MS-DOS Gaming

[Austin]

Shmup:

Tubular Worlds. Awesome game, and probably a little more traditionally shmup-like than Raptor or Stargunner. That is, if you can get it running.

[Ruldra]

If you want to try something different: http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/1001/Sea+Rogue.html

Deep-sea treasure hunting simulator. You start the game with a set of coordinates where you know a ship has sunk. You travel there in your ship, send a few divers with metal detectors and retrieve stuff like bronze cannons, silverware, jewels and gold. Sell all the stuff you find, try to find the coordinates of other sunken ships (by buying maps or paying librarians to search for them), loot, repeat. There's an in-game leaderboard where you compete with AI treasure hunters to find the most sunken ships.

Every time you find a ship, you're asked to identify it. The game will give you a few hints and then you'll need to refer to the manual which has a list and a short description of all the ships you can find. Guess incorrectly and all the treasure you find in that ship will only be worth half value.

On higher difficulties, there will be one AI player who not only is competing with you to loot treasure but will actively attack your ship and divers. Along with metal detector divers, you'll also need to bring in men equipped with harpoons for defense.

I played this game for some time and loved its unique concept. Unfortunately I didn't know how to discover new coordinates so I'd always get stuck after a while.

Give it a try if it interests you. It's the kind of game you just don't see these days.

[Gespenst]

A sorta underrated Euroshmup with Michael Bay level explosions, multidirectional weapons + enemies coming from every direction and highly destructible environment. Final Impact:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBzyI6Z9bjo

[Mortificator]

Check out 3D Realms' page on it (including some more artwork, from the box!) http://www.3drealms.com/menace/

Basically, Jim Norwood was better than the rest of 3D Realms, at least in the pre-Duke era. Damn talented guy! I think the game holds up pretty well too.

I do like the Duke Nukem sidescrollers, but it's amazing to have one guy doing a complete game basically by himself - and compare that to Duke Nukem's stolen assets despite having a team of people.

I'd never even heard of Bio Menace, but I knew I'd seen that monster before.

Then it hit me: the reference model is a killer tomato.



Chew you up for brunch
And finish you off
For dinner or lunch

[LEGENOARYNINLIA]

Warlords, Warlords II, Dungeon Master.

[Edmond Dantes]

Hey guys, since I'm chronically indecisive I thought I'd ask.

I'm a huge fan of Wolf3D and Zork. I have a chance to either get the Spear of Destiny Super CD or else one of the Lost Treasures of Infocom sets, boxed and complete in both instances, but I only have enough funding to afford one of them.

Which one would you choose if you were in my shoes?

[Leandro]

Halloween Harry

Powball

[Crafty+Mech]

Hey guys, since I'm chronically indecisive I thought I'd ask.

I'm a huge fan of Wolf3D and Zork. I have a chance to either get the Spear of Destiny Super CD or else one of the Lost Treasures of Infocom sets, boxed and complete in both instances, but I only have enough funding to afford one of them.

Which one would you choose if you were in my shoes?

Those two choices couldn't be more different, so if it was my money I would buy the set that I have the most nostalgia for.

Spear of Destiny was a good add on. I was in an art museum and saw a painting depicting the piercing of Jesus with a spear on the cross, and I thought, "Hey that's the Spear of Destiny!" and immediately thought about Wolf3D. Probably not the intended effect of the painting

[Ed Oscuro]

Interesting Things Found On The Internet:

PB SRAM uses Pipening

Florida International University homepage, citing the October 21 1997 issue of PC Magazine.

if you run [a Pentium II server] with more [than 512MB RAM] you got to disable both caches, L1 as well as L2!!! This results in a perfomance at Pentium 75 niveau.

Tom's Hardware, December 1997

The only problem I see here is getting the Pentium MMX stable at 290.5MHz, when testing it, the system crashed a few times however I believe most of the crashes were caused by inefficient cooling (I didn't use any thermal compound).

Anandtech, July 1997

So, it's that time of decade again - time to look at the old Packard Bell L90 again.
64MB of RAM (across 4x72 pins for memory modules)! Dedicated 3D video processing chip! Optical! Two fans in the entire system! Packard Bell Navigator! Multi-minute Half-Life load times (I haven't tested this since the disastrous pre-2000 attempt)!

