General Arcade and Retro Chat - Insert Coin -

Inviere wrote:

Fantastic place in its day, huge gaming selection.

Yeh, it was the first place I remember going as a kid to buy games. Got The Last Ninja 2 for C64 which came in a excellent and ridiculously big box for one tape cassette.

Andrew76

Inviere wrote: »

Fantastic place in its day, huge gaming selection.

A trip to town always had to include a visit to arcades and the Virgin Megastore, up the escalators and over to the gaming section. Try not to stare too long at the condom stand less the embarrassment kicks in. :pac:

Downstairs was mostly music iirc. Bought a few Guns N' Roses albums in there too. Appetite for Destruction on tape, Use Your Illusion 1&2 on LP.

Andrew76 wrote:

A trip to town always had to include a visit to arcades and the Virgin Megastore, up the escalators and over to the gaming section. Try not to stare too long at the condom stand less the embarrassment kicks in.

Kinda remember Clearys having a computer section, not as good as Virgin but still worth a look. I remember seeing Rise of the Robots on display there!

CiDeRmAn

Bracken3000 wrote: »

Kinda remember Clearys having a computer section, not as good as Virgin but still worth a look. I remember seeing Rise of the Robots on display there!

I recall seeing the Commodore CDTV there, being blown away by what turned out to be a prerender streaming from a CD.

Jerichoholic

The Megastore was heaven on earth for me, didn't get to Dublin much back then, but it had everything I could possibly want.

The Last Bandit

Bracken3000 wrote: »

Kinda remember Clearys having a computer section, not as good as Virgin but still worth a look. I remember seeing Rise of the Robots on display there!

Remember spending a fortune in there on a new sound card once, actually has a good enough selection of stuff.
Think I picked up a pair of shoes as well before heading home

Megastore was great for the old big box PC games, had heaps of them but sadly all got chucked out during a house move some years ago

The Last Bandit wrote:

Megastore was great for the old big box PC games, had heaps of them but sadly all got chucked out during a house move some years ago

I think the last boxed game I bought in the Megastore was Mortal Kombat for the Amiga, it was terrible.

Was the place upstairs in Clearys called Beyond 2000? They were originally downstairs in Easons if I recall correctly.

Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy wrote: »

I've never actually played Ape Escape, is it worth trying now? They played the 2ND one at GDQ but didn't watch it.

The first one might be a bit rough to play now, it's about as PS1 as you can get. The second one still looks great though.

[Deleted User]

The Last Bandit wrote: »

Remember spending a fortune in there on a new sound card once,:(

sound blaster 1.0 ?:P:P

The Last Bandit

BrownFinger wrote: »

sound blaster 1.0 ?:P:P

Think so

Massive Creative Labs yokes complete with IRQ hell to setup !!

I only realise now how god awful the SoundBlaster was until recently. The Gravis and Roland cards sounded so much better... although the Rolands would set you back the price of a new house at the time.

WeleaseWoderick

Was a frequent visitor to Virgin Megastore back in the 90's. My first memory of it was browsing the Amstrad games and wanting Bart vs the Space Mutants.

The shop used to have one of the best poster selections in Dublin too.

I also found this video of the opening day http://www.rte.ie/archives/2016/1201/835827-virgin-megastore-opens-in-dublin/

They had a great board game section as well. I even mentioned it in an interview with the Sunday Business Post a few weeks back.

Pretty neat looking C64 RPG game currently finishing up on Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stirringdragongames/unknown-realm-an-8bit-rpg-for-pc-and-commodore-64?ref=hero_thanks

Star Lord

Retr0gamer wrote: »

I only realise now how god awful the SoundBlaster was until recently. The Gravis and Roland cards sounded so much better... although the Rolands would set you back the price of a new house at the time.

When you are coming from pc speaker, the soundblaster was like a chorus of angels singing just for you... And sometimes just sounding wrong because it was so different to the pc speaker tune you were used to for that game!

CiDeRmAn

Remember that configuration screen, pressing the right number for your audio card before you got to the game.
You'd get to it after selecting the video mode, EGA/CGA/VGA/SVGA...
Good times!

I remember before the god like DOS/4GW.

Some games just wouldn't have the memory for sounds randomly.
Why?
Who knows it was completely random if they had the memory or not. You'd have to reset the PC 3 or 4 times to get sound in Wolf 3D.

And now we live in an age where consoles are getting more complex than a PC

CiDeRmAn

Optimized for Win95!

was in it's nards!

Direct X Sir?
Update Sir?

Noooo!!!!
Just install ffs!

Ah the horrors of the original directX.

'Hi I'm directX and I'll make games run faster on windows95. While I'm installing why don't I uninstall your graphics card drivers and myself in their place. It will only take 5 hours and a call to gateway support to get rid of me!'

Retr0gamer wrote:

'Hi I'm directX and I'll make games run faster on windows95. While I'm installing why don't I uninstall your graphics card drivers and myself in their place. It will only take 5 hours and a call to gateway support to get rid of me!'

Worked in Gateway when I finished school. I doubt you got much support, they were a useless bunch of monkeys that ran the place.

I applied for a job there and didn't get it. So they had some standards.

Gremlinertia wrote:

Have you asked your gp for a referral to a local mental health services?.

DinoRex wrote:

I applied for a job there and didn't get it. So they had some standards.

Maybe you were over qualified! :-) The place must be closed a good few years now.

YourSuperior

Back around 2001-02 I got the Rainbow Six Collector's Edition at Virgin Megastore. It had the orginal game, Rogue Spear + all the mission packs and Covert Ops. It included a mouse pad and a poster! Plus a CD detailing the history of terrorism, the psychology of terrorists along with counter-terrorism tactics. It was all very new to me; that type of thing. I was glued to the PC for months. One of the best computer game purchases I ever made.