Episode zero ideas?

1. End of the DOS era; Dawn of the new 32-bit Windows era. Reasons behind that, and consequences for gamers.

2. New possibilities with Win9x : DirectX, Consolidated drivers, Plug and Play. Fallback to DOS mode meant continuity wasn’t broken.

3. Pentium era, the PCI bus, the ATX system architecture. These strongly overlapped the roleout of Win9x and can be considered part of the same set of changes users experienced at that time.

4. Multimedia became a normal part of new system specs: 3D acceleration cards, sound cards, AC97, CDROMs, greater screen resolution with 16/24-bit colour modes.

5. Rapid changes in PC performance throughout these years. even a 1 year old PC could struggle with the latest games. 2 year old PC and you’re unable to play almost any new game. It was a hard and expensive hobby to stay relevant in those days… but that also made it exciting, seeing how much more your new hardware could do.

Maybe games that run in both MS-DOS and Windows. There are a couple, Command & Conquer Red Alert comes to mind.

Dunking on that other out-of-date Dos podcast?
/s 😀

Maybe outlining, if you’ve even decided, what era this will cover.. otherwise it’s an infinite podcast at the moment!

When I was musing about this concept in the past, I thought keeping the scope roughly to games that will work on the non-NT versions of Windows, ie 95, 98 and (shudder) Me, because they still rely on DOS to some degree and that will keep the connection to DOS game club. You could extend that to windows 3.x games too, except maybe DGC would be better off covering that.
Doesn’t mean you can’t pick games from the XP era, but they should at least work on 98.

As for episode 0, I’m thinking something similar to sorceress: a casual round-table discussion about the games that came with windows, eg solitaire, minesweeper, space cadet pinball etc. in the context of what it was like when 95 first came out, what we thought of this new OS, how things were now different to the days of DOS, etc etc

You can sign me up if you want!
My timezone is not friendly with US and Europe though, so if it doesn’t line up I’m happy to just send through a voicemail.