Some surprises here: I finally pulled out the optical drive, which says March 1997. So much for my '95-'96 guess! This was actually not cutting edge for when we bought it anymore - though it probably still cost $2000. It was certain to be a new offering at the time (since the PC was bought and old news in 1998, when I bought a copy of Half-Life...) but the 16MB of RAM and other anemic specifications sends home the point that it was a "multimedia PC," not a video decoding or 3D rendering powerhouse. Still, it was more than enough for Quake at 320x240! Almost enough for Half-Life, in fact, even with a 1MB S3 video solution.

Good build quality overall, but weird, and obviously not intended to be easily serviceable. I did find out something nice: The CMOS battery is just a regular CR3023, so I popped in a Camelion I had lying about. Then I thought better of it and pulled it out. Currently I'm working on stripping it down as much as possible for disassembly. Only one blood blister so far (in a spot that doesn't matter...joint of a thumb)! Front and back panels pop off with a spudger pretty easily, but most everything else is difficult. I realized belatedly that the power supply's output connectors (which should all provide the same voltage) are all labeled, so I went back and wrote down my best guesses.

The tower is small compared to a full-size ATX tower, but still heavy - the unique "skyscraper with base" look adds on a bit of weight, but mainly the internal structure is a bunch of steel boxes bolted on top of each other. Well, I think there are screws, but only a rivet edge is visible from the outsides. The actual motherboard is not too big, and just covers a portion of the base. There's a riser board which you connect your PCI slots into (I wonder what wonders that does for bandwidth?) There's other oddities, such as a variety of CapXon capacitors on that riser board - all still look fine. Pretty clean design overall.

It's very clean for having sat in a basement for many years - relatively little in the way of dust and there's almost none on the fan. I think it's definitely due to get new thermal compound under there. It's a Pentium MMX at 200 MHz; a passive heatsink would probably work even better than what's in there - a simple fan wired directly to the power supply; there's no temperature sensor here.

The drives are arghtacious: The floppy drive is a cool Mitsumi unit with a neat gold finish on the halves, but trying to pry it off I ended up bending one half a bit, even when using a spudger...still glad I did it, though, on account of all the dust; nothing functional got damaged. Clearly not intended to be serviced, once again. New Super-Tech moly grease (it really doesn't have much molybdenum at all, but it should work) on the worm gear. The Goldstar (old LG) optical drive is a different story - seems okay; I'd like to clean it also but unfortunately this was meant to be serviced even less. The drive tray holds back the plastic front cover even when you've released three snap points, and I don't have any luck prying the internals from the top half of the chassis. The bottom PCB can be pried off but there are at least a couple ribbon cables in there that I don't want to screw with. Maybe I'll connect it to a live power supply and hit the eject button to see what I can get at there, but I'm probably going to end up putting this back in as-is.

So right now the main thing is just figuring out how to get the motherboard out. All the screws I see are gone, but something else is holding it in - seems like more than just the back connector panel (i.e. the PS/2 connectors for mouse and keyboard, and the parallel port) holding it in.

One interesting note: The components used here are a far cry from those used in even unreliable modern machines. Many Dell Optiplex PCs burn up capacitors rated for 105 degree Celsius operating temperatures, but this one gets by fine with cheap brands rated for only 85 degrees. Despite being a "modern" CPU, the Pentium just doesn't get that hot. There's not much in the way of other components to get warm here; I possibly could look into installing a separate video card but it's honestly never been needed for the kind of programs this computer is used for.

Just for the sake of completeness, I'm wondering whether to swap modems. The rather gross "old" modem (1998 vintage) has its own transformer and two Rockwell chips with a ton of pins each, and the phone jacks are bigger (?!) than the 2001 Broadcom modem I'm considering, which only has a single small chip with relatively few pins, on a half-height board. For the sake of utility, probably putting in a LAN card would be better, or USB perhaps. I'm looking not to do anything that would degrade the CPU and memory usage of the machine, though. The only other thing that comes to mind is looking for an L3 cache on the motherboard.

Then it hit me: the reference model is a killer tomato.

Could be direct tracing there of something - ditto for the Astonished Green-and-Mullet-Wearing Man (sorry, forgot his actual name), but the actual game didn't seem to have any asset borrowing...that I could see, anyway.

