General

So far, if I caught everything…

68 = oldest
29 = youngest

That’s quite the age gap. I don’t know if I’m surprised the youngest is 29. It is very telling when pondering site longevity.

For those over 40, have your gaming habits changed? I don’t mean less time to commit, more so the games you like to play? I use to play alot of MW2 with my son online “back in the day”. I don’t even attempt any competitive online game these days. I mostly play on easy and prefer a slower paced adventure game or platformer. I’m about 4hrs into starfield and I’m not wowed. Newer games with all the bells and whistles really doesn’t do anything for me anymore.

dreamstate wrote:

Oh, I'm only 43. Our champ is @Tony at 68. When he's not napping, he's holding down GTZ.

It's crazy that the youngest is 29. I joined in 2009 and in my first several years here, it seemed like there were tons of young guys here, even some below 18.

Turned 30 this year and I'll have been here 15 years in December.

loztdogs wrote:

So, I would say that my tastes in games has not changed. Always loved the couch-coop games so that I could play with (instead of against) my wife. We did Halo and now love all of the Borderlands-related stuff.

The part that is "different" for me as I get older is having some money. I don't worry about getting crazy deals like I used to. I used to never buy the new games -- always wait for later/discount/used. Now I'm pre-ordering the legendary packages from anything Borderlands, for example. And, heck, Borderlands 3 had trouble with split-screen co-op -- so we installed twin 75" TVs in our living room and bought another console -- just so my wife and I could still play "couch coop", but on different consoles/screens! Love it!

The downside is that I'm now pretty picky about games. We've had trouble getting into anything else now that we've finished Borderlands/Wonderlands. I need to try to force myself to try something else that we'll like.

I enjoyed playing "It Takes Two" with my wife. I recommend it.

Ive been a life long Halo fan. Still online currently with Infinite. Bought Pikmin 4 for me and the new Street Fighter for when the nephews come over. My kids took over my pokemon/Mario games.

One of the things that stick out for me here is waiting for all the new listings after Xmas. When people got duplicates or something they didnt want and listing would be long.
Now I see listing are starting to shorten up no matter the season. I still browse here often before I head out to the stores.

@Frank is younger than 29 I think.

I'm 24. I joined when I was 14 in 2014. I have a distinct memory of trading with one of two people around my age when I was like 16-17 I think.. so they're here somewhere.

59, here for a little over 25 of them.

bill wrote:

Thanks -- will check it out!

35 here.. been here since 1997 (I was 9 years old) as a lurker, but I guess I never made an account until 2000? soo... 23 (or 26) years here. Crazy.

Time flies.

John wrote:

Seconded on It takes two. This game was incredible.

I'm 45. Been here since 2001 when I was 23. Funny the similarities I have with @Tony. I too had a 286 computer (Tandy!) with a 20 meg hard drive and also played Space Quest in the late 80s. Additionally I also got ripped off on my first trade here. I left the story in my bio comments if anyone cares what happened, lol.

How old was the kid who used to mail everything with a ton of postage stamps? Wasn't he like 7? 9? He was very young. There's been lots of teens through here. I wonder whatever happened to that 14 year old who got banned for threatening to put a cap in the ass of another trader if he ripped him off. Lol Kid was a hell of a wheeler-dealer with the personality of a CEO with antisocial personality disorder. What's his name ebaydot? Was that him? Lol

Staraang wrote:

I used Tandy 8086 and 88088 systems at work. My personal 286 was a Gold Star with a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. I eventually had to put a dual floppy disk drive in it because everything went to 3.5 inch floppies. I upgraded it to an 80 Meg hard drive and kept it alive past the 386 and 486 processors before I finally bought an early Pentium. The 286 had 640 K RAM and "shadow RAM" up to 1024 that had to be configured as "extended" or "expanded" for specific programs.

Tony wrote:

I bet those upgrades weren’t cheap. We never upgraded ours. I remember it being super expensive though. It was $2500 and didn’t come with a hard drive. The 20 meg HD was an extra $300. And this was in like 1988 dollars. I know a few years later we got another computer. Can’t remember the specs but it was at least a 486. That one was pretty exciting because I was able to run Wing Commander 3 on it which was amazing.

I can kind of relate to the 286 stuff, though I started with a (6502-based) Atari home computer that I used throughout the 80s. It was a good gaming PC for its time (similar to C64 and Apple ][ ). It had a bulky 5.25 disk drive connected to it. I had these big plastic containers for all my disks. By the late 80s, as I went to college, I mostly used it for modem stuff like dialing in to BBSes and school computers.

