2nd February 2010, 2:15 AM
Quote:Ya know, in the end you should convert some den into a sanctum sanctorum of old video game shelves all around. Oh, with all those PC games, not even DOSBox is enough for you any more. You need to get an old 486 PC with some General MIDI or MT-32 compatible sound and an S3 video card to play all that stuff on. Play it all on a multiboot with DOS, Windows 3.11, and Windows 98 SE. Complete the experience with an old "loud click" keyboard.
I know you're kind of joking here, but... I do still have my WinME machine (not here, but at my moms' house), sure it's a P4 1500Mhz, but it can run most DOS games native, with sound and everything. The only ones that don't work are ones that have serious problems running are ones that don't work well in WinME, things that require Glide because the machine doesn't have a 3DFX card and its 32MB GeForce2 GTS isn't good enough to run 3DFX emulation, and games with speed problems that can't be fixed with things like MoSlo. Most, however, do work.
I've found, though, that for most things DOSBox does a pretty good job... though yes, of course I'd rather run them native. I just don't think I need a 486 to do it, anything that can run the games is good... it might be cool to have an old machine like that sometime (I wish we still had our old P90 and P233 computers... those would be awesome to still have around! I know the 386 had big problems, but those were still working... :(), but it's not exactly a priority of mine.
Quote:You're certainly becoming a serious collector, and by serious I mean you should consider rehab. Buying so many bad games isn't good for you. Yeah there's some good ones there, as well as ones I've never heard of and that's always an experiment.
Hah... maybe. I do buy a whole lot more stuff than I play much of, for sure... there are a lot of games I've barely played, and I keep getting more which just makes the problem worse. But when I see good games (for decent prices hopefully) I can't help but sometimes get something...
And I'm not completely crazy or something. I don't usually get the same game on multiple platforms unless the version I don't have has something different about it -- that it's a better version for instance -- and the price is low... some collectors actually buy lots of copies of the same game for no reason other than that they saw it for "a decent price". I don't have more than two or three copies of any game, and all of those have good explanations (often involving game collections or lots) -- the number of times I've just bought multiple single copies of the same game for no reason is... um, maybe one or two times. And one of those was a case where the other copy was free and the other one where I was thinking of giving the second copy away sometime.
I mean, it's more the number of games than the amount of money I'm spending, really. People buying many current-gen games would spend a lot more than I have to get a lot less games, I think... I just decided a few years back to mostly get larger numbers of cheaper games, instead of smaller numbers of more expensive ones. Both are good options, but I've been doing this... and thanks to those Steam and D2D sales, I even have some more modern PC games now too, which is great. I mean, I don't love Digital Distribution, but when the prices are that ridiculously low I can't resist (I haven't bought any full-price games on digital download services, I think... well, maybe Geometry Wars Galaxies, but that was like $3 to begin with...)
Maybe it would be smarter to have a Wii or 360 or something and end up having many fewer games that cost a lot more, that way I'd actually finish things sometimes, but... oh well. I missed out on everything other than the GB, GBC, GBA, N64 and Gamecube (and DS, and '90s and beyond PC of course) during their lifespans, so why not try to catch up now? :)
... Of course though, it is completely true that I'm the kind of person who never wants to get rid of anything. It's really hard for me to get rid of just about anything I care about at all... which is why I keep getting games but virtually never sell or give them away after I've played them or whatever. After all, I'll probably want to play it again sometime...