[BrianC]

I'm not sure if Bio Menace did any asset borrowing (though it uses the Commander Keen Goodbye Galaxy engine), but Duke Nukem 1 and 2 borrow a lot of assets from Turrican.

[Ed Oscuro]

Duke Nukem also takes stuff from Mega Man:
http://dosclassics.com/duke/1other.php
...who needs to steal a barrel, anyway?!

Windows Box More:

Haha, I overthought things there. Just disconnected a few more cables (after properly documenting the hookups of course) and lifted the board out (had to push it towards one side to lift it out from the other).

Getting off the Socket 7 retaining clip is more maddening than trepanation with a Hobby Lobby dremel. Simple in practice - just push a spudger down and lift forward the clip! In practice, my plastic tool kept slipping (until I got smart and pushed down with the flat end of it - my spudger is actually a tooth floss handle!) and more stress on my junk precision screwdriver. Finally got it off there.

Under that heatsink was some surprisingly fresh and gooey thermal paste in a very thin layer, and what is probably a square of aluminum was sandwiched between two layers of paste, so that the CPU and thermal paste interfaces with the square, and the square interfaces with the green heatsink. I imagine I could get better results from throwing out the square, but I'll leave it in there for old time's sake - it might also give slightly better contact than the machined surface of the green heatsink, which is probably why it's there. Again, cooling has never been a problem with this thing.

Severe case of "if it ain't broke" here, but once you've started prying off an old heatsink it's too late to go back!

Thermal goop removal process: Goo Gone, dish soap, goo gone...water, distilled water, and next some isopropyl alcohol probably, then a bit more distilled water and then a pat-down with a regular towel, then finally a microfiber towel just to get up any stray dust. Then finally the fun part - new Ceramique thermal paste. It's not the best performer these days, but it should last as long as anything else.

[Edmond Dantes]

Duke Nukem also takes stuff from Mega Man:
http://dosclassics.com/duke/1other.php
...who needs to steal a barrel, anyway?!

I love how that website says "stole from megaman" but then says "also, from a game called Turrican" as if they expect more people to recognize Mega Man than Turrican... although, they may have the right idea there.

Also, This screencap (from the same site) totally looks like a scene from one of the early Space Quest games, but I can't remember which one exactly.

@Crafty+Mech

I have equal nostalgia for both, but ultimately wound up choosing the Spear of Destiny. My reasoning was that a boxed and complete Super CD rarely ever pops up for non-insane prices, but the Infocom Treasures seem to be dirt common, so I can grab both when my next paycheck comes in.

... and then the only one of their text adventures I won't own legally is Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which for some reason isn't on either of the Lost Treasures collections (though the second one included a coupon where you could buy it for $10. Gosh I wish that were still valid).

[Ed Oscuro]

... and then the only one of their text adventures I won't own legally is Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

Own it like you stole it. Scratch 'n' Sniff!

TBH, I've started a game of Broken Sword recently, but put it aside for a while. Don't like the flailing-about method of playing...don't like getting silently shut out of progressing further (although this might not be a big issue in this game), but I really don't like cheating with a walkthrough. Choices - I hate choices!

[Edmond Dantes]

Choices - I hate choices!

SHHHH! Someone might hear you!

I have actually never played a Broken Sword game, although the first one (here called "Circle of Blood") turns up a lot on the 'Bay. Cheap too.

I've never played a Monkey Island game either, which makes me feel kinda left out because it seems like the classic adventure game series everyone but me grew up with.

[drauch]

Love the first Broken Sword! Still need to play the rest. I collect big box stuff as well, but both the Broken Sword and Circle of Blood boxes are quite dull, so I doubt I'll be picking them up in the future. Been playing the first Gabriel Knight as of late. Reinstalled Windows 98 on a machine I've been working on. Snagged a 15" Trinitron from work, while my 19" Viewsonic looks nice, the smaller 15" screen is much kinder on the beautiful sprites and backgrounds.

Where do you buy your games at, Edmond? Local, or just eBay?

[Edmond Dantes]

I buy them wherever I find them, usually.