I wanted a 386, but they were expensive. I remember paging through these huge Computer Shopper books with all kinds of computer stuff I wanted. Finally, in the mid-90s, I got a Pentium-90 (aka 586). As PC gaming started to really take off with 3D games, I got a 3DFX add-on graphics cards to play the best new games.

I remember all that odd memory stuff for extended vs expanded, etc. too. It was a pain to stuggle against that and just all the limitations of DOS. I made a sort of boot-up script for some games that would load the memory stuff just so. Also, CD-ROM games were getting big then too, but initially required some odd steps to get working right. I had some sort of TSR DOS program I needed to load for mine before I started the CD-ROM game up. But, Myst and such were amazing (at the time anyway).

Then, as the Internet started taking off, I used a program (Trumpet Winsock) to do TCP/IP over the modem on Windows (ugh early Windows was so limited too). Also, installing Slackware Linux on my PC was another revolution (a PC that could be like the UNIX workstations I used at school/work)....

BBSes were a big part of my early computer usage. In fact I don’t think there was one computer feature that I paid more attention to than modem speed. I started out with a 2400 baud modem and I remember making the leap to 14.4k and it was like magic. Then 28.8k which was even more awesome. And finally 56k though by that time broadband was coming around so I don’t remember being as excited by it.
I forget all the different BBS software types but I think the most popular was one called Renegade. There was another one called MajorBBS I believe which allowed the host to have up to 4 dial-up lines. That allowed 4-player Doom which was incredible back then. Playing 2v2 remotely was mind-blowing for those days.

Every add on was expensive and just about everything was an add on because computers didn't come bundled with everything you needed. Since Windows wasn't popular yet, computers didn't come with a mouse or a modem. As I recall, my first mouse was about $20 (in 1980s dollars) and my internal 2400 baud modem was much more. Initially, connections weren't "plug and play". You had to tell your computer you added something and configure it to get it to work properly. I've probably forgotten more about all of that than I remember.

Ahh the good old days of listening to the robot scream "handshake" when dialing up a BBS on a 2400 baud modem. You had to make sure you wife wasn't home to pick the phone and hope no one tried to call while you took an hour or more to download "free" shareware games like Hugo's House of Horrors. I still have a lot of those old games stored on a CD.

Before Windows, I wrote simple menus in GW basic to handle the change directory and run commands and then return to the menu when I exited the program.

Lol, I used to skirt those issues by logging in very late at night or super early in the morning. My dad refused to pay for an extra line so that was the only way to do it.

I grew up very broke: food stamps, government cheese, food banks, the whole nine, so I never had access to a computer until I was an adult. I didn't get one until sometime after the year 2000 (my early 20's). Thank goodness for WebTV! That's how I first came across GameTZ back in '99 (lurked for a year before joining in 2000).

We should do a nostalgia thread sometime about early computers and such -- I'm enjoying the stuff above from people. I'll just throw out one quick thing...

My first real computer use was a neighbor girl with an Apple ][+ with a 300 baud modem. They'd let me come over and use it sometimes.

We then got an Apple IIe at home with a DUAL disk drive! Fantastic!

Few years later moved to an Apple IIgs! Color monitor!? What!??

The fun thing I wanted to mention was this... So, when I was like 10 years old, my parents temporarily took in this girl who was like 15 that used to be a neighbor years before. I guess she was a bit of a "troubled youth" with some parent problems going on, so my parents let her live with us for a while. It was great suddenly having an older sister. She then moved out later (and is doing well today). Anywho... Years later I'm like 15 and have my Apple IIgs and I've got a RAM expansion card in it with a tiny amount of RAM. Back then, the expansion card could hold like 1M, but it just came with like 256k. The rest of the card was empty sockets. Like this:

image

And RAM was CRAZY expensive. Like, that card was crazy money even with just the 256k. So, anyway, that girl that used to live with us? Her older brother made a few million apparently by making printer buffers. Business printers were very slow and you had to WAIT while they printed. So if you printed something huge, you lost employee productivity. He invented a box that just took the print job immediately and "buffered" it in RAM in the device and sent it on to the printer. They sold like crazy. So, out of nowhere, a package arrives in the mail for me -- and it is one of those buffers that he made/sold along with a note saying that he heard I did computer stuff, so he wanted me to have one in case I could use it!

I immediately opened it up and stripped the RAM from it -- it was socketed and removable and the same type used in my IIgs expansion card! I then had a full/1MB expansion card (and, if I remember, some RAM left over)! It was amazing!

Side story for another day: That IIgs was later confiscated by the police when I was a Freshman in college and I never got it back.

I vaguely recall making some changes to the site to make it work better for people using WebTV.

