There are thousands of amazing older games that run on old hardware. Forget AAA and wade into your backlog or pull out some classic from gog or a yard sale.
Don't chase the high end, relax and start a game of CIV 4 or Anno 1404
this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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In the past 2 weeks, I've played Tie Fighter and Dune 2. Glad I had over the minimum 640 KB of RAM for Dune - it's pricey these days but worth it for a smoother experience!
Dune 2 was my favorite game as a kid. I tried to play it again couple of years ago and couldn't. The UI is so clunky and the graphics are pretty bad.
Brother, we’re pulling out paper and pencil to play tic tac toe with the price of electricity these days
You mean civ V. Hexagons are the bestagons!
Technically very much a AAA game though, four was the first one published by Take Two and after it came out they bought Firaxis
Bought the Shadowrun trilogy for $10 bucks on GoG. That’s gonna be my next adventure.
New shit can blow me.
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I feel like everything is being priced to where we aren't meant to have any savings.
The objective is to kill home computing :D (🤮)
Companies want unbounded exponential profits. Now guess where those profits are coming from.
spoiler
It's from squeezing every cent they can from regular people.
You can jump into backlog of older game titles. Its never late to discover GOG gems.
It is weird to see people obsess over the price of a new release AAA game when the classics tend to be better made, less buggy, have a bigger mod community, and much lower specs.
Go back and play the Halo series. The opening scene of the first game still gives me chills. Play Portal. And then play Portal 2.
Check out some old school RTS titles. Planetary Annihilation is a reworking of the old Total Annihilation game and absolutely stands up.
Go try some indies - Blue Prince or Slay the Spire or Darkest Dungeon.
There's no reason to spend more than $20 on a game anymore
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🏴☠️
How do you pirate RAM?
have you tried downloading more RAM
Well you say that as a joke, but back in the day this was a real thing. Not exactly downloading, because the internet wasn't really a thing back then, but using software to gain more ram.
I was a big fan of QEMM myself and had it in the original box with all the manuals and such. I already had a pirated version through the sneakernet, but got the original on sale as well. I still have that box somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM
At allowed DOS and other TSRs to be loaded into what's known as upper memory. This is the memory in between 640KB and 1MB. This area often wasn't used as it can't be accessed through regular addressing. Tools that need more memory could often address the space above 1MB and was designed for machines with 2 or 4MB (or more). As most games and other software was limited to 640KB it could be a pain in the ass to manage that memory. Often selectively not loading certain drivers at boot to leave enough memory for the more hungry software.
With QEMM this was no longer an issue, shoving a lot of stuff from below 640kb to above, leaving a lot of memory free all the time.
Later some of this was also implemented directly into DOS (I think MSDOS 5 but also other non MS OSes had this). Although I think by that point high memory was often used (the first little bit above 1M). But by that time most machines had more than 2MB of memory and games and other software often used all of the memory, not limited to 640KB. Software developers often used DOS extenders to act as middlemen where the software can access all of the ram without any complexity needed. The extender could just handle it without any issue and the developer could focus on their software instead of mundane things like memory access.
Note the often wrongly attributed 640KB quote of Bill Gates stems from the era. But he never said it and nobody thought that at the time. It wasn't even a real DOS limitation, more of an IBM architecture limitation. And that became the defacto standard which made it harder to fix.
Yeah, that's the reason I need more hard drives, which are fucking expensive!
I think know where this is going:
"NoBOdy wAnTs to BuY gAmeS AnYmORE"
Luckily there are loads of good indie games at low prices with low spec requirements
I get slightly bummed about this possible future, but then look at my crazy backlog from over the years and all of the old spare hardware I have kicking around. I could spend years just going back through emulators, let alone the literal thousand Steam titles built up and waiting to be rediscovered. Plus all the fan projects and indie studios that don't require frame gen as part of their base spec.
We'll be ok, we just may have to revisit the Old Ways a bit.
This is the reason I didn't know I was building that Steam backlog all along
We're forgetting food...
More Americans are skipping breakfast because it's not in the budget anymore
Bread and circuses are getting expensive. The emperor's throne is held by one who could never wield it's authority with the competence and loyalty of the one who built it. What year is it again?
Think of all global resources and all economies that slowly leave imperialism behind. Things must get more expensive without wages adjusting to give everybody their fair share.
I think consumer devices are slowly going to not exist. It will switch to screens that stream from the data centers.
I don't think it'll ever happen fully. There's waaaaaay too much money in selling even 1980s-tier hardware to individuals after a certain point.
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I basically don't buy games anymore. I started to get the free epic games 2 years ago and this got me like 200 games. I don't play much but when I want, I try a couple until I find something interesting. Playing Disco Elysium now.
picked up a steam deck as a piece of insurance a drew months ago.
it has simply become a darksouls 1 machine.
I love to hate it.
Aw shucks... Anyways, back to playing GunZ, runescape, and KOTOR for a third decade. Woo!
But really, even if you aren't stuck in 200X, there's plenty of good stuff out there
Everything inflated but my pockets
everything's going up except for my desire to continue living on this planet
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