Recommended shmups for Win95?

[LEGENOARYNINLIA]

I've been playing a bit of Carax '95 today on a Thinkpad 380D, and as it goes with freeware games, I'm now hungry for more. Any recommendations? Doesn't have to necessarily be a shmup, I'm willing to try anything that runs on this machine*.

*Specs: Intel Pentium 150MHz, 80MB, Neomagic MagicGraph128ZV

[Ed Oscuro]

Z-Max if you can find it (for the lolz), Raptor: Call of the Shadows, maybe Stargunner (if it works; I never tried), maaaybe Major Stryker (while you're at it, see if you think it qualifies as a "shmup stinker")

[shmuppyLove]

Tyrian
CRS 68k

[Leader Bee]

Tyrian
CRS 68k

Tyrian 2000 is free with an account at Good Old games.

http://www.gog.com

http://www.gog.com/gamecard/tyrian_2000

[Edmond Dantes]

Do games purchased at GOG actually run on old comps?

Some re-releases of old games are actually reprogrammed so you HAVE to run them through Dosbox and can't run them in a native environment (The more recent Space Quest/King's Quest etc. collections were like this... I don't know if its affected any shmups though).

[robivy64]

Processor is too slow for Chourensha 68k.

[LEGENOARYNINLIA]

Processor is too slow for Chourensha 68k.

Yup...

I'm familiar with Tyrian, Raptor, Stargunner and Major Stryker. Not very fun games IMO.

[undamned]

Star Goose!
-ud

[LEGENOARYNINLIA]

Stargoose is quite something alright, but I have a different setup for DOS games. Right now I'm asking for Win95 recommendations.

[Observer]

Kamui technically runs on Windows 95 so you might wanna try that too. I think the ram you have there is too low though but wouldn't hurt to try it.

[Vexorg]

There was actually a port of Raiden 2 to Windows 95 that was fairly decent, but these days you'd probably have a hard time finding a copy. I think I've seen it on an Abandonware site or two, but that was ages ago.

[LEGENOARYNINLIA]

Seems that the display adapter on this Thinkpad is quite a bottleneck when it comes to performance. It has a whopping 1.125MB of memory.

I guess I will have to stick to Carax'95 then. At least I can recommend that to everyone else so that this thread isn't a complete waste.

[Ed Oscuro]

And here I thought the old 1998 lappy (with 1 GB hard drive, which is half that of a desktop from two years before) was slow. The screen must be unbelievably bad, or are you using a VGA or other output?

[LEGENOARYNINLIA]

Actually the screen is rather nice. At first I was supposed to only play Warlords, Warlords II and Warlords II Deluxe on this thing, but then I stumbled upon Carax '95 and realised the possibilities as it looks surprisingly vibrant and there's no bleeding.

[Leader Bee]

Do games purchased at GOG actually run on old comps?

Some re-releases of old games are actually reprogrammed so you HAVE to run them through Dosbox and can't run them in a native environment (The more recent Space Quest/King's Quest etc. collections were like this... I don't know if its affected any shmups though).

Both my laptop,with intergrated graphics chipset and my desktop with windows vista 64bit, 8 gig of ram,GTX280 in SLI both run Duke nukem 3d just fine. I'll be honest, i havent bought a lot from GOG. Both DN3d, Stronghold and Arcanum work fine though.


EDIT: just realised you said OLD comps.

I would imagine so anyway because they're DRM free, what you get in the download is what you'd have gotten on the original disk.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

There was actually a port of Raiden 2 to Windows 95 that was fairly decent, but these days you'd probably have a hard time finding a copy. I think I've seen it on an Abandonware site or two, but that was ages ago.

Yep, although that Cyber Front version of Raiden 2 for the PC was originally based on the PSX version of Raiden Project's Raiden II code. The U.S. version of Raiden II for Win95 that was released by Interplay still had the messed up tate controls if played in tate mode -- a minor quirk from the U.S. version of Raiden Project on the PSX (which had the same messed up tate controls when playing in tate -- fixable with a handy Gameshark code). The cool thing about the Win95 Raiden II port is, all the original "arcade" BGM tunes are encoded in glorious Redbook audio format for your listening pleasure.

