Wayback Wednesday: NBA Live 98 Demo on a 486

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m reminiscing about the time I tried to get the NBA Live 98 demo to run on my family’s aging 486 PC.

As a teenager in 1998, making do with a 486 DX2/66 IBM compatible PC, there were few things I wanted as much as a shiny new Pentium. I mean, I wanted the Chicago Bulls to be featured on the Game of the Week, to win as many games as possible, and ultimately, take home the NBA Championship. I wanted to stay up late on weekends to watch the NBA and WWF, and play games. I wanted to create rosters for NBA Live 96, and upload them to my Geocities site, the NBA Live Domain. There was a girl at school I wished I was more than friends with. But yes, I wanted a Pentium.

How did that turn out? Well, I got to see quite a few Bulls games that year, many of which they won, and of course they went on to win their sixth NBA title in June. I did fill my weekends with basketball, wrestling, and video games. I continued to hone my skills as a modder, and the NLD began to develop a small but dedicated following. The girl at school…well, let’s not bring the mood down, here! We also didn’t get a new PC until a couple of years later, which led to me attempting to run the NBA Live 98 demo on our rapidly aging 486. How did that go? Let’s take a look back…way back…

Reflecting on dial-up internet and computers of the late 90s makes me feel like my parents probably did when they told me about black and white TV. If all you know is a world where we can stream all manner of entertainment in high definition anywhere we want on handheld devices, I’m sure it’s impossible to imagine waiting an hour to download a video – and an extremely low-resolution video at that – on devices that have less power than what we now carry around in our pockets. Nowadays, we hope for higher system requirements, as an indication of superior tech. In the days of boot disks, we hoped for lower requirements, just so we’d have a chance of running games!

I suppose that still happens, but with the speed at which technology was improving in the late 90s, a PC bought for Christmas 1994 was outdated very quickly. These days, a good gaming rig can be built to last at least a few years and still perform well. If your family had a desktop back in the 90s, chances are it would play old games and be fine for word processing, internet, and email, but when it came to newer games, it usually wasn’t as future-proof as modern systems. Once Pentium processors, at least 16 MB of RAM (yes, that’s MB, not GB), and dedicated video cards became the standard system requirements, a 486 DX2/66 from 1994 just wasn’t going to cut it.

A boot disk might’ve been enough to get NBA Live 96 to run more efficiently on a 486, and even NBA Live 97 was playable with minimum settings. However, NBA Live 98 was out of the question. That required a 1 MB SVGA card – again, that’s MB, not GB – such as the fancy new Voodoo card from 3dfx. Our family PC didn’t have one of those, and I’m not sure if it had the capacity for one even if I’d known more about upgrading PCs at that time. Getting a new PC was out of the question, so I just had to make do with a system that had already experienced one hard drive failure. On the plus side, we’d upgraded from 8 MB to 16 MB of RAM, and installed Windows 95. We were connected to the internet, and I knew there was an NBA Live 98 demo.

At the time, I knew enough about computers to realise there was no point buying the full version of the NBA Live 98, as I wouldn’t be able to get it to run. However, I was already interested in tinkering and experimenting with computers, foreshadowing my future career in IT and computer repairs. In fact, that all began when I accidentally uninstalled the CD-ROM drive in our computer while my parents were out, leading to me scrambling to reinstall it before they got home (I got it working just as they were pulling in the driveway). As such, I figured there was no harm in downloading the NBA Live 98 demo, and seeing what would happen if I tried running it on our PC.

The NBA Live 98 demo – which is still available in our Downloads section – clocks in at 10.4 MB in size. On a modern broadband connection, it will download in seconds. On a dial-up connection – one that wasn’t even running at the maximum of 56 kbps – we’re talking at least a 45 minute wait, and most likely an hour. I began the download, went and amused myself with something else for a while, and eventually, it was done. I installed it, and fired it up. The NBA Live 98 demo consisted of a single exhibition game between the East and West All-Stars. I was full of anticipation as I assigned my controller and started a game. It was already going far better than I had expected it to.

