Golf Sim Clubhouse Forum

In the excitement of making the first post in the JNSE forum I thought I’d start a general post to see how people got interested in any of the Jack Nicklaus series of games (not necessarily just JNSE)…

I started playing sports games in the summer of 1988 when I got a 1541 disk drive for my Commodore 64 for my birthday as most games were now coming on disk versus a cartridge. As far as golf games, I started out playing Leaderboard on a Commodore 64 at my cousins’ house and liked it so much I got I bought Jack Nicklaus' Greatest 18 Holes of Major Championship Golf. The former was more realistic for putting and the latter more realistic for the rest of the course and scenery. I scooped up all the course disks I could for the game - the 1991 disk was never made for Commodore 64 and the most treasured one was the 1990 disk as I wanted to see St. Andrews on Jack Nicklaus vs. Leaderboard (it was also the hardest for me to find as they were phasing out Commodore games in the USA - in fact the copy I have was the only one I ever found in a store).

After I got a Windows 95 computer after graduating with my Master’s degree and starting full-time work I bought JN5. I played it once and some parts of it seemed so frustrating which immediately led me to think I would never learn to do well at the game and so I never played again. The power bar seemed harder to judge using the mouse clicks than with a fire button in Greatest 18. After looking around at computer shows I found someone that was selling copies of JNSE where the power bar was the same as Greatest 18. I played it for a few years until my computer died, got a new computer and was so busy with work (working on items related to 9/11) that computer golf went by the wayside for other games.

With the bizarre year that 2020 was, and seeing how golf was rearranging their schedule due to the pandemic, I got the itch to play golf on the computer again. With the U.S. Open in September and finding a file for Winged Foot I loaded JNSE on my laptop and started teeing off again. This was short lived but living in Wisconsin and with winter fully upon us I started picking things up again at the end of January/beginning of February.

I have tried playing golf in real life but stopped after taking the lessons just over 20 years ago and struggling with the proper grip etc. However I enjoy playing it on the computer. I hope we can get some other JNSE lovers involved in the forum as it would be great to interact with more people. I’ve already met a few great people including BrianZ and Fred who runs the Play with the Pros (PwP) Tour and are the impetus for getting JNSE items loaded here.

Yeah, hopefully there are a few more people out there who want to talk about this game or any of the really old ones.

I can’t be 100% sure but I believe Jack Nicklaus' Greatest 18 Holes of Major Championship Golf was my first experience with a golf video game. My friend had an original Nintendo and we would play a golf game sometimes and I think that was it. We’re talking around 1989 or 1990 and I was only 5 or 6 years old at the time so it’s pretty hard for me to remember for sure. I don’t think my friend was ever too excited about golf though, it was more like once in a while I convinced him to play it. We played way more Mario Bros. 1 and 3 then anything else.

I got the SNES for Christmas of '90 when it first came out. With friends it was still mostly playing Mario, now Super Mario World, but I got Hal’s Hole In One Golf with it and could play it whenever I wanted to. It wasn’t a particularly notable golf game, my parents got me it with the SNES and it was probably the only golf game available at launch of the SNES. Later I got The Irem Skins Game, and I frequently rented but never got True Golf Classics: Pebble Beach Golf Links. I think the reason was we were never able to find it in the store to buy it. Times have changed. There was a version of Jack Nicklaus for SNES but I never played it. I think the Pebble Beach game was the best of the bunch but I may think more highly of it because having not owned it, I couldn’t overplay it. All of these games suffered from lacking replay value due to there being only one course you could play on them.

We got our first computer in 1995, an IBM Aptiva just after Windows 95 came out, and it came with JNSE. I became a PC gamer pretty much from the moment we got the computer and never looked back to consoles again. The depth of what you could do with PC gaming was beyond compare because of how you could customize your playing experience and eventually I got into full-fledged modding of games. For JNSE it mostly meant creating courses. I was 11 or 12 years old at the time so not much notable came out of this time period in course design for me. It was more like experimentation and formative years.

My version actually came with about six stock courses from what I remember. It included some courses that were a part of some kind of designer contest that Accolade sponsored. You could edit any course in this game and I remember being upset with myself for wrecking one of those design contest stock courses. It was years before I was able to restore it because the computer didn’t come with the game’s original disks, only a computer wide restore disk that I didn’t know how to use.

We didn’t get the internet until late ’96 or early ’97. The first site I ever landed on for JNSE was Dave Honan’s which is why I still have his page archived in my links. I distinctly remember the struggle to figure out how to get a course from his site to load. The barrier was the dreaded zip file. It seemed like a long time but this was kid time so it was probably only a couple days or a week. I still remember figuring out how to use PKZip was a real ah ha moment though.

The second JNSE site I ever ran into was Brian Silvernial’s, and the second course I ever got off the internet was Cypress Point. This was a real step up from the courses I previously played. It is up there at the top in wow factor on first play of any course for me because he did things I didn’t know were possible like changing the color palette and the course was just overall great. It made quite an impression. The fact that I'm now friends with him and play regular online golf games with him, staring about 10 years after that, and got to meet him in person about 20 years after that, is still a pretty cool thing to me that I never would have imagined then.

