/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.10351968]

We had a pretty comfy pre-1987 PC gaming thread here some time ago. Let's try one that encompasses games up to 1993 just prior to Doom, which of course was a seismic shift in many ways. Everything from old-ass PC booters to DOS and Windows 3.x games, from CGA to VGA, from games using the charming little PC speaker to full-blown SB16, GUS and Roland support. Tandy is also welcome. Discuss the PCs and OSes that you had or used during these years, and what you use today to play these games, including PCem and 86box builds.

Starting with an old favorite.

[Anonymous No.10352057]

I'm wanting to get into this era of PC games, since all I know about that time is limited to the NES, but the PC games seem harder to get into than arcade games of the era. What should I be focusing on, Apple II, C64, DOS?

[Anonymous No.10352061]

>get an old vga monitor just to use for old pc games
>both dosbox and 86box either have scaling artifacts or cut the screen off because apparently nobody ever thought anyone would want use those programs on an actual 4:3 display

[Anonymous No.10352064]

>>10352061
You have to fuck with the config file.

[Anonymous No.10352113]

>>10351968
My first PC was a cheap second-hand 286 bought in 1994 and it came with Captain Comic, Prince of Persia, GP Circuit and a few edutainment games. The problem was it only had 5"1/4 floppies so I couldn't get more games, which made me fumble with QBasic.

Second one was a low-end 386, and I had a blast playing Wolfenstein 3D, Dune, Volfied, Might & Magic 3, A-Train, Monkey Island, Links...
At a time where Doom 2 and Diablo were all the rage, my favorites were Dune 2 and, worst time-sink from that period, Civilization.

[Anonymous No.10352145]

>>10352057
This thread is meant to be about IBM PCs and compatibles, not home computers in general, and in any case I only ever had those, so I can't speak to the first two. I can say early PC gaming can be a bit daunting if you've never used DOS, but usually emulators like DOSBox make the experience easier. You WILL want to look up the manuals for games, though, not just because that's what you want to do with old games in general, but because a lot of PC games have complicated controls and don't hold your hand in the slightest. This era is also prior to many conventions becoming standard, so if you try to play, say, Wolfenstein 3D like a modern FPS, well, it just doesn't. So yeah, if you want to become acquainted with this era of PC gaming, you'll have to do a bit of reading.

[Anonymous No.10352386]

>>10351968
>We had a pretty comfy pre-1987 PC gaming thread
I liked that thread too.

Warlords II was released right before Doom. Used to play a lot of hotseat matches of this with a friend back in the day.

[Anonymous No.10352396]

>>10352386
Really digging the 16-color 640x480 graphics. Lovely aesthetic IMO.

[Anonymous No.10352967]

>>10352396
Me too, 16 colors was right at the cusp of enough colors for detail but still few enough to look really crisp and neat.

[Anonymous No.10353125]

>get tired of accidentally typing "dor" instead of "dir" and getting an error
>create dor.bat, it just contains dir and nothing else
>stick it in the DOS directory since that's considered system path
>forget about it
>accidentally type in dor again
>damnit, that's...going to work?
>smug.jpg
I am so smurt.

[Anonymous No.10353131]

Really wish they would make OLED 4:3 monitors, I know it will never happen though

[Anonymous No.10353412]

>>10353125
>accidentally typing "dor" instead of "dir"
somehow this happened way more than it should

[Anonymous No.10353473]

>>10353125
What if you want dir /w or dir /p, though?

[Anonymous No.10353492]

>>10353473
Then I'm not jamming d*r and hitting enter, I'm jamming d*r and when I go to type in the flags I notice the mistake.

[Anonymous No.10353629]

>>10351968
I'm a boomer but not a mega-boomer, so I didn't play many games that came out pre 1993, just when I was very young, too young to really remember much. I will say however that Sword of the Samurai is a really fantastic game that holds up even today, primitive as it looks.

[Dave No.10353793]

I loved the graphics of this game, but it was way too hard for me, I didn't even speak the language.

[Anonymous No.10354054]

>>10353793
Kill yourself namefag.