That didn’t last very long. As I mentioned, NBA Live 98 required a dedicated SVGA card, and our PC didn’t have one. You might think that this would cause the demo to crash as soon as it tried to load into gameplay, which incidentally took a while with a 486 processor instead of the 100 MHz Pentium it required at the bare minimum. It did not. I do recall that PC supporting SVGA, so it clearly had enough power to try and render something. Without 3D acceleration and a dedicated card however, to say nothing of an outdated processor, the performance of that 486 was never going to be good enough to run the NBA Live 98 demo in anything resembling a playable state.

So, what did happen? The gameplay ran at about a frame per second. Actually, that’s being generous. It was more like one frame per thirty seconds, with a ton of skips in between; essentially, a bunch of freeze frames as the hardware desperately tried to render what was going on. I remember feeling more amused than disappointed. I didn’t know exactly what would happen – indeed, I’d been able to get further than I’d anticipated – but I knew that I would not be playing the NBA Live 98 demo on our 486. I couldn’t even pause and quit the demo, so I eventually resorted to a hard reset. I needed a Pentium for my future PC gaming, as if there’d ever been any doubt about it.

Once again though, that wouldn’t happen for a couple of years. We rode that 486 into the ground. Begging for a new PC became a running gag with my cousin when he came to visit in the holidays. We made do with our Houston Rockets season in NBA Live 95; a game that we could actually play, though for some reason I could never get the audio to work properly with that PC’s SoundBlaster card. We even invested in a Y2K fix for the BIOS, though it didn’t last too long into the year 2000. That led to us finally getting a new PC – a Pentium III, no less – and I took the opportunity to buy NBA Live 2000. I also bought NBA Live 98 and NBA Live 99, just to collect them.

Even though I now had the full versions and a PC that could run them, I actually went back and played both the NBA Live 98 and NBA Live 99 demos. There was a certain novelty in doing so, despite the fact I could obviously play the full games. I’d wished I’d been able to play those demos for a long time, and now I finally could. Reflecting upon it all these years later, it gave me a similar satisfaction to what I’ve experienced whenever I’ve collected a retro basketball game that I never played, and finally spent some time with it. It hasn’t needed to be the greatest experience I’ve ever had on the virtual hardwood. It’s just been interesting and fun to finally see what it’s all about.

Basketball video game demos are also nostalgic for me in general, because they’ve become a relic of a bygone era in gaming. Admittedly it hasn’t been that long since we’ve had a demo to sink our teeth into before the full game released, but the ones we’ve received in recent years just haven’t been the same. The NBA Live demos didn’t impress as much as the ones that came during the series’ Golden Age, or even the last few seventh generation games (the NBA Elite 11 demo not withstanding). Even the watered down NBA 2K demos on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were more like the demos of old, compared to the MyCAREER preludes and 2KU shootarounds.

Those old NBA Live demos are also nostalgic for the way they represent a special time in PC basketball gaming, when it was somewhat unique. Obviously modding is still generally restricted to the PC platform, but back then it was also the only version that could receive official patches, roster updates, and demos. NBA Live was the only series that came out annually on PC, and in many ways, the PC release was the best version of NBA Live until the consoles began catching up in power. Those titles are what our community were built upon, and I have fond memories of logging on to the NLSC to see bulletins regarding new mods, as well as news, previews, and demos.

Times have obviously changed, and while there are aspects of basketball gaming from the late 90s and early 2000s that I do miss, I’m grateful that I have hardware that can handle new releases. It’s unfortunate that demos are becoming a relic of the past, but when it comes to the PC version, I can at least compare my PC’s specs to the system requirements and know what to expect. It certainly won’t be a series of still images that updates every thirty seconds! Since leaving school and embarking on a career in IT, I’ve managed some tricky repairs and devised some creative solutions. However, none have been as amusing as trying to run the NBA Live 98 demo on our old 486.

The post Wayback Wednesday: NBA Live 98 Demo on a 486 appeared first on NLSC.