Thank god we've moved on from the old days...or not

Back in 1996 when I was the owner of a 486DX2 personal computer (mind you at this point everybody else had their Pentium level processor) a lot of the games required DOS.

And of course, it required you to either exit out of Windows 95 into DOS mode or create a DOS shell in Windows itself (the former was usually best)

I had for it, under the White Label budget selection of games, Sim City Enhanced CD-Rom. Installing was a cakewalk and soon after that I was lost in a blizzard of metropolis management and live action videos, which even impressed my parents on how far computing had come.

The 486 handled it perfectly, no bugs or crashes. Life was good.

Until one day, it inexplicably was unable to run because of a lack of "conventional memory" and to shunt some programs and executable files into higher memory to free up more conventional.

My know-how of programming was a case of rudimentary basic but after looking into how to operate Microsoft Edit, I tried time after time to free up memory (and reinstalling the game itself now and again to see if that worked) But nothing. And there it remained gathering dust.

I later bought other titles such as Dark Forces, X-Com Terror From The Deep and Civilization/Worms. They all ran pretty much as well as could be expected with the odd glitch now and again but had an easier time as none of them had memory issues. Command and Conquer outright failed on my later custom built Pentium 90 because of "DirectX issues" but worked fine on the recently purchase Gateway Pentium 2 machine in our study

Today I still find that buying a PC game is a universe apart from picking up console titles. It still feels like a gamble regardless of what the system requirements are and you keep wondering to yourself "Is the game itself running as it should be on my machine?" or "Should I be experiencing slowdown at this point? Is it my machine's fault or the game?" That last one is something I've wondered when playing Rainbow Six Vegas or The Sims on this game-prepared machine.

Thankfully the systemrequirements.com website will tell me in advance if a title is capable of running and 99% of the time it is correct.

But sometimes I do wonder...