Interplay released Darius Gaiden for Win95 as well, stateside. The insider notepad info mentions that it was originally based off of the Sega Saturn version of the same name.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Vexorg]

There was actually a port of Raiden 2 to Windows 95 that was fairly decent, but these days you'd probably have a hard time finding a copy. I think I've seen it on an Abandonware site or two, but that was ages ago.

Yep, although that Cyber Front version of Raiden 2 for the PC was originally based on the PSX version of Raiden Project's Raiden II code. The U.S. version of Raiden II for Win95 that was released by Interplay still had the messed up tate controls if played in tate mode -- a minor quirk from the U.S. version of Raiden Project on the PSX (which had the same messed up tate controls when playing in tate -- fixable with a handy Gameshark code). The cool thing about the Win95 Raiden II port is, all the original "arcade" BGM tunes are encoded in glorious Redbook audio format for your listening pleasure.

Interplay released Darius Gaiden for Win95 as well, stateside. The insider notepad info mentions that it was originally based off of the Sega Saturn version of the same name.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

I think I've actually got a copy of the Cyber Front Darius Gaiden port (they did G-Darius and Raystorm as well, and I think they might have even done RayCrisis, but I'm not sure of that.) They play quite reasonably, but are basically straight ports from the PSX versions with only the bare minimum amount of work to enable controls on a PC. I think Raiden 2 is the only one that would possibly run on an older Win95 PC though.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

There was actually a port of Raiden 2 to Windows 95 that was fairly decent, but these days you'd probably have a hard time finding a copy. I think I've seen it on an Abandonware site or two, but that was ages ago.

Yep, although that Cyber Front version of Raiden 2 for the PC was originally based on the PSX version of Raiden Project's Raiden II code. The U.S. version of Raiden II for Win95 that was released by Interplay still had the messed up tate controls if played in tate mode -- a minor quirk from the U.S. version of Raiden Project on the PSX (which had the same messed up tate controls when playing in tate -- fixable with a handy Gameshark code). The cool thing about the Win95 Raiden II port is, all the original "arcade" BGM tunes are encoded in glorious Redbook audio format for your listening pleasure.

Interplay released Darius Gaiden for Win95 as well, stateside. The insider notepad info mentions that it was originally based off of the Sega Saturn version of the same name.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

I think I've actually got a copy of the Cyber Front Darius Gaiden port (they did G-Darius and Raystorm as well, and I think they might have even done RayCrisis, but I'm not sure of that.) They play quite reasonably, but are basically straight ports from the PSX versions with only the bare minimum amount of work to enable controls on a PC. I think Raiden 2 is the only one that would possibly run on an older Win95 PC though.

Yes, the Interplay Raiden II port ran just fine on my PC with a 100MHz Pentium CPU, Win95 OS, with 8MB of memory and a 1.2GB HDD setup back in the day. It even played some cool arcade emulation like Raine just for kicks.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Ed Oscuro]

Actually the screen is rather nice. At first I was supposed to only play Warlords, Warlords II and Warlords II Deluxe on this thing, but then I stumbled upon Carax '95 and realised the possibilities as it looks surprisingly vibrant and there's no bleeding.

Is this one of those models with the big pixel groups? I've got one like that on a CD-i portable. My Win98 laptop, on the other hand, has less obvious door screen effects but the relative smudging (and the VERY bad backlight unevenness; looks like the imprint of somebody's fat ass I swear, and it's always been that way since it was bought used lol) leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe I ought to fix that...

[Temia Eszteri]

If you haven't yet, see if you can get as much display memory reserved for your game as possible by using low-resolution fullscreen modes. Gamewise, everything I could suggest has been suggested, so...

[Austin]

There is also the DOS version of Raiden. Sort of a poor-man's Jaguar version. Works in '95, but the game is only really worth playing if you have the original CD (for the soundtrack).

[Raytrace]

there's an awesome game called Fury 3 that used Direct X TO THE MAX!!! and is not in anyway a rebadged Terminal Velocity - check that out - I think you might need a CD-ROM drive though!!!!!