Reminiscing of the days gaming under DOS, Win9x and long dead genres... - by EvaUnit02
EvaUnit02 on 20/6/2009 at 06:09
People whine about backwards compatibility with Vista, XP, etc, I'll say it now, things are a lot easier now than they've ever been.
DOSbox just craps all over real DOS.
I remember spending hours in my primary schools trying to DOS games working under Win95. Oh Christ, Wing Commander: Privateer - it took ages to get a frigging boot disk together to actually run that game. Making a Win95 boot disk, endlessly making config.sys and autoexec.bat. Messing with virtual memory variables... ARGH.
I had Lemmings 3 (All New World of Lemmings), I remember I only ever actually got that going like twice.
I'll admit that the early days of Win2000/XP weren't rosy. Running VDMSound was very hit and miss. The loss of DOS under the hood killed a lot of games stone dead that otherwise worked perfectly under Win98.
But trading the infinitely better general stability of Win2000 over frigging Win9x was worth the loss of some of my favourite games. Dual booting with Win98SE was a great work-around that I used for awhile.
The complex Win3.1 only games were even worse. The driver model in that OS was HORRIBLE. Whenever I could I would bypass Win3.11 and run games directly from DOS 6.22 or whatever.
Let's talk about dead genres. My God, I spit on your grave CD-ROM FMV games. Fuck Cyberia, fuck Rebel Assault.
The Wing Commander series was terrific, but that had an actual game in-between the interactive movie bits.
Blade Runner was awesome, but that obviously came at the very end of era and developers had gotten over relying on the gimmickry of the storage space granted by CDs.
Rebel Assault was a bad, bad game. I got it free with a joystick for my 8th birthday (in 1995, IIRC) or something and was eager for anything Star Wars related at the time. I can't believe that I kept playing that dross.
My brother had TIE Fighter, but it was too difficult for me to play at the time. I played through XvT engine remake of that in 1999, what a superb game.
Volitions Advocate on 20/6/2009 at 06:24
Tie Fighter... what an amazing game. Still my favorite Star Wars game. Where can you get the remake? was it fan made or what? Now all i have is X-wing alliance.
My favorite Adventure games were all Sierra or Lucas Arts. Sam n Max hit the road. Gabriel Knight, Quest for Glory 4, Space Quest 5 & 6. I never got into the Betrayal and Krondor games or the early Might and Magic games (except for Gates to another World on the Genesis)
I don't really know much about how to get DosBox working wonderfully and I've only gotten a handful of games to work. But I remember making boot disks to swap between playing Tie Figher and Whatever else. Extended memory vs. expanded memory.. and the biggest kick in the face about all of it was that it was usually all less than 1 mb of memory, and the difference to make the game work was no more than about 100K.
My parents have an IBM Aptiva collecting dust in their basement. It has some problems. the optical drive doesn't work but I"m sure replacing that (8x) should allow me to use the recovery disk.
Pentium 133 w/ 90 mb of ram and a 6Gb HD. I've been wanting to take it off their hands so I can play some of these old games. Its got an ATI 3D Rage... with an optimised version of Mechwarrior 2 that came bundled.
Man i miss those old days. At Least GOG has fixed up some of those old games for XP/Vista.
Man I want to play Rise of the Triad right now.
EvaUnit02 on 20/6/2009 at 06:32
Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate
I don't really know much about how to get DosBox working wonderfully and I've only gotten a handful of games to work. But I remember making boot disks to swap between playing Tie Figher and Whatever else. Extended memory vs. expanded memory.. and the biggest kick in the face about all of it was that it was usually all less than 1 mb of memory, and the difference to make the game work was no more than about 100K.
A lot of games under DOSbox require very specific settings, using universal settings for all games doesn't really cut the mustard. Eg X-Com 1 & 2 run at 10,000 RPM and need to be slowed down, Wing Commander 3 gets stuttering during cutscenes if you don't limit the CPU cycles.
The secret is to use a front-end, I like (
http://members.quicknet.nl/blankendaalr/dbgl/) DBGL.
But it still stands DOSbox >>>>> real DOS, IMO.
Dresden on 20/6/2009 at 07:35
I didn't have much trouble with boot disks, luckily. My dad was a programmer so he did all the configuring for me.
Gabriel Knight is still one of my favorite game plots and characters. It was very well written. Also, Gabriel Knight 3 did the whole DaVinci Code thing far before Dan Brown and much better.
DreamWeb was another great but flawed adventure game and somewhat of a cult classic. It had a very chilling atmosphere. I remember the demo had (very pixelated) nudity in it. Try to get away with that nowadays.
Wing Commander, god yes. I loved these when I was a kid. I started with the second and bought every single one after that. The characters were great and had their own quirks and motives. And of course there's Maniac.
Diablo. I hadn't ever heard of the term "roguelike", I just knew that I loved it. The whole random generation thing was completely new to me.
Duke Nukem 3D was great for obvious reasons, but also had a brilliantly easy to use level editor. Making levels with that was my favorite past time. I even made some decent ones.
Eshaktaar on 20/6/2009 at 07:37
I never played UFO: Enemy Unknown back in the days, but some months ago I saw somebody playing the game on YouTube which got me into trying it out via DOSBox. I normally don't play tactical games, turn-based or otherwise, but X-COM had me hooked immediately, which says a lot for a game that's 16 years old.
Poesta on 20/6/2009 at 09:25
I've played some Magic Carpet recently after I saw (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=813Wk1pjSyw) this crazy video. :rolleyes:
I also tried the original Lemmings 2 after my brother bought the remake, pretty cool.
Koki on 20/6/2009 at 09:30
It is a crime against industry that Magic Carpet never had a modern sequel/spiritual successor
EvaUnit02 on 20/6/2009 at 11:37
Quote Posted by Koki
It is a crime against industry that Magic Carpet never had a modern sequel/spiritual successor
If Molyneux did make such a game it'd likely be married to a mundane life simulator, camera-based motion interaction with underaged virtual boys and a thousand broken promises.
Zerker on 20/6/2009 at 13:42
Thanks for that. I was setting up Dosbox for a friend and trying to find a good Windows launcher for him. I ended up giving up and just writing a batch file. Personally, I use Boxer on OSX, and some crazy Python script I wrote to interpret the .boxer folders on Linux (for my eee PC). It's a very nice setup, but DBGL looks good from a Windows perspective.
As for the games, I loved most of the old Looking Glass games (obviously), but I still haven't gotten around to finishing Terra Nova.
I enjoyed both Crusader games, and am slowly working my way through No Remorse again.
I'm also a big fan of (
http://www.adeptsoftware.com/jetpack/) Jetpack which is a single-screen game somewhat like Lode Runner, but with a Jetpack, and lots of different environmental hazards (not to mention tons of level design creativity + a level editor). I missed Lode Runner itself, but I still play Jetpack.
I also played through Dark Forces on Dos box for the first time ever a while ago. That was great fun. Now I'm considering replaying Jedi Knight at some point. Then again, I still haven't finished Jedi Knight 2...
catbarf on 20/6/2009 at 15:25
I still play Wing Commander IV. The cutscenes are worth it alone, it really feels like a movie.
