When did PC gaming start to make an impact in Europe?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Aladin

Were protections as common on PC as on Amiga? (To find out if the number of game sales is representative of the number of players).

Manual protection was pretty much the same, but I would say that physical protection on floppy disks was less common on the PC. I mean you could just install the game to a hard drive anyway.

[Aladin]

I asked because I remember that in games in 1989, we often photocopied protection codes and that there was no cracktro. But that didn't stop the games from being copied. And I didn't have a hard drive, just two 5 1/4 drives

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Aladin

I asked because I remember that in games in 1989, we often photocopied protection codes and that there was no cracktro. But that didn't stop the games from being copied. And I didn't have a hard drive, just two 5 1/4 drives

That's a fair point. In the 80s I guess there were more physically protected games (but like you said some form of protection codes was far more common). Once a hard drive install is possible it makes far less sense to protect the actual media the game is delivered on.

[donnie]

Pc where insanely expensive. When we bought our first family pc it cost something like 16000 sek, that is probably 4000 euros today.

before 94,95 id say most if not all pc were work pcs. People around me started buying pc around 94-95 for family or gaming purposes. This is also when svga, cdroms, sound cards were standard.

[TCD]

This is an ad from the German magazine Power Play from June 1992:

Two points:
1) It is bundled with Monkey Island II.
2) That sure doesn't look like a work PC to me.

[donnie]

thats one nice looking pc.

[TCD]

I just entered the price into one of those 'inflation calculators' and the 2,999 DM from 1992 would be 2.945,35 € today.

[donnie]

I think those inflation numbers are off. I check one of the swedish inflation calculators and it said the same thing. 16k sek was more than a months salary.

even so. 2945 euros is not a mass market price.

We have to take in to account that in 92 the average gamer was a kid without an disposable income. The first generation mainstream gamers where just hitting 20.

Today the average gamer is probably around 35-40.

[Megalomaniac]

So £1, $1 and €1 in today's prices all roughly equal 1DM in 1992 prices, within maybe 10%. I'll try to remember that. But yet, PCs weren't truly affordable for the average gamer even in the mid-1990s. For a lot of us it was probably more a case of persuading dad that we'd used it for serious stuff as well? Even an A500 was over £1000 in today's money for most of its lifespan.

Having On-disk copy protection meant improved performance if you accessed the hardware directly perhaps using non-standard trickery, but it also meant a game not being hard drive installable. On the PC where machines came with hard drives by the late 1980s, and disk-access-heavy genres like sims, strategy and especially adventures dominated at that time, point 2 mattered a lot more than point 1. On the Amiga, where even small hard drives cost more than the entire A500 (the A600 and A1200 changed this slightly) and action games were at least as big as sims / strategy / adventure, point 1 mattered more. Maybe the proportion of pirated copies to bought games was higher on the Amiga than the PC too?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

For a lot of us it was probably more a case of persuading dad that we'd used it for serious stuff as well?

That was surely the case. It is just important to note that gaming PCs were a thing as early as 1992 and not only after Doom was released.

[CCCP alert]

I did actually have to buy a PC for university work in 1992-1996. I couldn't find a PPC native Amiga based emulator that I could run Windows 3.1 etc so I bought a 486 25mhz PC.

Once I got to university I found that the disk swapping scene on PC was much worse than Amiga, I got anything I wanted and tried loads of stuff out but I guess the real eye opener was that PC Mortal Kombat and SF2 was better than on my Amiga 1200 so I guess that would be the start of it. Stuff like Lemmings or Gauntlet 2 was not really any better though and Lotus III didn't run faster than on my A1200 I got the same month (Oct 92).

As I abhorred point and click or anything that wasn't remotely arcade quality my experience is going to be different as most of the 'good' DOS games were VGA simple screen manipulation type things around 92/93.

IIRC F1GP on Amiga was frame locked so even on an A4000/040 it wouldn't match the 22fps I was getting on the DOS version on my 486 which naturally like most PC games was not frame locked in any way.

