Retro gaming on period-correct or modern systems
Image by Wild Pixar from Pixabay
EA had a big sale recently on Steam where they released the whole original Command and Conquer series. All the old original games, no remastered editions. I really enjoy these old gems for nostalgia and the occasional retro LAN party, and getting them on Steam helps a lot, because it has been difficult or even impossible to play them for a long time. A Steam release is thus perfect for simplicity. I messaged my retro pals and gave them a tip on the sale. In the conversation I jokingly said that the best way to enjoy the original games is on proper Retro hardware with spinning discs. Surprisingly, my joke turned out to be the truth.
To run legacy software on modern OS doesn’t always work as planned and I have noted often run into several strange bugs. Red Alert 2, my favourite game in the series was the first one I installed. Before long, I had several crashes and had to do a couple of reboots. And the loading times were very long. That makes no sense, because the game ran just fine on a Pentium II back in the day. But the biggest dealbreaker of all was that they had killed the multiplayer network support. That’s like selling a car without wheels.
The past years I have been tinkering with retro hardware and built a couple of Windows 98 PCs, perfect for retro LANs. The journey was fantastic and one of the striking things is how much more stable and easy it is to design and build your own machine today compared to around the millennium. My recent Windows 98 systems however, where so unstable that one did not even last a couple of hours before I managed to brick the Windows installation by selecting a too high screen resolution in Quake III. Imagine today if you would be forced to do a full system reinstall when you are fiddling about with the graphical settings in a game. Some things were not better before.
At first, I couldn’t believe that it was as bad and unstable as it seemed, back in the day. But after some contemplation I remembered that Yes, it was actually that bad that I remembered. Wow. Frequent reinstalls were not a surprise. To claim, as I jokingly did, that my retro battlestations were the optimal and most hassle-free way to enjoy the old cultural treasures, should in reality be an outright idiotic and somewhat funny comment… Yet still; on my Pentium II battlestation, the game feels much snappier and responsive. The loading times are shorter, and most important of all: There is a strong multiplayer network component available. Red Alert without multiplayer is unthinkable.
Maybe there is a place for retro gaming on original hardware after all? Even with the extreme amount of hassle required to figure out how everything worked back then, it remains a work of love and passion. When we did our Retro LAN with 20+ year old physical hardware, the nice gut feeling can never be surpassed by Steam. It is utterly pointless to compare a classic American muscle car with a modern car. Of course, the modern car will totally demolish the classic car in every performance metric available.
But at the end of the day, the old car will put a bigger smile on your face. And that is what truly matters.