still....

we got a spare pc from a relatives work in i belief somewhere begin 90's an 8088 xt .... green screen, loud internal speaker used it to play a variety of games spend days and days on silly little games or sims such as the f19 stealth fighter
Later this old thing got replaced by a 386 something, i belief it ran windows 95.. fond memories of the mysterious theme and the pc gamer cd's also finally had my own money which i spend on games such as Command and Conquer, Warcraft 2, Baldurs Gate, Privateer 2 : The Darkening
I belief after that one we had one ready for xp .....
not sure if there was one in between but in 2008 the first serious piece of equipment arrived in the room in the form of a i7 920

Not boring you with details of how this continued but the i7 920 stayed until 2019

Had some great teen memories on the thing, without internet, sometimes together with friends
Later on mid twenties it became special again, right after the first major relation break up i discovered gaming online this time and spend a lot of time and money in online arena's and mmorpg's

these days it became more of a casual hobby with 4x/wargaming as the main interest and now and then a triple A adventure

Never had much time to consider the purchase of a console, only with the new rising prices it does seem smart to invest in a console ( instead of that thousand dollar costing gpu ) or streaming services for that matter but then again, in the genre's i play most even a streaming service would just be a waste of time even if the costs are similar to the price of 2 or 3 full payed games per year

There's obviously a ton of PC gamers out there if you look at revenue charts, but it is funny how so many in the mainstream treat it like a total unknown. I wonder if that will change with so many younger folks today playing Minecraft and Fortnite on PC.

I remember when I was a kid I was into NES and SNES like every other kid, and then around 1993 I switched to PC and it was suddenly like we were in completely different worlds. The games I was playing and loving were games most kids at my school never even heard of. Obviously there were plenty out there like me, or else PC gaming would be dead today, but I guess we were in a quiet niche.

I was and still am a PC Gamer. Games are for me a computer affair.

No way I could fork the money for an expensive import such as console hardware.

Right now all I have is a laptop with Intel HD Graphics which I use for work, and sometimes for games. I can play very good games with it, and that's enough. Now, if only we cold get more current games to offer good fallbacks for that chipset, and more Linux ports, I would be very happy...

I must be in a bubble everyone I know is a computer gamer and no console users in my circle. The only console gamer I know is one of my tenants but he plays older games on Dreamcast and the rest on a Windows based computer.

PC gaming was pretty much on equal footing with consoles around me when I grew up in the 90s if not more popular at times (Counterstrike/Quake 3/UT era); yeah there were certain games or genres considered more nerdy or niche but playing on PC wasn't weird at all.

It was through the internet I learned that consoles were a lot more popular in the US for example, particulary 80s-eary 90s era.

PC gamer for me still has the ring of "someone who tinkers with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT". :-)

Maybe he had a evil stepfather that had him eat his veggies on his plate, or to wash his hands after using the bathroom, or maybe to learn how to tie his own tie rather than using a clipon...


Those were the days.. fighting to get a CDROM and Mouse driver to work AND still have the room for the 500k game was a chore.

CD-ROM, mouse, and Soundblaster, and a ton of EMS (iirc) and 624kB base memory for Strike Commander CD... took me a whole day. No internet that you could ask for help. Just manuals and PC magazines (I had several shelf-meters of those).

Mhmm. Makes you wonder if instead of being offsets of a nibble/hex (16) it insead did a whole byte shift...

Max x86 Realmode access: FFFF+FFFF0 = 10FFEF (1087k (~1Mb))
Max with byte shift: FFFF + FFFF00 = 100FEFF (16,447k (~16Mb))

Instead of the 640k max potential memory, assuming you took say 2 megs for video/anything else, that would give you 14Mb max accessible before going 32bit. Though you'd still be working with 64k segments, it would have been quite different.

(286 could access something like 16Megs theoretically but Win 3.x use pretty much died at that point)

*shrugh*
Perhaps not, but you did specify 286, so I couldn't help myself. Relevant XKCD.
My first PC (not first computer) was an 80286 with 640kB RAM and 20MB hard drive. That one wouldn't have run Doom in any shape or form.
True, dat.
Used to schlep around my full size 80386 with 4MB RAM, and heavy CRT to play DOOM and a few other LAN games with mates.

Well, is it possible to play strategy games that are mouse-intensive on a console? With all the catalogue that there is for PC? When the reply is yes, then we can talk.
Oh, yes, the memory issues... Freeing up enough memory of the right kind.... *shivers* Sometimes making a game work felt like a hobby itself.

what are u talking about doom is only 4 years old as it came out in 2016

Yup! While consoles were always about: You turn it on and it just works. Albeit you could not do what you could do with a PC and viceversa. They did different things and eventually they overlapped in some areas.

Doom came out in 1993, Doom 2 in 1994, and Doom 3 in 2004, though you just reminded my why I hate it when developers give new remakes exactly the same name as the original ("Doom That Was Made in 2016" should have been called "Doom 4" or "Doom (2016)" or something to save a lot of confusion).