John wrote:

I would enjoy reading that

I wish I could remember better the old computers I used growing up. Both in school, and at home. Most of the home computers we had were custom-built by a friend of the family. I didn't really get good with computers until college, so none of the model names/specs/etc really stuck with me from back then.

bill wrote:

I can tell you that it was much appreciated. Even back then, many websites were not very user-friendly with WebTV. I think my first couple of years here were experienced on WebTV. Thanks for keeping it accessable.

I joined in early 2000 when I was 13. First trade was my THPS for RE3 (PS1). I remember when using money orders was very common before people moved to paypal.

I've made many trades over the years. Some good and some very bad. I really like the community here. I do wish we could bring in more new members but that topic has been beat to death!

You guys were far more technically savvy back in the 80s and early 90s than I was though granted I was just a kid. I did enjoy poring over Computer Shopper in the early 90s and salivating at all the sweet builds they had which were also ludicrously expensive. Some of the premier brands in those days were Dell, Zeos, and Gateway. There were others too. It took years but eventually my dad caved and got us a Zeos and I remember being so thrilled, lol. That thing was a beast compared with what I had been using.
Reminiscing about this reminds me of how spoiled we are now. PC gaming in those days was a prohibitively expensive hobby for most people I would say. We balk now at $2000 gaming rigs and MacBooks. People were shocked at the $3500 price tag for the Apple headset. But adjusting for inflation these prices are nothing compared with what we had to pay to play PC games. It’s why I didn’t really play any advanced PC games until the mid-90s.
On the Tandy I’d play stuff like California Games, Skate or Die, Command HQ, Space Quest 3, and Sopwith. @Tony do you remember any compatibility issues with Tandys in those days? I feel like I used to run into problems trying to run games and wishing my dad had bought a different brand.

Later I was able to play stuff like Wing Commander 3, Command and Conquer, Bioforge, and more which was great.

Staraang wrote:


Without Windows and "plug-and-play" hardware, if you were going to use one of the early computers, you had to get tech savvy or know someone who was. The company I worked for was moving a bunch of stuff to computers, and one of the reasons I bought my own was to get up to speed as quickly as possible. The company hired a guy who was very tech savvy to get us started, and I watched him and asked questions rather than just letting him do it and hand me the results.



I remember buying my Gold Star computer and some of the accessories from a Damark catalog. Think Wish or Temu.

Some of the early DOS games had to be configured to run on specific computers. As I recall, the early Sierra (King's Quest and Space Quest) games had you answer questions about what kind of system you were installing it on and Tandy was one of the options because of compatibility issues.

Software piracy was pretty simple back then. You could back up a whole computer hard drive on floppy disks, then use that backup to copy the entire drive (including the OS) to another hard drive in another computer. Most games could be simply copied to a floppy after it had been installed on a hard drive. All you had to do was copy the directory where it put the files. I recall having to find the configuration file for Sierra games and editing them for a different computer since I wasn't doing a fresh install. Sierra (and maybe others) tried to combat piracy by having their game open with random questions that had to be answered from the game manual. BBSs would have files you could download to replace the original *.exe file and take you straight into the game.

Yeah, I remember thinking life would've been easier with an IBM instead of our Tandy. Oh well.

Lol, I remember having to authenticate my games by answering those random questions. And piracy was definitely rampant even back then. Some of the BBSes I frequented had pirated games. I remember there being one BBS that had a gold mine of software but it was located somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and you'd have to dial in long distance to get any of it which would probably nullify any savings from piracy. Never did it myself.

Did any of you post on BBS forums? The one prerequisite for all BBSes was a Kill Barney forum. Ha, so 90s!

I live near Louisville, KY, and there were many BBSs available. One of them had all sorts of pirated software available to subscribers and it hit the papers when they got busted. I remember posting frequently to help people with technical issues like how to copy taglines.

What’s a BBS?

Bulletin Board System I reckon. Precursor to forums.

More like precursor to the internet.

If you really want to nerd-out, watch BBS: The Documentary.

bill wrote:

Nice! Just found it on YouTube. Will have to check it out.

lordkaosu wrote:

Ha, misread that for sure. Sorry to you both, one for thinking they were that old and the other because they are. Ha!

I'll have to check out that BBS doc.

Usenet is where it was at. When I was learning how to use the internet, I pretty much thought usenet was the internet and the early web was just weird and hard to get around on.

I ran a BBS for a while. It was called The Two-Tone Arsenal. It ran on a C64. I had a pair of C1581 drives (those were the 3.5" floppies that stored 800kB each!) Felt like you could fit SO many warez on there!

Wow, warez... Haven't heard that in ages!