/vr/ - Retro Games

Game manuals were a big part of games in the past. To the point that they expect you to read them, cover to cover. Keep that in mind as you try some of these. You skipped the tutorial and didn’t even realize.

>>7193081
Sounds about right, the PC in the 80s was absolute trash for gaming. That Tandy 1000rl is still a dream machine though.

This is why the Amiga is a superiour platform.
You just shove disk 1 in and boot. Swap disks as necessary.

>>7193125
I can't believe software was released in this state. However I'm forgiving since Starflight was a super ambitious game for 1986 with a lot of detail and depth. After poking around on GOG the problem is when you play the game it's files are essentially constantly changing or loaded into memory. When you quit without saving it essentially gets corrupted.

Some oldfags said it was common practice to copy the entire game to a blank floppy disk and then play it from there. Now I think about it, the readme.bat actually told me to do this and to never play from the MASTER floppy. Goddamnit I'm a fucking retard.

No, only retards played games on PC before 1999. Smart people had Nintendos.

Computers are for work
Consoles are for games

>>7193081
1. Yeah
2. Cry harder zoomshit, idgaf

>>7193159
Neck yourself, waste of oxygen

>>7193159
>buying a Nintendo after the SNES
>smart
lel

Starflight is like that because it was written in Forth and Forth tends to scatter variables throughout the code, consequently the programmers decided the only way to save your game was to just write a copy of the entire executable to the save floppy.

>>7193081

dude... you literally just entered NAMEOFGAME.exe in the proper directory and your game started. Saving was done by... just saving. I don't know what else to tell you.

>>7193125
>PC in the 80s was absolute trash for gaming
unless you liked rpgs
>>7193159
>1999
>nintendo
ahahahahahaha

>>7193381
I did some rudimentary experimentation and it seems if you backup stara.com and starb.com, that's essentially your save file. I think the readme calls them floppya and floppyb but I find it really confusing since I've never seen a fucking floppy disk in my life.

I've bricked the game and replaced the files with my backup stara and starb and everything works fine. I guess the only way to "start a new game" is to copy those files from the master floppy and replace them to your copy. Either way I'm having fun. For a 1980s game it sure is really detailed. Apparently the guy who made Dwarf Fortress was inspired by it.

>>7193081

You need to use your science officer before landing on planets. You would know this if you read the fucking manual.

The GOG version of this game works like a charm, there's no "broken CGA emulation", get that version instead.

I'm a millennial who play old DOS games on real hardware. It's not that hard, really. Just do minimal research.

No, it was even worse back then. You would buy a game that claimed to work under a PC with your specs, go home, open the box, install, and find it doesn't work. Returns were not an option since open box software was as good as copied software. If you REALLY wanted it badly, you could try to contact the company and see if they had made a patch or update that fixed it and if they would mail you the patch, but that was never a promise of a fix. And thanks to how loosely companies followed standards back then, there was always the chance that your special snowflake VGA card or soundblaster clone wasn't 100% compatible with everything. Or maybe your CPU isn't exactly the CPU speed the game was expecting, so timings were off(Cyrix, I'm looking at your chips specifically).

Once you finally managed to get a game to run, you were pretty much on your own. You studied the manual like there was gonna be a test on it. Even then there was no promise you would understand how the gameplay worked. If you were lucky you had a friend who knew the game, but not as many kids were into PC gaming as there were console and arcade gamers back then. And you probably didn't have a modem, or dealt with the BBS scene, so you weren't asking for help there either.

The reason some games got so popular was the fact they ran on almost anything without issues or needing patching. There were tons of learning game titles, but the Super Solvers series installed easily and ran on everything, so they were everywhere. Commander Keen, Prince of Persia, Doom, all fit this mold.

>>7193081
There are plenty of good DOS games that don't require all that. Learn DOSbox and use eXoDOS.
I recommend the original Might & Magic.

>>7193081
only the real /vr/ posters, not those console shitters. so yes, i did

>>7193537
A lot of the classics like X-COM, Colonization, and LucasArts adventures were like that. They could be set up and run easily and ran on everything.

>>7193081
Are you lost kid?

The worst DOS game in the entire world to set up is likely this one. You don't even want to know.

>>7193081
Pleb faggots who only got to play on their daddys PC did

>>7193881
>t. that ONE kid who had an Atari 5200 and got beaten up for it

>>7193287
>Computers are for work
>Consoles are for games

The IBM PC's were marketed more for business, but IBM did leave the platform open for lots of expansion from third party hardware vendors. The Amiga certainly had more appeal as a gaming system, it was also popular for creating graphics, animation and even video editing. The Atari ST's were best known for their MIDI capabilities and used in the music industry. Apple had the office and education markets cornered in NA.