[Megalomaniac]

Obviously you're comparing unmodified code designed for a 7Mhz A500 to code designed for a 25Mhz 486 PC, but from a technical point of view I'd say an A500 still outdoes a low-end 486 for 2D action games, aside from colour depth. What else did you check out on the PC in that time frame though? Wolfenstein 3D, Commanche, Strike Commander, Indycar Racing, Alone In the Dark, X-Wing, Lands of Lore, Ultima Underworld (1 and 2)? Plenty of games that weren't 2D action or point and click that were making headlines at that time, and should play well on a 25Mhz 486. Realistically, even a stock A1200 (perhaps even with fast RAM) would struggle to make perfect imitations of most of those playable, especially from floppies.

[petran]

I'd also add that some countries, especially in north Europe, were very strict about allowing 12-13 year olds in arcades. I do not mean the ones at funfare parks but the regular ones. They were strictly for adults. So there was no other way to play such games except the watered down computer and console versions. While in Greece for example arcade owners would often turn a blind eye and even let elementary school kids play.
This was huge because arcades were still cheap and not everyone had money for a console and it's expensive games. This way there was no need to buy a console or even PC as you could just visit your local arcade.

One reason PCs were still low. Eg when the first dial up attempts were made in the late 90s, in Greece at least only 3% had Internet access, which shows the number of households with PCs. The numbers started to gradually increase with each year after this.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Obviously you're comparing unmodified code designed for a 7Mhz A500 to code designed for a 25Mhz 486 PC, but from a technical point of view I'd say an A500 still outdoes a low-end 486 for 2D action games, aside from colour depth. What else did you check out on the PC in that time frame though? Wolfenstein 3D, Commanche, Strike Commander, Indycar Racing, Alone In the Dark, X-Wing, Lands of Lore, Ultima Underworld (1 and 2)? Plenty of games that weren't 2D action or point and click that were making headlines at that time, and should play well on a 25Mhz 486. Realistically, even a stock A1200 (perhaps even with fast RAM) would struggle to make perfect imitations of most of those playable, especially from floppies.

I have never tried it on any Amiga but I know there is a patch that unlocks the frame limiting aspect of the code of F1GP so it will run faster with upgraded/faster Amigas. My point was just that the Amiga version of the game runs at the same speed on A1000 to A4000/040 which is an odd thing to do for a polygon game and makes no sense really and was really a bad time for that to happen. By contrast if you play Simulcra, Virus and Hard Drivin on an A1200 they are much smoother than A500 spec machines. Even so, in 1992 I believe the A4000/040 was £2000+sales tax and that was really the difference, whilst super smooth Lotus III on A1200 or even 1989 Shadow of the Beast on A500 etc was not as smooth/not possible on a 25mhz 486 of 1992 but Actua Soccer is impossible on an A1200 or even something like an A4000/030 spec and that was really the crossover point I remember, when I had my 486 and A1200 in 92-94 it was a bit like my C64 vs Atari ST in 1986-87, each did some game genres better so both got used.

Even with an A4000/030 you wouldn't get much better than the Apollo/Blizzard 1220 28mhz 020 trapdoor card with fast ram type speeds, and Frontier doesn't have a texture map option on Amiga like it did on DOS etc. Stuff like that really is what I remember. The C64 never went back in the box until after I got an Amiga, with PC vs Amiga...it didn't really happen, the A1200 got packed away in 95 when I got a PS1 and Ridge Racer. Once I finished University course I sold my PC in 1996 and didn't get another one until fixed rate unlimited use internet was an option (2001?). Battlefield 2 is the only game I can think of that is only worth playing on PC vs anything else (the Xbox 360 version was some side port nothing like the PC Windows release in reality).

Before 1992 and before 486 I wouldn't even bother with DOS/Windows games personally, they were of zero interest to me compared to Amiga or MD/SNES/PCE options I had by then. Before texture mapped 3D like 3DO Need for Speed level I wasn't really interested anyway, that goes for Starwing/Virtua Racing/Starglider 2 etc so maybe for other people it was earlier. I do remember playing Actua Soccer on my 486 though, which was a taste of things to come I guess.

I had hundreds of cracked games for 486 PC(alone in the dark/wolf/doom/Lotus III/Frontier/F1GP/Sam n Max/SF2/MK/Zool etc), even more than the massive stacks of Amiga cracks I had collected already. Don't remember a lot about that time really though but if it was in the PC gaming charts my friend had a cracked copy of it to give me in exchange for helping him do his SQL segment of his degree course lol. Never mind boozing and smoking doobies, University was an utter pirate central zone, hell I even got ST game cracks too not just Amiga or PC.