I also was big into racing and racing games and got hooked on the Papyrus NASCAR and IndyCar racing simulations which were published by Sierra. It was through the ads about other games that they include in the box with games you buy that I found out about Sierra publishing its first golf game, Front Page Sports: Golf. If not for that I may have stuck with the Jack Nicklaus series but I never bought the later games, instead I got FPS: Golf when it first came out in ’97 (which eventually became the PGA series) and the mouse swing had me hooked. However FPS: Golf didn’t have a course designer so I continued on with JNSE alongside it. I ended up playing JNSE fairly regularly from 1995 until 1999 when PGA ’99 came out as the first version of that series that had a course designer. I had some unfinished work in JNSE that I finished up in the year 2000 before I fully converted over to PGA '99 and PGA 2000.

I had JNSE running in DosBox on my XP machine and would play it a few times a year until late 2009 when I retired that PC and built a new computer with Windows 7. Amazingly I’m still running that PC. It used to be a new PC every 5 years before that but this was my first self built PC and I built it top of the line. The games since then haven't pushed the hardware like they used to, so I haven't felt the need to upgrade other than a video card I got from a friend about 4 years ago. Anyway, JNSE never got up and running on this computer so I haven't played it since 2009. I'd like to get it up and running again someday when I have time though.

Those are some cool stories Brian! I especially liked the one about Brian Silvernail since I have always enjoyed playing his JNSE courses.

A quick download of DOSBox and your JNSE game files and you'll be ready to go! Thank you for putting the courses you had in a link so I could retrieve them. I will definitely be playing some of those.

No problem, happy to send you the courses I had. For some reason it seemed like it was a little bit of a pain to get DosBox up and running from my memory but that was 2004 when I set it up on the old XP computer so things have probably changed a lot since then. I also had about 20 DOS games running on it so maybe that's why it was a pain and it wouldn't be too hard to just get JNSE running. I will make some time to get it running on my computer sometime in the not too distant future.

Below are my first 2 golf games and my first golf game hardware.
The Gameboy is what got me interested in golf games back in 1994.
I've recently started using the Gameboy again. I have kept it as new. It is my actual Gameboy and games pictured below.

Mario Golf on the right is what I started with. You may laugh but it's actually a really great little golf game.
It has everything a good golf game has. I've started playing it again last couple of weeks and it is quite a challenge!

After enjoying Mario back in the day I then went and purchased Jack as a more serious golf game.
I haven't played Jack yet in recent times but remember I found it an excellent golf game in the past.
I'm totally looking forward to trying it soon as I'm sure it will again be a blast to play.

I later moved on to PGA 96 on the original Playstation and then finally into PC golf gaming with Links LS 2000 in 1999.
Never looked back since and played all the major PC golf titles from 1999 onwards.

I love so many old games golf and everything else. I will happily play a modern game but only if it is good.
Unlike the rest of the world, I feel no pressure to move forwards unless the forward option is actually the better option.
With golf games, I certainly feel they have gone backwards and the past is the place to be!

I'll be fascinated to try the JNSE PC version as the Gameboy version it appears is very much the same game.

I just wish I had more time for all these great games. The day is coming and I'm certainly counting down!

Very cool, sometime when I have time I'll have to post the boxes I still have. Don't have JNSE since it came with the computer and there was no box with it but I do have my FPS: Golf, PGA '99 and PGA 2000 boxes yet.

Oh, I forgot Microsoft Golf 99 was actually my first PC golf game and then Links.
MS Golf works in a Win XP virtual machine perfectly and will have to load it up again.

I was just walking out of an electronics store in 1999 and they had this golf game in their bargain bin for $5. It was JN6 and I have loved playing it and designing courses ever since.

But, the greatest joy it has brought me is all the friends I have made all round the world.

Cheers

Brad

My first PC golf experience was PGA Tour Golf from 1990. I played that on a DOS system with a monochromatic monitor. It was a lot of fun for it's time. In 1999 I finally got a new CPU and the very first piece of software I got for it was Links 1999 and played that religiously. I was walking through one of my local software stores when I spotted the familiar visage of the Golden Bear himself. Being a fan of Jack I jumped on the purchase of GBC and Links was pushed aside for the time being while I mastered GBC. I played on the GBC Offline Tour for a while and even fiddled with the course designer but time and other interests kept me from finishing a course. After a while GBC became too easy for me and I switched back to Links 1999 which is still my favorite, above Links 2001 and 2003. Viper was telling me to lower the skill points in GBC to make it more challenging so after reinstalling it I found this was true and it makes this re-visit more fun. I used to have it set up with a very fast swing meter and the skill points maxed out. Once you had the swing down, all those skill points made the game quite easy. I'm looking forward to seeing the old GBC courses that I didn't put on disk. I only have about 50 of my absolute favorites and I realized there were a few that I forgot to put to disk, TPC Avenel and TPC Waterloo among them.

Guitarzan wrote: ↑April 15th, 2022, 7:01 am My first PC golf experience was PGA Tour Golf from 1990.

This is a classic golf game. Will be coming to the site.