What are some of the longest loading times you've had with dos-win98 games?

Haven't played many 8086/286 games but they all seem to load really quickly. I thought there might be some old dos games that take nearly as long as c64 tapes/disks to load. The lengthy load times on todays' AAA titles made me wonder about what the state of affairs was like up until about the '98 era.

Eradicator has unusually long load times on my DOS PC. Hard drive access on it can be a little sluggish to begin with, but on that game it's on another level.

Yeah, I remember that game taking ages to load.

I'd have to say either Doom II or Hexen.

To clarify, it took a while for my old Windows 95 system to boot up Doom II, and it took even longer to load each Doom II level. Same story for Hexen (I forgot if this was on Windows 95 or 98 though).
For shareware Doom, that was a different story... the levels loaded up rather quickly!

Thief levels took ages to load up at first. Consequent quicksaves/loads were fast, but the initial startup was glacial.

HavoX said:

I'd have to say either Doom II or Hexen.

To clarify, it took a while for my old Windows 95 system to boot up Doom II, and it took even longer to load each Doom II level. Same story for Hexen (I forgot if this was on Windows 95 or 98 though).
For shareware Doom, that was a different story... the levels loaded up rather quickly!

What kind pc you had with Win95??? Because even since Dos days i had fast load with Doom games.
Quake was a little Slow to load but not that much.

To be honest i didn't had any issue during the Dos - Win98 Era. Had some issues with loading early with XP, because most game asked for more ram, issues with Vista for the same reasson. No issues with 7,8,10

Wild Dog said:

What kind pc you had with Win95???

I'm not sure. I was young and didn't know much about PCs back then.

Hexen loaded fast on my dad's Pentium-150. This wasn't true of my neighbour's much cheaper PC. It was glacial on there. We got to hear the whole music track for the the loading screen. One time he got impatient when it looked like the game didn't start and he clicked it a bunch of times. Several copies of Hexen loaded even more slowly. It was surprising something didn't crash.

I don't remember having really long load times for any of my own games until Tiberian Sun came out. Red Alert 2 and Half-Life were pretty bad too, unless you had a Pentium-III and a pile of RAM.

Bedlam took minutes to load on Win95. Doom and the others were fine.

Aliotroph? said:

Hexen loaded fast on my dad's Pentium-150. This wasn't true of my neighbour's much cheaper PC. It was glacial on there. We got to hear the whole music track for the the loading screen. One time he got impatient when it looked like the game didn't start and he clicked it a bunch of times. Several copies of Hexen loaded even more slowly. It was surprising something didn't crash.

I don't remember having really long load times for any of my own games until Tiberian Sun came out. Red Alert 2 and Half-Life were pretty bad too, unless you had a Pentium-III and a pile of RAM.

What???? Half-Life pretty bad? I'm an AMD lover even if i know they are not the best.

I was playing Half Life "Won" with an AMD K6-2 and the game was quite fast when it came to load times. That AMD K6-2 was worst than a Pentium 2, it was barely better than a Pentium 1.....


One of the worst load time i ever had was with Operation Flashpoint, but that is an Xp game.

Simcity 4 with a lot of mods. I thought the mods had frozen the loading process until one day I left it running while I did something else. Lo and behold it was just really, really slow.

Doom took about 30-60 seconds to load on my 486, even longer with some pwads. Had only 4 MB memory and 33 MHz cpu.
By far the worst loading times were some Amiga floppy games, where you had to swap a couple disks to even start the game. Even the 8-bit computers I used weren't as slow, but then again they loaded much less data from disk.
A properly coded Amiga game could load fast too. The holy grail was to fit your game on a single floppy and have short loading times. The most impressive example I can think of is Faery Tale Adventure. It's a game with a huge world map you can wander around in, and it won't all fit in memory (game is from 1987 and was designed to run on stock 512k Amiga 500). So they got around that by dividing the map into sections, and when you get towards the edge of one section, it preloads the adjacent one, so play is seamless. It probably helped that the Amiga could do I/O in background without need for much CPU.

Aquanet said:

Simcity 4 with a lot of mods. I thought the mods had frozen the loading process until one day I left it running while I did something else. Lo and behold it was just really, really slow.

You might want to try it again now if you have a late model computer, I knew 12 years ago that it would finally run smoothly in the future, and that future is now.

I remember Dark Forces taking its sweet time on occasion.