PC vs Consoles 80's

[fousekis]

I would like to know how popular where pc gaming back to the 80's comparing to consoles like Nes , Genesis ,SMS, Turbografx16.IIRC there were many systems like IBM AMIGA ,ATARI ST and others.Iam asking cause now that ive started playing some retro from those systems i find pc games "unplayable" comparing to consoles.Dont know why thought , maybe the lack of tutorial or the controls were awful comparing again with the systems controllers.

[Areala]

In my experience here in the US, PCs were seen as primarily business machines up until the early 90's, when games like Doom and Warcraft started outselling the major office applications like Lotus 1-2-3. Games existed of course, and magazines like Computer Gaming World covered them, but they were really niche products, especially when you compared what Nintendo and Sega were offering on their home consoles and what was popular in the arcades. Additionally, without one product leader to offer a more unified experience, home computer development was a major hit-or-miss proposition. There might have been five million home computers out there, but they were split up between a dozen different companies each with their own internal specs, strengths, and weaknesses. Would-be developers had to decide which platform to support and which ones to ignore, often on the basis of sales projections that could not possibly be accurate, then decide which niche of those products to aim at. If they went for high-end systems, they'd rake in lower sales numbers but create more impressive-looking games. If they aimed for middleware, they made larger sales but released games that often lacked the 'wow' factor necessary to entice the hardcore computer gamers to pick them up. They were screwed no matter which way they went: if they pitched to the Commodore market, they were aiming at the largest single group but it meant ignoring 3/4ths of the other platforms out there. If they went for smaller platforms, like the Mac or the Amiga, they could produce better-looking software but with fewer total buyers who might be interested.

 

Only the largest studios (or those like Infocom whose games were text-based and therefore easily ported) could afford to code games for multiple platforms simultaneously. The Atari series of computers in particular suffered from a kind of death spiral in terms of gaming, where nobody was buying the 400, 800, or ST models of gaming computers because no one was making games for them, but nobody was making games for them because there weren't enough units out there to ensure profitability. Software piracy was absolutely rampant in the 80's and early 90's as well, when disks were cheap, easy to copy, swapable among friends, and easily uploaded to the local BBS. The Amiga (which was a Commodore brand, not an IBM) sold extremely well in the UK, but had a very lukewarm reception in the States. It's unfortunate, because Amiga games of the day were blowing away the console competition in the 16-bit arena in terms of graphics and sound.

 

By contrast, a company like Capcom could create Mega Man for the NES and buyers could buy with confidence knowing it would work on any NES out there. They didn't work directly with the PC market, but third-party studios sometimes bid for the rights to port popular titles like Mega Man and Street Fighter to the home computer market. The results were...not often ideal.

 

By the mid-90's, when graphics cards started becoming more and more of a requirement to play the newer titles (or at least see them at their best), PCs came into their own as gaming machines first and office machines second. Companies started using Quake to benchmark hardware instead of things like spreadsheet and database operations, and hardware manufacturers were forced to create the components that could run the software making higher and higher demands of them, as opposed to the 1980s when game developers were forced to code to the limits of a given system.

 

In the UK, though, this trend is almost the reverse of what we saw in the States. Game-centered computers were huge there, with multiple publications devoted to individual computing platforms from the Commodore to the Sinclair to the Amiga and beyond. Consoles, by being tied to the PAL television standard, most often had to be converted from the NTSC standard used in Japan and the US, and these conversions were often sloppy, resulting in cropped screens, slowdown in gameplay, input problems from the controllers, and so on.

 

*huggles*
Areala

[Data]

I would like to know how popular where pc gaming back to the 80's comparing to consoles like Nes , Genesis ,SMS, Turbografx16.IIRC there were many systems like IBM AMIGA ,ATARI ST and others.Iam asking cause now that ive started playing some retro from those systems i find pc games "unplayable" comparing to consoles.Dont know why thought , maybe the lack of tutorial or the controls were awful comparing again with the systems controllers.

 

Consoles were a decent platform to play games in the 80' and 90's especially Nintendo Sega.  I was too young to start buyng computers at the time but they did offer advancement in graphics cards, sound blaster, vga resolution as well as the ability to do many other usefull tasks.

 

You had to know how computers worked to understand how to get the games to work.  Keyboards were often used to control the characters.

Starting with Doom is when the processor speeds began to double every 6 months and 3D graphics cards began development.

