Im lucky i guess. No signs of motion sickness. Then again, i do use the keyboard to turn around, and that seemingly takes a decade to do a 180 degree spin.

Descent 2 got me over my vertigo in games. I remember one of my friends getting a tossed stomach to Omega Boost on the Playstation console a few years down the road, while I had no trouble with it at all.
That's one of the charms of the game, the fact that it could trick you simply by the 3D perspective alone. It also didn't help that half the time you were looking into the bottom of a barf-bag while enemies turned your ship into Swiss cheese.

One thing you definitely didn't want to do was watch someone else play Descent. When I purchased the game during its original release, I invited a friend over to try and sell him on the game too. (Hey, I wanted to play it at our network parties!) Regardless, he watched for a minute or two before I handed the controls over to him. Because I was giving the "sales pitch" I gave him a much longer gaming session than what I had taken and I felt horrible afterwards. It took me doing this a few times before I realized that my "motion sickness" was for no other reason than I was not in control of the ship so my brain could not anticipate the type and timing of its movements.
To this day, as long as I'm not excessively tired, I can play Descent for as long as I like and I never suffer from motion sickness. Give me five minutes of watching someone else play however, is a whole different matter. (He-he)

This is all kind of funny, because it's exactly what I heard from other people back when Descent was released. I've never had a problem with motion sickness in any game, but I'm curious if it's the low-resolution graphics, or is it just the way the graphics move? I guess better display technologies haven't helped with this problem. Would it help to play it in a window instead of fullscreen?

It's not the graphics. It's definitely the full range of motion within confined spaces I think. My buddy used to get vertigo while we played. I could play it for hours and hours. It was weird going back and playing it again this weekend as I have't touched it in so long. I've gotten this to work in XP by itself with compatibility mode enabled but I would get keyboard functions that would "stick" if you pressed multiple keys. WIth this version I don't get that anymore so I can go back to just using a straight keyboard for movement.
Ok now let's get Case's Ladder to add Descent 2 back up there. :P

I have the Descent 1 in the original box (5- 3 1/2" diskettes) and on the back there's a warning that it may cause motion sickness!

These warnings are in all game manuals.

Hahaha but that's still funny coming from a Descent manual.

Actually, the warnings that "all games" come with has to do with the potential seizure inducing properties of some games. Certain moving or flashing patterns, can induce seizures in people who are prone (such as people with Epilepsy...)
Funny thing is, back in the day, I never had a problem with the Descent series, but WOULD sometimes get a little nauseous after playing Wolfenstien 3D for a while.

Definitely it's not the graphics. I get motion sick pretty frequently, and so cannot play most FPS games. Still I loved games like Doom and Doom 2 and Descent so much when I originally got them(when they came out) that I was willing to give it my all and see if I got sick.
I got just as sick years later with Unreal when it came out, with its far better graphics, and Doom 3, with still better. It's an inner ear thing, exactly like getting sea sick(I get sea sick looking at a glass of water). I feel either barfy or like pooping within five to ten minutes of playing Doom 3. I've even used it to make myself poop when feeling constipated -- works every time.
Interestingly, I can get even sicker when not paying close attention to the game. If I look at t.v. for a while as a descent demo is playing in the background, I will get nauseous VERY fast. Turning head on immediately soothes my stomach. Paying very close fixated attention to the screen and my feeling of what is top and bottom seems to work wonders to keep me oriented, thus not triggering my inner ear that weird stuff is going on, thus not making me sick nearly as quickly or as badly.
It's been many years since I first got Descent when I was in my early 20's I guess it was. I'm curious how bad it will be for me now. But it's not entirely a matter of age. I and many of my friends back in the day got sick at FPS games.
Try what I said, though. I managed to get through the Descent games with only rare sickness. (I think flying around using the automaps in anything but wire frame might have made it worse for me.) You might be able to "adapt" to it like I did.

One thing that may hep you guys is if you get an s3virge wrapper for your vid card. D2 in particular was made for use with the s3 virge chipset. The nicer display of hardware gpx acceleration vs software rendering may help you out. Wrappers can be found, just google for them.
There are 2 wrappers you should have. One for s3virge, and one for 3dfx Glide. Both are pretty easy to find and ge4nerally work really well. It is possible that your crt monitors are refreshing very slowly which can lead to eyestrain which can lead to nasea.
Get the wrappers, you'll thank me later :-)

So going commando can lead to sickness in video games too?

There was a Myth Buster show on sea sickness a while back. They tried everything including special pills to solve the problem. In the end though, the only thing that seemed to work was ginger. Give it a try, and see if it works for you.

My friend has the same problem. From what I've seen, he gets this only from games using the 320x200 default screen mode for DOS games.
Apparently even to this day, Descent 1 doesn't support higher resolutions like Descent 2.

There's actually a good reason why only seeing the edge of the screen is worse.
One of the reasons for getting motion sick while playing games is because objects at the edge of the screen warp and change shape as they move across the screen. A sphere at the edge of the screen will be more of an oval shape, will squash into a circle as it moves towards the centre of the screen, then stretch back out into an oval as it approaches the edge again. It's a result of projecting 3D objects onto a flat surface. It makes your brain think you've eaten the wrong kind of mushroom (solid objects should not behave that way!), thus your body tries to flush your digestive tract as quickly as possible...
For a real puketastic time, try playing as the alien in Alien vs. Predator. The extra-wide FOV makes this distortion even more pronounced.