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to me it sounds like you have some kind of a midlife crisis.



Probably .

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there are a lot of exciting and adventurous things happening now. people share more ideas and code than ever before. since the communities were smaller back then maybe they felt more personal?



It could be. I might also have felt different for a few reasons that come to mind: 1) it was all new to me, so I am sure I approached it differently than I do know and 2) there were a lot less people trying to make money from it or making a living doing it (i.e. not many were experts).

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and some things you mention are quite wrong. like:

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You did not have to worry about the variety of hardware that we do today (i.e. no one had 3D video cards, etc)

maybe doug can say more about this but as far as i know back then it was a lot worse than now. in times of DOS the programmers couldn't simply target directx but had to support and write separate code for a lot of different sound cards, 2d graphics chips,... themselves.



Doug already talked about this, but one thing that we need to remember is many of the different video cards were accessed via the same "generic" VESA or UniVBE driver (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE).

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Dan: If you are missing low-level programming, check out the Cell processor. Not exactly the same thing, but it reminds me a lot of the good-old-days.



Argh! No! I don't program. I do graphics .

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and what about graphics chips? some games (i don't remember which ones but i think simcity 2000 was among them) started installation with a list of graphics chips you had to choose from if you wanted to use resolutions higher than 320x200 and more than 16 colors. later more and more graphics chips supported the vesa standard.



If you are talking about SimCity 2000 (or any of the other SimCity games) then you are already talking about something much newer than what I was talking about. In any case, most of the games seemed to rely on VESA or UniVBE, as I mentioned above. There were really only a few video cards and, as pointed out previously, they were not 3D cards.

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i think the novelty of games like doom is a bit exaggerated. there were realtime 3d games long before and when computers became fast enough to do things like texture mapping the logical progression happened.



First of all, DOOM was not 3D at all (though I understand that some have tried to say the opposite). DOOM was a raycasting engine. As such, the levels were developed completely in a 2D, top-down mode. A ray was cast from the players perspective and, when it intersected a boundary, a "wall" was projected vertically. The wall had no thickness. DOOM was technically a 2D game that fooled you into thinking it was 3D. Even the monsters were 2D sprites (and basically the walls were as well). For this reason, DOOM broke the mold. Real-time 3D games followed and further defined the genre.

While other real-time 3D engines may have been there before DOOM/QUAKE, etc, DOOM is the one most recognize because it was successful on so many levels. I don't think DOOM's contribution to 3D gaming is exaggerated.

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