A lot of games just turn up in local goodwills, and I snap them up (I picked up Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold this way), but if its something I really really want then I'll turn to either Amazon or eBay. It's kinda surprising how often a decent deal pops up in those places lately.

EDIT:

In random other news, I've been playing Myst (not a DOS game but whatever) and Zork 1 lately. My copy of Myst actually came with Riven (not a compilation, just it included Myst as a bonus--I think I have a later printing of Riven), while my Zork 1 came from the Zork Legacy Collection (which was released to hype up Zork: Grand Inquisitor and thus includes every game in the series from the original up to Zork Nemesis--that last one could also be called "Zork trying to be Myst").

It's amazing how I beat Zork 1 years ago, and yet I still find stuff that I never knew of before. For example, you can actually try to rape the mailbox. And the game comments that "That's an (ahem!) interesting idea." And no, you do not want to know what kind of state I must've been in to consider raping a mailbox.

[drauch]

You probably do have to find something before you buy it, yeah.

I always hear great stories about people finding things at Goodwills, but I usually just end up wasting my time. I've got just one store near me, and even then that one is out of the way, and I usually turn up with nothing. I've found a handful of things there, but nothing golden, and not really worth the amount of times I left there with nothing. Same with flea markets for me. I've had luck twice on Craigslist this year, but they were literally the only two listings that have shown up in the past 8 months. I guess this is the drawback of living in a shithole city. I'm pretty much bound to eBay, so I might as well just bend over and take it.

[tinotormed]

First-Person shooter?

Doom
Quake
Wolf 3D + Spear of Destiny
Duke Nukem 3D
Chasm the Rift
Powerslave
Shadow Warrior
Blood

shmup?

Tyrian
Major Stryker

Anything else?

Wacky Wheels
Jazz Jackrabbit
C&C Tiberian Dawn
C&C Red Alert
Dungeon Keeper + The Deeper Dungeons (had a walkthrough of this)
Terminal Velocity
Jetpack

[Ed Oscuro]

I always hear great stories about people finding things at Goodwills, but I usually just end up wasting my time. [...] I've found a handful of things there, but nothing golden, and not really worth the amount of times I left there with nothing.

Yeah, that's a reasonable way of looking at it; gas and time don't come free. Let other people pick up stuff.

Goodwill does occasionally have something neat for me, but I'd estimate that recently I've probably gone in at least five times to one purchase, and probably the last dozen times I've stopped by I didn't buy anything.

[soprano1]

Duke Nukem 1 and 2, and Dyna Blaster (European port of the PC Engine Bomberman) were great to play. The sound from the pc speakers made me shiver, though, like the sound of nails on chalkboard...
There was also a Worms-like game called Tank Wars, every computer in my school had it, and during lunch break people would skip lunch to play tournaments. Not even Counter-Strike had such popularity.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Were Antarctic Adventure or Penguin Adventure also ported to DOS? You can't go wrong with either.

[Ruldra]

^Neither were ported to DOS.

...although Penguin Adventure is a game everyone should check out. By far my favorite MSX title.

[Edmond Dantes]

I always hear great stories about people finding things at Goodwills, but I usually just end up wasting my time. [...] I've found a handful of things there, but nothing golden, and not really worth the amount of times I left there with nothing.

Yeah, that's a reasonable way of looking at it; gas and time don't come free. Let other people pick up stuff.

Goodwill does occasionally have something neat for me, but I'd estimate that recently I've probably gone in at least five times to one purchase, and probably the last dozen times I've stopped by I didn't buy anything.

I'm probably lucky... the Goodwill I go to happens to be near a grocery store I visit often, so its no issue for me to say "Well, I'll swing by Goodwill on the way home."

Only annoying thing is they mix their game CDs in with their music ones, so I have to search through rows of pop and country stars I've never heard of in order to find a game... and sometimes something that looks like a game turns out to actually be a music CD.

To the guys immediately above me: There was a DOS game called Arctic Adventure, but it has nothing to do with Pentarou the Penguin.

[Crafty+Mech]

Has Stellar 7 been mentioned yet?

It came originally for the Apple IIe/C64, but was eventually ported to DOS with better graphics & sound.