 

PC cost more money, it took extra work and knowledge to operate but it offered many more options for the user.

[magcollector]

The computers back then were nowhere as good for gaming as computers in the last 12, 14-16 years, basically if you wanted some decent gaming in the 80s you had to get a console either a NES or Genesis, this is what I was told by people who played games on PC back in the 80s and I recall playing some game or two in PC some time before the release of the Game Cube and there was a world of difference between what graphics could achieve on Dreamcast, N64 or GC and a computer of the late 90s early 2000s, the gaming experience was a lot better on console so it should have been the same but with a lot more difference in the 80s

[kitsunebi]

The computers back then were nowhere as good for gaming as computers in the last 12, 14-16 years, basically if you wanted some decent gaming in the 80s you had to get a console either a NES or Genesis, this is what I was told by people who played games on PC back in the 80s and I recall playing some game or two in PC some time before the release of the Game Cube and there was a world of difference between what graphics could achieve on Dreamcast, N64 or GC and a computer of the late 90s early 2000s, the gaming experience was a lot better on console so it should have been the same but with a lot more difference in the 80s

 

Not true.  It depends on why types of games you like.  If you wanted to play platformers and action games, then yes, consoles were absolutely the way to go.  But if you liked more complicated games that often appealed to a more mature audience (strategy games/flight sims/wargames/adventure games/RPGs), PC had far more variety to offer, even if the graphics and sounds were primitive in comparison.  The 16 bit generation was pretty much the last time consoles had a clear technological advantage over PCs, though. 

 

Still, that huge gap between console/PCs is what made gaming great back then.  Unlike now, where most games are designed to appeal to everyone and run on every system, back then PC gamers and console gamers got to experience completely different types of games from one another.  Console games ported to the PC were awful, and PC games ported to consoles were awful, so only those of us gaming on both PCs and consoles were getting the whole of what gaming had to offer at the time.  Nowadays, that's mostly been lost, and more and more people are getting into pointless "my system is better" arguments while ignoring the fact that all the systems are playing more or less the same types of games.

[Data]

Computers have existed and evolved over the same timeline but different paths than consoles. Consoles were derivitive of computers.

Commodre 64 came 4 years before NES in the US.  Both offered games.  Nintendo had it's own intellectual property which made them successful.

Commodore Amiga as well as IBM came 1 year before NES in US.  They both destroyed NES and SNES technically as well as having many clones of Nintendo games and other unique options.  They did this with either a 286, 386 or the high end 486 cpu.

 

By 1995 Doom had been out for a couple years and people were hungry for power.  The Windows renaissance began.  Everybody wanted to get a computer modem and communicate with friends in remote locations.

Gaming enthusiasts now had choices to make.  After the dark ages of the 386 days, socket 7 was introduced and it ushered in a cpu clock speed war between AMD and Intel which up until the early 90's had been a race for memory.

 

3DFX was the superior graphics card from 1994 up until about 1999 when Nvidia picked the bones.

[MisterXiado]

Home computers were an order of magnitude less expensive in the UK in the eighties than in the US, which is why Atari and Nintendo ruled the decade for the most part over in the states. I received a beat-up 386 that died in a couple months at the dawn of the Pentium era, but I didn't get my first usable computer until 1999, when I bought it myself.

 

Still have the motherboard and processor in the basement. I just need a case for it, and it could be usable again. 300MHz system with ISA slots. Whew.

[Data]

Home computers were an order of magnitude less expensive in the UK in the eighties than in the US, which is why Atari and Nintendo ruled the decade for the most part over in the states.

 

Commodore and Amiga were Canadian companies then later US.

Atari was California.

Apple was California.

IBM is American as Apple Pie

 

Are you thinking about vic 20?

[MisterXiado]

ZX Spectrum and company. Low-spec systems with massive libraries of low-cost titles that used tape decks instead of much more costly floppy drives. The only computers I saw in the eighties in the US were multi-thousand dollar home office boxes, and this was when minimum wage was around $3.35 per hour. Let's say you wanted a $1000 computer, ignoring tax or any other add-ons. You would make $16 per day working full time, but pay about 20% of that back in taxes, so let's say $13 a day. It would take you about three months with no other expenses. Meanwhile an NES was $200. Definitely an achievable purchase for someone without a decade of tenure at the GM plant.

