The Good Old Days of PC Gaming Are Back...

judithmgalloway

Once upon a time, in the days before Windows '95 (sorry Mac and non-MS OS users!), playing PC games often required at least a smattering of knowledge about a dark and arcane thing called DOS. Wake up at the back - I'm going to start talking about The Sims in a minute.

Sometimes, in those long-lost mists of time, would-be gamers had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get a game working. Patches - if they were ever even created - usually came on 3.5" disks taped to the front of gaming magazines. Want to run Doom well and also run Windows 3.1 successfully on the same machine? Better upgrade your RAM to 4mb (yes, I mean megabytes not gigabytes) and learn to edit your autoexec.bat file.

I got Fast Lane yesterday, and I'm pleased to report that it appears to be working. However, this is what I had to do just to get it to play nice:

Back-up all user data (well, duh...) and then remove same to Desktop. Remove (two of Twallan's) mods. Launch game from base game launcher (I have WA, HELS and Ambitions) to get new patch to successfully do its stuff. Install Fast Lane. Use CFF Explorer to make Fast Lane large address aware. Fiddle with DEP to stop crashing to desktop. Launch nVidia control panel and force vsynch on for FL to stop alarmingly high framerates. Test game. Return user data. Test game. Return mods. Then download new CAW, uninstall old CAW (backing up user data first), install new CAW and replace user data. Do CFF and nVidia tricks for CAW. Launch CAW.

Now, admittedly, anything to with mods is entirely down to me, but was, in fact, just a case of moving to desktop and then putting back. Everything else was simply to get FL to play nice. Which it is - hurrah. I tried to avoid the DEP step, but it crashed immediately.

Suddenly, I feel like I'm back in time 20 years-ish tinkering with my old 386 trying to get Doom to run without borking Windows 3.1! Ah, nostalgia.

Less I be heckled, this isn't actually a complaint, merely an observation. Sims 3 is the only game (and I play a lot of PC games) that I know that requires such hoop-jumping in the modern age. It's always a challenge...

:-)

LilZairaGrace

Loved this post!

Couriervaughan

It is bring back a lot of memories to me

Jenieusa

Windows 3.1

this is funny to me...first computer i got back in 1988/89...had
Windows 2.0 on it...the most i could get the windows part to do was
play Othello...and dos was used for writing homeworks papers and playing
Tetris....

Goldfinger168

Good post.
I do agree that the Sims 3 requires a level of maintenance I had not seen in a while. Back in the day running a game could be nightmare and you had to be somewhat computer-savvy.

One thing I miss from those days is that developers tried to release a finished product that worked out of the box. Sometimes they failed, but at least they tried, as they couldn't rely on patches and DLC as much as today.

judithmgalloway

Goldfinger168 wrote:

One thing I miss from those days is that developers tried to release a finished product that worked out of the box. Sometimes they failed, but at least they tried, as they couldn't rely on patches as much as today.

Absolutely, and EA aren't the only culprits by a long, long way.

Something else that made me feel nostalgic was when I was shuffling all the .Sims3Pack files around and I realised that, for example, the freebie Renault set from the store would've needed 10 3.5" floppies alone. Remember entire games that came on a single (or at most three or four) floppies?! The world's gone mad, lol.

CK213

I have to do the CFF trick too, every time the game is patched. I can't help but ask, why do I have to do this? I have 8 GBs of RAM and a 64-bit CPU and OS. Why not have the game take advantage of it?


I don't have the high frame rate issue with my Nvidia card. The average is round 50 fps. It goes up to 100 if I zoom in on a patch of grass with nothing else in sight, but that seems normal to me. My vsync is set to "Use the 3D application setting"

MaryJos

I agree with you ! I'm just so disapointed at EA that it's the only game I play that gives me so much trouble if I want to play. We really shouldn't have to play with DEP, LAA, ect.

blunote00

Very good post! Looks like we have to do a lot of the same things. And I agree, the Sims games are the only games I have work so hard to play. That's why I keep telling people they better read the manuals that came with their computers. Sad to say but as gaming progresses I can only see this getting worse. :?

Ps. You just brought back memories of Lemonade Stand. Awww the simplicity.