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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2380 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 11, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I lucked into some more old computer hardware recently. Saw a guy selling a Phenom II X4 and an Athlon X2, both with motherboard and ram for $20. Went to go pick it up, and he decided he didn't need the money after all. Threw in a PCIe Geforce 6600, and some random network cards too.

Lately I decommissioned my AM2/Athlon X2 machine because the motherboard needed recapping. I'd long been thinking of building a rig targeting 2008+, or about where my Athlon 64/Geforce 7800 starts to tap out, and that Phenom II system seems like a good platform. Grabbed a Geforce 470 GTX local, and now I'm just waiting on the PSU to finally arrive here. Because I don't trust used PSUs.

Both guys asked me what I even do with these old parts, and when I told them games, they were incredibly curious. One guy seemed a little older than me? It gets hard to tell approaching middle age because some people take care of themselves, and others age really poorly. But one of them was practically a kid, in his early 20's maybe, selling old parts his step dad didn't need anymore. When I mentioned I used old CRT monitors, he just gave me a blank stare. Had never even heard of them.

I've been thinking about the games I own which are good candidates for this Phenom II system. The problem I keep running into is that even most physical versions of games in that era have online activation requirements. Bioshock won't even install anymore. Most EA games like Spore, The Sims 3 or Dead Space have online activation which may or may not work any longer. The physical version of Call of Duty 4 has a form of disc based DRM that won't work on any version of Windows after Vista SP1. My disc for Rage is just a Steam key and install package. GOG has a lot of these games with the DRM stripped out, god bless them. But it's frustrating that even the disc I own will no longer work.

What's worse, you look at the Gamerankings for 2007-2017 or so, and for the few years I really exhaustively checked, only half the top 10 games could be played on an offline, era appropriate system. The rest were either MMOs or have online activation requirements which may or may not still be able to phone home. I mean, just looking at 2010, StarCraft II, World of WarCraft: Cataclysm, Civilization V, Borderlands: The Secret Armory of General Knoxx and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, to this day, have online DRM. Bioshock 2 would be playable only because GOG later released a DRM free version. Still playable today would be Mass Effect 2 (maybe), Super Meat Boy, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (maybe) and Monkey Island 2: Special Edition.

2011 was even worse with Portal 2, Skyrim, Total War: Shogun 2, FIFA 12, Battlefield 3 and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood all have online DRM to this day. Only Limbo had none. GOG freed Batman: Arkham City and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Contemporary 2011 versions of Minecraft I'm unsure about.

I guess what I'm getting at is that pirates are doing the lords work.

One of my favorite things about this hardware era was AMD was crushing Intel, and we were finally stepping into games taking advantage of multiple cores.

I remember one of the worst decisions I made when building my own PCs was landing on a single-core FX-57 instead of the dual-core alternative. This was the same period of time that I'd be running a game, yes, but also Xfire or other utilities, and I recall that as time went on my extremely expensive processor fell further and further behind compared to my gaming buddies' dual core rigs.

It resided in a glaring blue LED NZXT Case, well-warmed by a blistering X1900XT. 2 years of mowing lawns went up in flames, and I sold the behemoth by 2010 to someone for $500 after that.

If you haven't included F.E.A.R. on the list of things to try - though it predates 08 by 3 years - it still holds up as an excellent gaming experience. Amazingly.

FEAR is definitely on my to do list. Although right now I'm striving to beat at least Warcraft II's orc campaign.

As a fellow fan of archiving and hater of DRM, if you aren't restricted to PC versions, several of the DRM'd games were also released on consoles sometimes even with physical versions complete on the storage medium.

Skyrim and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit are both complete on a Switch cart and are emulatable as N Switch roms, offline. Minecraft was released on the PS Vita, a system hacked wide open but with an emulator worse than those for the N Switch.

Contemporary 2011 versions of Minecraft I'm unsure about.

There's a pretty sizable community of Golden Age Minecraft players, and while it varies when that age actually falls depending on who you talk to (Rotarycraft and Thaumcraft fans usually say r1.7!), most of the reddit community tends to emphasize b1.7.3 (June 2011) or r1.2.5 (April 2012) are two of the most common ones. AtLauncher does recent stuff and legacy versions pretty well, but there are also legacy-specific installers. Zontargs was pretty heavily into it, if he's still floating around.

Ah, 1.7.2. The moment I finally bought the game instead of just playing the browser demo with my siblings.

Please excuse me while I shoot up some of this nostalgia.

Well, I'm unsure not about it being playable, I know it is. It's whether it's playable offline on a legacy system. I forget when Minecraft strongly implemented an account requirement, and furthermore, what account has changed since 2011. First it was a Minecraft account, then a Mojang account, then a Microsoft account. Will a modern launcher that authenticates with the correct account work on 2010 hardware and Vista?

Ah, that's fair. The big problem is usually less than authentication side, and more fighting with finding the right Java version. Go too early and you don't have TLS 1.2+ support, go too late and it'll do a version check during Java install and be a pain in the ass (or worse, depend on SSE instructions you may no longer have). But people have done it!

Newer Minecraft versions (1.17+) require more recent versions of Java that have stricter version checks; there are some workarounds but they're incredibly inelegant. But I don't think that's what you're trying to do.

You couldn't get me to build a retro pc or play old games on it for love and money, I'd wager because when I was a kid, I had no choice in the matter, being stuck with a frankly ancient pc till my late teens, so instead of nostalgia it provokes more of a sense of impotent rage at all the good games I simply couldn't play at the time.

If I had a dollar for every game I saved up to buy with my literal 20 cents a day of pocket money (which I saved by skipping lunch) and I ended up being unable to run on my system because they were too demanding or needed an online activation, I'd be able to buy them all again on GOG.

It wasn't that terrible when I was a kid in the 90's. Especially the early 90's. Basically right up until Quake came out, system requirements, and what was considered playable, were fairly loose. Doom could play on just about anything, although a 486 was best. Which to put in perspective, you could get in 1993 and still be playing games reasonably well in 1996. Plus the DOS VGA era has a massive catalog of quality games you could almost never exhaust.

After Quake all bets were off. The race for 3D from 1997 to 2000 obsoleted computers so damned fast. A P233 MMX from 1997 could barely run a 3D game by the end of 1998. The first generation of 4MB Voodoo or Nvidia cards from 1997 were only barely supported by most games in that same timespan. It was fucking terrible.

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