[Data]

On 1/20/2017 at 9:43 PM, Raijin Z said:

ZX Spectrum and company. Low-spec systems with massive libraries of low-cost titles that used tape decks instead of much more costly floppy drives. The only computers I saw in the eighties in the US were multi-thousand dollar home office boxes, and this was when minimum wage was around $3.35 per hour. Let's say you wanted a $1000 computer, ignoring tax or any other add-ons. You would make $16 per day working full time, but pay about 20% of that back in taxes, so let's say $13 a day. It would take you about three months with no other expenses. Meanwhile an NES was $200. Definitely an achievable purchase for someone without a decade of tenure at the GM plant.

Yes that's right.  Also add that before 1994 and the age of Pentium, the Compaq PC which was about $30,000 US in 1986 dropped to $4500 by 1994 when Pentium came out and the above average personal computer remained about $6000 US.  Many computer game reviewers like PC Accelerator went bankrupt in the 90 because the cost to play the top echelon of games each year required the most ram and the fastest CPU.  It cost $6000 a year to play any game at acceptable framerates between 1989 and 1996.  Between 1996 and now the price has slowly reached the lowest common denominator 

[kitsunebi]

38 minutes ago, Data said:

Yes that's right.  Also add that before 1994 and the age of Pentium, the Compaq PC which was about $30,000 US in 1986 dropped to $4500 by 1994 when Pentium came out and the above average personal computer remained about $6000 US.  Many computer game reviewers like PC Accelerator went bankrupt in the 90 because the cost to play the top echelon of games each year required the most ram and the fastest CPU.  It cost $6000 a year to play any game at acceptable framerates between 1989 and 1996.  Between 1996 and and now the price has slower reached the lowest common denominator 

That's a lot higher than my memory and magazine ads at the time indicate.  I have no idea what an IBM PC cost in 1986, but my family bought a Tandy 1000SX at around that time which retailed for $1200.  When I bought my first computer (as in, with my own money) in 1996, a top of the line machine could be had for under $3000.  Still a lot pricier than today, but I can't say I ever saw anything being sold for $6000.  Which isn't to say that such expensive PCs didn't exist, but they certainly weren't necessary "to play any game at acceptable framerates between 1989 and 1996," as you say.

[Data]

It's was only the top echelon, I mean, you and I may have had a 386 between 1994 and 1997 but that computer wouldn't play Doom.  The 486! and Pentium I came out in this time.  The clock cycles increased 33 Mhz every 6 months with AMD chips right behind them.

Remember that in the late 80's and 90's the displays were very crude.  If you did not buy a new display almost every year, you would be wasting money on the rest  of the machine.  Monochrome displays were replaced by VGA in 1992 and SVGA replaced in 1995.  The RAM was always sold at the lowest  but to play the top games you needed  more ram.  Remember high level memory access in MS DOS before Windows 95?  An extra 64 MB of memory in 1994 was $500 US.  The monitors were between $500 and thousands and the operating system and audio card were another $450 US.

After tax, for a computer minus the printer and other upgrades was in the $6000 range.

This is May 1994 from PC Accelerator

November 1995

Dec 1996

December 1997

 

December 1998

December 1999

 

Or

If you go back and read computer game reviews from anyone honest will tell you what you need.  It aint cheap but I did embellish somewhat.  I assume a buyer would also buy a new printer and modem and either speaker or a CD Player or some software.

[kitsunebi]

My point was mainly that you didn't need those top of the line $4000 machines to play current games.  A $2000 machine would work perfectly well - but you're right, it didn't last long and less than a year later you'd need to upgrade again if you wanted to play new games.  Not sure how long you could go without upgrading if you bought a $4000 machine.  And I'm not including unnecessary stuff like extra RAM, upgraded speakers and software (other than OS) in the price.  Just computer (which depending on the year may include stuff like sound card, modem and CD-ROM drive) and monitor. 

I still don't know where this $6000 number is coming from.  I realize that crazy-expensive computers and overpriced "gaming rigs" from companies like Falcon Northwest and Alienware were (and still are) available, but to suggest that they were necessary, let alone common, just isn't true.  Every computer I or my family ever bought cost $2000 or less and had no problem running the newest games at the time it was bought (though as I said, the ability to run current software well didn't last long, and 6 months later you'd be cursing in dismay when looking at system specs of some new game you wanted to play.)  If the price tag had been $6000, I can guarantee you that neither my family nor any of my friends would have ever had a PC in the first place.