civilization through the night, Wolfenstein 3D, F117A, Falcon 3.0, Dune 2, Alone in the dark. And on Amiga 500 Another world, Lotus turbo challenge 2, Monkey island, Populous, License to kill and so many others. Fire power was a favorite vs game, Budokan the preferred fighter. Street fighter came to pc and Amiga as well, but I don't remember playing it. We played Golden axe a lot though, hardly every made it to the end since we always ended up fighting each other :)

Before PC/Amiga we were on MSX and C64 (at a friends house), loading tapes yup. And copying them on dual cassette decks. PC as well, but the early days of PC were bleeps and ugly colors. Still it got the most attention since it was so easy to get games for PC. My dad used to bring them back from work, mostly Sierra games until I got onto BBS and started downloading games.

Consoles were all right too, my nephews had Sonic and Mario, always fun. Yet, no cheat hacks, can't edit the save games. PC had everything, Amiga had a game shark thingie, edit the game memory while it's running to track variables like lives and money to edit them on the fly.

PC's were light?

Towers were hardly lighter than they are now, if at all, and those monitors were way, way heavier than those we have now. And the whole thing took more space than these days, making them much more cumbersome. Even the C64 (Keyboard, floppy disc drive and monitor + a controller if you had one) was heavier as a whole than PCs can be these days.

I really don't know where you get that they were lighter back then.



Conina on 30 May 2020

I never experienced "console wars" or splitted up gamer groups in school.

I had a C128 (mainly in C64 mode), many had C64s, some CPCs, some Atari 800s, some "Nintendos" (NES) and some "SEGAs" (Master System). Some had several systems, others none, but they were welcome to play with us at our homes. One day we played together on one system, the next day we played together on another system.

In the later school years, many of us had Amigas and SNES consoles, some had Atari STs or Sega MegaDrives and some were still happy with their 8-bit computers/consoles.

There were no "spec wars" or "game library wars" and even if someone felt that his system was superior, he was well advised to not show that to others. Gladly comparative advertisement ain't allowed in Germany, so the big companies can't incite gamers that easy against other gamers. And without internet we wern't even aware that fanboy wars were a thing in other countries.

Good old times... but with the spread of the internet since the later 1990's that changed to worse.
Fortunately I was out of school by then and could afford all gaming systems, so I didn't have to choose.



Conina on 30 May 2020
Pyro as Bill said:

My first system was a C64 but I didn't have a computer science degree so I had to get my older brother to type in the code everytime I wanted to play a game then pray for the next 10 minutes that it would load.

Then I had to work out how to get the joystick working instead of using default keys. Every game had a different setup. The NES/Master System were a godsend for us console kiddies. Yeah, the games cost 10-20 times the retail price of C64 games but they loaded every single time (apart from the occasional blow) and you could play half an hr of Mario or Tetris before school while the C64 was still deciding whether it was gonna load up. And most importantly you got the old TV. My early NES years were mostly in black and white but the games still loaded.

Once Street Fighter 2 arrived on the next-gen consoles, every older brother had to concede that consoles were superior to their geekboxes.

Sorry, but some of your claims let me doubt that you spend enough time with the C64 to come to the conclusion of the console superiority.

F.e. "you had to work out how to get the joystick working instead of using default keys. Every game had a different setup."

No, they didn't. You plugged in the joystick into port #2 and every game with joystick support (so everything except text adventures) used it for player one. No additional "setup needed".

And do you really need a computer science degree to type in two simple commands?

LOAD "*",8,1  and after that RUN

Maybe you should have written it down instead of annoying your brother every time.

And if loading a game really took ten minutes or more... blame your brother for cheaping out on the disc drive, not the system. Loading bigger games from diskette took 2 - 3 minutes, with a "fast loader" less than a minute. Smaller games took 1 - 2 minutes, with a "fast loader" only a few seconds.



Conina on 30 May 2020
SvennoJ said:

Portable was no issue, we were young, pc's were light, monitors only 14inch, couple boxes of floppies, a power bar and you're all set.
Over time it grew from this

From 1993 to 1998 I had a 17''-Monitor which weighted ~20 kg / ~45 lbs, my PC tower another 20 kg. Plus a lot of cables, mouse, mousepad and keyboard.

After that I had a 21'' iiyama Vision Master Pro 501 which weighted fricking ~34 kg / 75 lbs! https://www.cnet.com/products/iiyama-vision-master-pro-501-crt-monitor-21/

It's the one on the left in this 1999 LAN photo:

Didn't stop me to carry all of it every 2 weeks to "computer club" every few weeks to a friend and once or twice per year to a LAN party.



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SvennoJ on 30 May 2020
Pyro as Bill said:

R1D1 doesn't look very portable to me but I was 5-10 years younger so couldn't carry as much. And let's not try to pretend that a 14" monitor of old wasn't ten times bigger than a modern 14" monitor aka a tablet.

We had a PC in the house too later maybe a 386 or 486. I think I played Populous first on the SNES then got it for PC but it didn't run very well. I know Sierra's Pinball and Pool/Snooker was one of the few games that could run and the options for making music when you bought something called a sound card were immense. I left consoles after CnC on N64/PS1 so I could play it properly and didn't go back til consoles started being more like consoles again.

Compared to the living room fish tank tv, PC monitors were pretty portable :)

My dad mostly brought Sierra adventures home from work (pirated). I grew up on Kings quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police quest, Space Quest etc.  Played them all from the first release. We also had flight simulator, sim city, rogue, xenon, 3d pac man and more old stuff. My first 'sound card' was home made to play mods (which still stood for music sample tracks back then)

Memories!

