I found a box of CD-Roms and floppy disks in my mum's basement and damnit, I want to play them! I could use emulators, DosBox or VMs but it's never quite the same as having the real thing, so between an eBay mobo and a box of old parts I managed to build my new gaming rig to cover 1990-2005.
Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory. As I didn't want to run an old IDE drive with a million hours on it, I tried an SATA-IDE adapter, it caused some issues during the install but that just felt like the standard Windows experience.
Though unpopular, I went with ME for 2 reasons, the first was Dos support, the second is that I went from W95 to ME as a kid, 98 wouldn't have felt the same. The install bricked twice with video drivers but I finally got it up and running with the default drivers and an 18" Samsung flat CRT (runs up to 1600x1200 at a nauseating 60hz).
So what were your favorite games from the 90's and early 2000s?
ME is a bold choice regardless—those installs always seem to destroy themselves before long in my experience (admittedly from quite a while ago now)
As for games (in no particular order):
I'm definitely forgetting some
Great list, pretty much my childhood. I'll add some more:
Great list, I'll add some more
Yes to all of those, though I never actually played empire earth, so that goes on my modern day list
There is some weird difficulty scaling on EE with faster cpus iirc. I got it on gog last year and its significantly harder than I remembered it being.
Ah that's good to know, might be one for 86box then
My childhood! Though I was more of a MechWarrior 2 guy.
Fantastic list and love that you put Z on there. Gotta add some classics like Wolfenstein, Doom, Descent, Quake 1, Mechwarrior Mercenaries, Kings Quest… damn guess you could go on and on..
When I had ME the first time around I do remember there being some stability issues but I never had it totally brick, even with the assload of sus softeware that came from Kazaa and Morpheus.
From what I remember hardware support was weird with ME. If you had the right hardware you were golden. Also last release of MSDOS
I had an entirely different experience with Windows ME than seemingly everyone else. In my experience windows Me fixed a ton of hardware issues. I preferred it over 98 SE back in the day.
I only used it for 1 week but I remember that it would randomly commit suicide every hour, even without doing anything.
Sim City games were so cool back then! I hate what they did with them as they progressed.