i was still quite young back then but i vaguely remember lists with "s3, trident, cirrus logic,..." you had to choose from and most of the time the graphics card i had caused troubles. later it got better with VESA but sometimes there still were problems and you had to play around with software like display doctor.

and at the time of quake 1 the first 3d-accelerators came up and this really was a mess with proprietary 3d apis like speedy3d and glide.

so i don't really believe that times were better in this regard. except if that is what you mean with adventurous.



i also heard from programmers that DOS development was a pain. all this dos-extender stuff, bad debugging solutions,... didn't carmack use some very expensive NeXT machine for development and always cross compile to DOS since DOS was too crappy to work with? for most bedroom or garage developers a $10k NeXT box wasn't really affordable.