Before that you had 90 second music clips filling an entire 3.25" floppy, big wav file playing through the pc speaker. It sort of worked! Amiga had it as well with proper sound through the tv.

I got more into consoles with the ps2. More again with ps3 and 360 and then left pc behind (mostly). I got tired of carrying the PC back and forth to play on my projector and keeping things running on PC was always a chore. Nowadays I have a gaming laptop for PC games, yet with PCs there are always so many distractions! I'm not playing a game right now....

Hynad said:

PC's were light?

Towers were hardly lighter than they are now, if at all, and those monitors were way, way heavier than those we have now. And the whole thing took more space than these days, making them much more cumbersome. Even the C64 (Keyboard, floppy disc drive and monitor + a controller if you had one) was heavier as a whole than PCs can be these days.

I really don't know where you get that they were lighter back then.

Not lighter than today, but a heck of a lot lighter than carrying the living room tv anywhere!
PC towers were solid steel cases, not light, sturdy :) Although considering how many of my HDDs gave up, not as sturdy as I handled them haha.

Conina said:

From 1993 to 1998 I had a 17''-Monitor which weighted ~20 kg / ~45 lbs, my PC tower another 20 kg. Plus a lot of cables, mouse, mousepad and keyboard.

After that I had a 21'' iiyama Vision Master Pro 501 which weighted fricking ~34 kg / 75 lbs! https://www.cnet.com/products/iiyama-vision-master-pro-501-crt-monitor-21/

It's the one on the left in this 1999 LAN photo:

Didn't stop me to carry all of it every 2 weeks to "computer club" every few weeks to a friend and once or twice per year to a LAN party.

Yep, monitors got heavy, 21" monitor wasn't fun to take anywhere. Those CRTs had great image quality though. The first LCD monitors were a step back in picture quality. No more distortion, yet also no more 'glowing' bright colors.



Hynad on 30 May 2020
SvennoJ said:
Conina said:

From 1993 to 1998 I had a 17''-Monitor which weighted ~20 kg / ~45 lbs, my PC tower another 20 kg. Plus a lot of cables, mouse, mousepad and keyboard.

After that I had a 21'' iiyama Vision Master Pro 501 which weighted fricking ~34 kg / 75 lbs! https://www.cnet.com/products/iiyama-vision-master-pro-501-crt-monitor-21/

It's the one on the left in this 1999 LAN photo:

Didn't stop me to carry all of it every 2 weeks to "computer club" every few weeks to a friend and once or twice per year to a LAN party.

Yep, monitors got heavy, 21" monitor wasn't fun to take anywhere. Those CRTs had great image quality though. The first LCD monitors were a step back in picture quality. No more distortion, yet also no more 'glowing' bright colors.

Starting from the 4th gen, all the way through the entirety of the PS2/Gamecube era, I used my family's old C64 monitor to play my games because the colors were just so much better than most anything else I could use. Some friends would come over and comment about that as well. Making me smile. That monitor was only 13 inches diagonally, but it was glorious. I would still game on it, for my retro stuff, if I didn't part ways with it a few years ago. :(



d21lewis on 30 May 2020

We didn't have internet back then but companies hyped is up more than anything. Turned is into good little soldiers in their war. Outside of Nintendo and Sega other usurpers to the throne tried their hand, too.

You had snk bragging about their power while showcasing graphics the 16-bit consoles could only dream of. NEC with their TurboGrafx and Turbo Duo systems attacking the NES and Sega CD. Atari asking gamers to "Do the math". 3DO and CD-i going after those who thought FMV gaming was the future. And I'm probably forgetting some.

All of those players from Phillips to Panasonic wanting a piece of the pie. And one by one, they fell. That's why I didn't expect much from Sony when I heard they were going to toss their name in the hat. I wonder how that went... 🤔



Conina on 30 May 2020
Hynad said:
SvennoJ said:

Yep, monitors got heavy, 21" monitor wasn't fun to take anywhere. Those CRTs had great image quality though. The first LCD monitors were a step back in picture quality. No more distortion, yet also no more 'glowing' bright colors.

Starting from the 4th gen, all the way through the entirety of the PS2/Gamecube era, I used my family's old C64 monitor to play my games because the colors were just so much better than most anything else I could use. Some friends would come over and comment about that as well. Making me smile. That monitor was only 13 inches diagonally, but it was glorious. I would still game on it, for my retro stuff, if I didn't part ways with it a few years ago. :(

Yeah, I had to decide between a TV and a monitor, when I bought my C128 (hadn't money or space for both).

But the image quality of the composite signal (cinch) was soooo much crisper than the blurry TV-picture with RF-modulation.

So I bought a Commodore 1702 monitor and a small receiver box for TV-signals (on the top of the monitor in my old photo):

A few years later I bought a Amiga 500 and a Commodore 1084s monitor. It also had a crisp image quality and good stereo sound.



d21lewis on 30 May 2020
Ka-pi96 said:
I don't think it even existed in Europe. I hadn't even heard of Nintendo until the N64 came out, granted I was super young at the time but my family did have a Mega Drive so it wasn't as if game consoles were an alien concept. They just didn't really seem particularly noteworthy until PS1/N64.

I often finding myself forgetting that the gaming landscape was/is different in other parts of the world. One of my favorite gaming channels (Top Hat Gaming Man) said that there wasn't even a gaming crash in other parts of the world and that Nintendo never even saved gaming outside of the US.