What I totally don't miss is the time when there was no free saving in games. Only some checkpoints (or passcodes) for certain positions in the game.

...What do you say? There are still games being produced that don't have free saving? Didn't the devs learn anything over the past 30 years?

Under MS DOS: the need to setup boot disks, juggling memory, setting up sound cards.

Also: user interfaces and steering setups that were second nature back in the day, but are hard to getting used again nowadays.

Yes, plenty of them still have only 1 auto-save. Not to mention games saving in Windows registry! :/

I forgot something:
joystick calibrations...

There for something WAY easier nowadays.

Well, at least one has to do it only once nowadays. Back then every game had it's own routine with sometimes different results. It was just frustrating when a fighter didn't react in the way it was supposed to.

Depends on what kind of games you play. I have more modern(ish) games without free saving than old ones - but all in all not that many.

Low screen resolutions.

All the other stuff (limited number of save slots with checkpoint saves, painfully long loading times, etc.) has made a comeback.

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In the original Serious Sam you could choose between red blood, green blood or flowers.

-Game speed being tied to processor cycles
-Not being able to easily patch games
-physical distribution media
-easy modes that punish you for playing them
-walking dead scenarios with no warning
-win & end the game
-games being monetized on hints or walkthroughs

Code sheets and having to look things up in the manual as disguised copy protection.

CDs. A fragile and irritating format that while larger, was often wasted potential. Having to keep the CD running often lead to early wear.

Mascot/Mascot killer games, the insane claim that something would be the next Mario or Mario Killer. The only infamy they gleaned was their absolute failure; they're otherwise so forgettable that I can't glean any specific examples.
Don't forget about the competing 'standards'! Did you have a Kempston? Sinclair? Atari? Well too bad, none of them are compatible between each other even though they had the same lead and pin out.

Edit: Ah, right: Mazes without automaps/autoexplore. Thank goodness for GameFAQs or GameAtlas. Especially in games of the 8 bit era where the tilesets were often just the same shade of blue.

That is why I bought GOG games.
I do not have to adjust the DOSBox config myself.

If the game had to have any DRM I would prefer physical one (like words from manual or some lenslock). Digital/online one is the worst one because:
a) I am not always online
b) developers / servers can go off
c) it can cause some slowdowns / troubles

Manuals. MANUALS. I just LOVE manuals. I still remember when I got my boxed edition of Microprose's Magic the Gathering and it had a few hundreds pages manual included. It was so fun reading it and learn how to play the game! Now I miss manuals so much. :(

What I not miss?

- Infinite loading times, like on the C-64/C-128. It could take easily 20 - 30 minutes to load a game from Diskette.

- Permadeath because of no save function! Oh, wait: some idiots brought this crap back into computer games.

- Only one difficulty, which was often too difficult. Nowadays most games give you more possibillities to choose exactly the difficulty you want.

But there are still things I love about old games, like the thing that a game ran on your computer, and you were not forced to install patches or find some super complicated workarounds to make your game work on your computer.

Oh, and one thing I hated in the DOS era: Some games I couldn`t bring to work, no mater what I changed in the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. I remember one game (but not the title of it) which I was never able to play, because it wasn`t possible to free enuff base system memory for it (the first 640 KB of your computer).

Sounds like you've never played Dune 2 in MS-DOS. :-P

edit: I just saw your edit... never mind!!