>>7193319
>>buying a Nintendo after the SNES
>>smart

Ninteno's were incredibly cheap at that point. retailers were discounting NES hardware and software to make shelf space for the 16bit machines. You could build a pretty nice library of NES games for little money at that point in time.

>>7193450
>but I find it really confusing since I've never seen a fucking floppy disk in my life
This is a troll, right? Or else this anon is extremely underage.

>>7193081
I did. They were good times for me. Some games had interesting copy protections. I did get some patcher program which removed them from a lot of games, but they were not all nuisances. There is a charm to some code wheels, papers with blue ink on brown paper preventing photocopies, and in depth manuals/extras adding to the overall package of having the games. I think my cousin had that Tandy computer, got me started with PC gaming before I got my own 286-12.

>>7193912
You're clearly not old enough to have been one of those dorks who played on his daddys PC and coped about how shitty they were, so why are you so mad?

Nah it wasn't all bad. But Starflight in particular is a rather overrated game from the period.
I didn't have a PC in the 80's but many of my friends from school did. Prince of Persia was a game that made an impression on me and is still fun to play. I also remember Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry. We understood fuck all about those games due to not really knowing english but we "played" them by typing in commands from playthroughs in magazines. Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain was also fun times.

>>7193450
>never seen a fucking floppy disk in my life

woah 3d-printed save icon poggers

>>7193432
The Ultima versions on IBM were inferior due to the lack of sound. They only got passable later when fans developed patches that added music and tilesets to replace the CGA shit.
The only advantage IBM had was the easier support for hard disks.

>>7195550
>>never seen a fucking floppy disk in my life

They were basically phased out with Windows NT/ Win 2000/ Win XP. Windows 95, Windows 98(se) and Windows ME all ran ontop of DOS and required a 3.5inch floppy drive to install Windows. The boot disk would come with CD-ROM drivers, so you could boot your Windows 9x install disc.

To be honest nobody really misses floppies they were a goddamn terrible method of storage. The only thing worse were the C-tapes they replaced on eurocomputers.
Fun fact, tape is still used for data backup purposes on servers and the like where speed is not of essence.

>go to play chess
>pick up knight
>throw him at the enemy's formation knocking them all to the ground
>declare myself the victor

games should be immediately fun, rules are for losers

>>7195606
I was using them up to 2007

>>7193317
>>7193319
>>7193432

Look at these retards. Don't be like them.

>>7193450
>I've never seen a fucking floppy disk in my life.
You need to be 30 years old or older to post here

>>7195606
XP (and Server 2k3), in a typical Microsoft fashion, still officially required them for RAID/SATA chipsets during setup and for resetting passwords (yes, I already know about slipstreaming the CDs and the Offline NT Password reset utility).

>>7193081
I got my first IBM clone (a Compaq 386) in 1992, and I played it much more than my Genesis. Was loaded with games from my mom's friend's greybeard husband.

Mom deleted Aladdin because there wasn't Mortal Kombat for her to delete.

>>7196441
Greybeard was piping your mom.

>>7196463
I wouldn't mind if he was, but I'm pretty certain nothing like that happened. I know my mom's type. He didn't come over and install the games. Just put them in a bag and my mom installed them.Their daughter was cool.

>>7193537
Lot of companies offered refunds on their products back then. You could get your money back from the developer but not the cocksucking retailer.

You could try the Amiga Starflight instead, maybe the C64 one. Even the Mega Drive port would all be easier to set up and use.

>>7193081
>find out CGA graphics emulation is broken when running Starflight specifically
Not sure which Dosbox you were using but don't use old ass versions, and don't listen to comments from the year 2007. According to the Dosbox wiki it works on 0.74, which is 10 years old.
I tested the 1986 CGA version on EmuCR and Dosbox-X. On both versions it has fucked up graphics unless I set machine = cga in the config file. Also I bricked the game by not saving before quitting lol.

>>7195603
>The only advantage IBM had was the easier support for hard disks.
IDK man, thats a pretty big feature if you ask me
t. grew up with a C64

>>7198234
If you grew up playing c64 in the 80s you were probably having more fun than a kid trying to play games on IBM. Up until the late 80s it was just forcing games to run on an expensive work machine not designed for them.

>>7198234
This. Anyone who didn't spend $5k on a HDD for the Apple ][ so they didn't have to swap disks to play Ultima was a complete pleb.

>>7193081
There wasn't a lot of options yet, so you figured it out at some point from boredom.

>>7195606
I remember a bunch of musical/sampler keyboards had floppy drives built in at one point.

>>7193450
>i've never seen a floppy disk in my life
jesus this country has no future