yyahoo: I recall VESA being a lot more common than that. I haven't played GOG's version, but I remember that the original Pirates Gold (the version from 1993) used VESA... Ah, and I was able to find the tech card from my personal copy. Yup, it used VESA if it couldn't specifically recognize the video card in your PC (which was much, much more likely of an event way back in 1993 before 3D graphics cards were used). IIRC, I had to install and use VESA on my PC at the time. It was a headache too. As much as I love games of those days, I will not miss stuff like VESA and extended memory managers, and having to create a unique, alternate autoexec.bat and config.sys for nearly every single game I wanted to play. God bless DOSbox!
You're probably right. I didn't own my first computer until Windows 95 was already an option, and most virtual drivers for the
DOS programs to run were fairly good, so I didn't need to do anything too special. Then again I didn't have many games either; Although I do remember there were some games that just had to be played outside of windows with all the dedicated memory (
8-16Megs at most) so you had boot disks or could reboot into special modes for games.
God, I remember seeing Jazz the JackRabbit demo thinking it was awesome, and having access to QBasic and doing small simple programs... feel like 20 years just rushed by me...