Wow, lots of good posts!
Let's disect...
@BlackMonk:
You're right about the where-abouts of the Future Crew crew :-)
I've got a one degree connection to Purple Motion (makes music for my friend's game company), and some of the other guys (good friends with Gore).
Indeed the BitBoys were bought out by ATI for $11-30 mil., I forget right now, as a "reflex motion", when NVidia bought out another Finish mobile 3D company, Hybrid, for about the same price (I'm friends with the two founders). All in all, they did pretty well even if they didn't have any success in the consumre hardware sector :-(
CMS: now that you and DamageX explained it in detail, I remember it! It was the competitor to Adlib. Indeed not the same.
SB16 SCSI, huh? Don't think I've seen it, or at least my memory doesn't say so!
Very interesting info about the propriatery CDROM with the wacked out through-put rate. All I can say is WTF!? :-)
Scary experience, your Win98SE on a ISA hard-card! I refuse to punish myself like I did back in the M$ days! :-p
Punch cards & tubes: see what I mean? :-D
Sliphead was a great game! I remember my friend had it and we used to play it. And DeathTrack was great too! I remember the day a friend and I went to a computer show and bought it, and took the bus to get back home eager to play it! Ah, those were good times!
@DamageX:
Thank you for the low-level details on sound cards! You seem to have some very good knowledge on this arcane subject. It'd be nice to see it added to your site! (hint, hint)
Now I'll add some of my own low-level details for anyone like BlackMonk looking to refresh their old skool memory :-)
These hardcards had their own ROM (much like SCSI cards, or even Ethernet cards, etc), which was usually mapped onto the low 1MB memory space (C0000-F0000, where A0000-BFFFF=video card buffers and F0000-FFFFF=IBM PC BIOS, like Amiga Kickstart in a way) via a jumper set (and possibly IO ports, I forget right now). Then you had to instruct the "OS" (DOS or Windows was a joke not an OS) or relevant memory expanders (EMM386), to avoid using that memory area as it was mapped to the ROM of the card. No such thing as AutoConfig in the crappy PC architecture :-) Afterwards the BIOS would communicate with the card's ROM for accessing the disk(s) on it, and your software would talk to the BIOS to do its work, so in the end it was transparent.
As an aside, this is why "BIOS Shadowing made those old computers and their crappy software faster (shadowing copies the ROM chip contents onto RAM, which is much faster - like Amiga BlizKick in a way), because they relied on the BIOS to do their work, and didn't have direct hardware access, aka drivers - and at the same time it's yet another reason BIOS Shadowing won't help you when you're running a modern OS, like Linux for example.
@koaftder:
If I'm not mistaken that (16 color EGA game) was John Carmack's first entry into the 3D labyrinth / FPS genre, and the precursor to Wolfenstein 3D!
EDIT: memory still functions: check!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_3D@Invisix:
I would agree with your B) reason for enjoying playing with these old systems, but you are insane if you think this is true: "A) DOS and Win 3.11 are pretty stable and a hell of alot safer for internet use than modern systems (due to OS flaws, holes, 'bugs', etc)" :-D
I won't even comment. It's a troll-bait waiting to happen. Suffice to say: you need to either LAY OFF'EM DRUGS SON, or study a bit more about computer operating systems technologies :-)
To add to the validity of the nostalgia feelings: I was very impressed recently, after seeing again my old 3D code doing 30+ fps with 1k gouraud polys on a completely unacccelerated crappy architecture like a 486 PC. Today's CPUs are 100x faster and multi-core, but you could still do a "decent amount of work" with those old boxes.
Now as for Macs, all I'll say is that they were cool little machines. Lots of good stuff in them, and the OS even though technically crap, feature-wise and UI-wise was excellent. I wish some of the UI features, the resolution game, font-stuff and "UI consistency" was brought to the Amiga. Other than these the Mac had nothing going against the Amiga. (PS. I have lots of Mac stuff if anyone's looking for parts, and some rare accelerators too)
Ataris were somewhat cool as well (especially when the Carebears demo group got their hands on them), but not much point to them when an Amiga was there at the same time, and far superior hardware and software wise.
And of course the King of Kings (no, not Alexander the Great), or the Queen of Queens (no, not Cleopatra of Egypt), was and is the venerable Amiga.
Cheers to all the old skoolers!