[Ruldra]

For people wanting to re-visit Dune II, you can actually play it on your browser here: http://epicport.com/en/dune2/description

Never played this game back in the day. I'm giving it a try now and enjoying it so far. The fact that you can't select multiple units at once sucks, but you can still use keyboard shortcuts to quickly assign orders to them.

What exactly are the faction differences? I started playing as Atreides but they all look the same.

[Edmond Dantes]

What exactly are the faction differences? I started playing as Atreides but they all look the same.

I think basically at some point they each get a unique unit or two, but at first they are all kinda mirrors.

...

In other news, played Secret of Monkey Island finally, and I'm on Part 3 now.

I was really loving it at first, but its reminded me of why my thoughts on the Adventure Game genre are so conflicted.

On one hand, I love the stories and characters, and when things go smoothly and you can figure out what to do they are genuinely engrossing experiences.

BUT THEN you wind up at a part where you're beating your head on a wall and saying "okay, what the hell am I supposed to do?" and either you get so desperate that you just try every command on every item or hotspot, or you resort to GameFAQs or the Universal Hint System (the latter is my preference). Once this happens, I feel this sort of "the illusion is broken" feeling, where it stops being fun and immersive and other and suddenly becomes just a series of puzzles strung together by a narrative that feels like its designed to sell hint books.

In Monkey Island's case, the game-breaking moment was this part where you're on the ship and you have to open this cabinet. It turns out what you're supposed to do is open a box of cereal to get the prize, which happens to be a key.

PROBLEM 1 - When I hear "cereal" I think "edible" and not "prize in box."
PROBLEM 2 - Most cereals IRL (even back in 1990) didn't come with prizes, so I have no reason to think one in the game will either.
PROBLEM 3 - Especially since, if you have Guybrush "look at cereal" all he says is he loved it when he was a kid. There's absolutely no mention of it having a prize (not in the floppy disk version anyway).
PROBLEM 4 - Even if there was, why would you expect the prize to be the very key you're looking for?
PROBLEM 5 - The immediate issue is either the cabinet or the mutinying party, neither of which have an immediate connection to a box of cereal.

So of course, I read the UHS file and find out what the solution is... and suddenly I can't enjoy the game anymore, because I had to do something that is completely unnatural and breaks any sensical game/story flow. Again, the effect is very much like watching a monster movie where at one point, you can see a normal man's foot in the frame during a kaiju battle, and its very hard to get back into the "groove" once that happens.

Okay, rant over, time to play Monkey Island some more.

[LtC]

RTS: Zed (By Bitmap Brothers)

Very fun and challenging RTS even when played today. I think it was in many ways ahead of its time and it's one of the only RTS I've ever played that I felt truly challenged beating its campaign. It had a sequel but I hear it's absolute rubbish though

[Pretas]

RTS: Zed (By Bitmap Brothers)

Very fun and challenging RTS even when played today. I think it was in many ways ahead of its time and it's one of the only RTS I've ever played that I felt truly challenged beating its campaign. It had a sequel but I hear it's absolute rubbish though

The consensus about the sequel (Steel Soldiers) is that it isn't terrible, but it plays much more like typical Warcraft/C&C fare and lost all of its distinctiveness and charm.

[Ruldra]

On one hand, I love the stories and characters, and when things go smoothly and you can figure out what to do they are genuinely engrossing experiences.

BUT THEN you wind up at a part where you're beating your head on a wall and saying "okay, what the hell am I supposed to do?" and either you get so desperate that you just try every command on every item or hotspot, or you resort to GameFAQs or the Universal Hint System (the latter is my preference). Once this happens, I feel this sort of "the illusion is broken" feeling, where it stops being fun and immersive and other and suddenly becomes just a series of puzzles strung together by a narrative that feels like its designed to sell hint books.

I made a similar rant about adventure games here. And funny enough, I also got stuck at the ship part in Monkey Island. I gave up after two weeks of desperately trying to find the solution.

My gaming time is too limited these days, I REALLY don't have the patience to deal with that anymore.

[Ghegs]

I'm in the same boat. I was really big on adventure games as a kid, but nowadays they just frustrate me. It annoys me to no end when I can think of dozens of real-life ways to deal with a problem, but I need to find the one the game designer demands I use. And that could be a stupidly obscure and round-about way of doing things. Just don't have the patience for that anymore.