foone

ICQ was particularly bad for this because it didn't have screennames, it just had numbers. So sometimes people would random-dial a bunch of numbers into their contact list, and then if any of them were online, they'd just send them a message.

we were very bored in 1997, if you didn't notice

of all those old chatters, it's the only one still around. AIM: Shut down in 2017 MSN: Shut down in 2013 (Worldwide) & 2014 (China) Yahoo: Shut down in 2018 Google Talk: Shut down in 2015 ICQ: STILL ALIVE IN 2020, BABY!

ICQ launched in 1996, was bought by AOL in 1998, then split back off in 2010 when it was sold to Digital Sky Technologies, later known as the Mail .Ru Group. They still run it.

BTW, remember the first time you were playing a fullscreen 3D game and someone sent you an AIM/ICQ message, which switched you out of the game... And the game then crashed when you tried to alt-tab back into it?

DirectX has (or maybe had, I haven't looked at it since Windows 98) a thing where if you switch video modes, it loses the context. This means the game has to be ready to reload the video configuration + textures at any point, since it could be easily lost.

and a lot of games, especially early on, did not do this correctly (or at all) So you'd alt-tab out (or get forced out by ICQ windows) and the game would suddenly find itself with no graphical context and fail to handle that error properly

I think OpenGL didn't have this problem, but what that meant was that the drivers for your video card had to be ready to reload all that info themselves.

So I think the idea with DirectX was that by not requiring drivers to be able to restore context, it made for thinner, simpler drivers, which possibly meant more performance over OpenGL.

But the side-effect was that games had to be ready to handle reloading all that stuff, and to handle crashing out of the render loop at any point, because the render context just went away.

This is also why the windows key was such a disaster in the early days of Win95 gaming: accidentally hitting it would often pop up the start menu, and then the game crashes because it lost the context.

Games could tell the OS to temporarily disable the key while in fullscreen, but a lot of them didn't. Or they'd disable the windows key but fail to disable alt-tab.

I definitely had at least one keyboard where I'd manage to damage the keycap for the windows key, because I'd often pry it off (usually with a flathead screwdriver) before going into a big gaming session

I also did the same with the Escape key, because of playing Star Wars:Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight multiplayer. It used a lot of F1-F4 keys to trigger spells, but Escape brought up the main menu.

Which was a problem because menu always ran in 2D mode, at 640x480. So if you had a Voodoo 2 and were running the game at 1024x768, it meant hitting escape had to both switch video cards and screen resolutions.

And my monitor was VERY slow at changing screen resolutions. The 3DFX card is a little faster at switching itself on and off, but it still takes time.

So if you hit escape: 1. 3DFX card turns off 2. Screen switches to 640x480 3. You click "back to game" 4. 3DFX card turns on 5. Screen switches back to 1024x768

Great! Now you're back. And you're staring at the "YOU DIED" screen because you were motionless for the last 10 seconds, idiot.

So I started prying the ESC key off before I went into multiplayer. Eventually I destroyed the clips that held it in, so every time I picked up my keyboard for any reason, Escape would go flying off and I'd have to root around under my desk to find it .

The 90s were a very different, weird, and stupid time.

The Voodoo 2 isn't like... digitizing the VGA output of the 2D card and then re-outputting it. It's literally just an analog passthrough, with the card completely idle.

The Voodoo 2 can't even overlay 3D on top of the 2D display! If you want to draw anything 2D while in 3D mode, you have to emulate it with 3D drawing effects.

So every time I hit "RUN GAME" I'd have to go through that slow 3DFX-turn-on monitor-change-resolution cycle. So I had the brilliant idea of borrowing a monitor off my brother's computer, and hooking it up to the 3D-out of my 3DFX card, and plugging my monitor into my 2D card

So now I had DUAL MONITOR SETUP! on a Windows 98 machine. It was just that one monitor was always the 2D stuff, and the other one was the 3D stuff. So when I hit RUN GAME the other monitor would start showing 3D graphics, instantly, because it was still ready.

This also answered something I'd wondered for a while: When you switch on a 3DFX game, what's the 2D card doing? Is it just black, or displaying gibberish? You can't see it, because the 3DFX card has taken over.

The answer (at least for Unreal) was pretty boring: Exactly what it was showing before the game launched. Basically the 2D display keeps showing UnrealEd, because that's what it was last told to display.