[Anonymous No.10354308]

>>10353793
sex with dave
>>10351968
Been meaning to try Legends of Murder.
>https://www.mobygames.com/game/35156/legends-of-murder-volume-1-stonedale-castle/
Opinions on this game?

[Anonymous No.10354332]

>>10354308
Crazy that you picked that. I saw that a few months ago and played it. I think it's concept is fantastic. You don't see games like this at all.

It's a Rogue like but plays like a point and click etc. I loved the multiple menus and HUDs.

[Anonymous No.10354365]

>>10352967
I had to try to fix the aspect ratio, the compass rose not being round was bugging me. But it's difficult without the scaling looking ugly and losing the sharpness.

[Anonymous No.10354389]

>>10354365
Unironically a CRT shader might help here. It's a bit hard to get it looking ok for PC games, though, at least the ones that ran at higher resolutions than 320x200. Here's an attempt I tried last night, but I'm not quite satisfied with it. The idea is to emulate an early lowish pitch VGA monitor.

[Anonymous No.10354391]

>>10354389
Oh, but if you want pure sharpness without any CRT effects, you can use a shader like sharp-bilinear. It'll get everything looking correct with maximum sharpness.

[Anonymous No.10355174]

>>10354308
The medieval mystery concept is good and I like the way it looks, but the combat and random encounters drag it down.

[Anonymous No.10355802]

>>10354389
>>10354391
Thanks, I usually just use the default dosbox filter (which I guess is normal bilinear?) with Fit to Original Ratio turned on. Though it seems a bit random how Dosbox handles the aspect ratios of the more unusual resolutions, like 640x350.

[Anonymous No.10355870]

>>10351968
Real talk bros. I am debating building a reverse sleeper to put something like Linux Mint on it with every computer emulator imaginable on it like FS UAE, PCem, 86Box, etc, along with my actual CRT monitor.

Anyone else fuck with this kind of setup?

I find it fascinating that we can do this these days since I remember emulating fucking NES, SNES and GBA during Win XP era.

Would kill to get an Amiga though bros but I cannot find one that is not over priced as fuck. I keep seeing good deals on Facebook Marketplace for CRT TVs though.

Do you dudes think it'll be easier to just build a case and keyboard for an Amiga clone but AliExpress tier in terms of money spent?

I know Checkmate cases exist but yeah I want something cheaper to actually get the Amiga 1200 vibe instead of just using some dumbass SBC.

[Anonymous No.10355874]

>>10355870
I forgot. t. Millennial.

[Anonymous No.10356176]

>>10355802
DOSBox-X has the pixellate shader, which is almost as good as sharp-bilinear, but just a tad bit blurrier. I don't see sharp-bilinear, but maybe it's been added already, as the build I have installed is a bit old.

[Anonymous No.10356379]

Friendly reminder for new DOS users:
>when it comes to CD-ROM drivers, shsucdx and xcdrom are drop-in replacements for mscdex and gscdrom that use far less RAM
>when it comes to Mouse drivers, CuteMouse is a drop-in replacement for Microsoft's mouse drivers that uses far less RAM
>when it comes to ANSI drivers, ZANSI.SYS is a drop-in replacement that uses a bit more RAM than ANSI.SYS, but draws the screen MUCH faster than ANSI.SYS and somewhat faster than NANSI.SYS(as well as using less RAM than NANSI.SYS)
Additional tips:
SmartDrive is a driver for speeding up HDD access by using a bit of RAM as a buffer that is enabled by default on a fresh install of DOS 6.22, and only has a use on real hardware only. Delete the line from your config.sys file if emulating to reclaim the RAM with zero downsides.
To see a brief summary of how much RAM DOS has available and used up, use the "mem" command. To see a more detailed listing of what is loaded where in RAM, use "mem /c /p".
Microsoft's DOS CD-ROM driver disk install program won't function without EMS386 or some other memory manager being loaded first. If using a 386 or better, just use "memmaker" to setup DOS with EMS386 before trying to install CD-ROM drivers through that install disk.
Want an input history like modern command lines? Just type DOSKEY at the command line, or add DOSKEY to the end of your autoexec.bat file. If you want to be able to insert text like with a modern command line, use the command "DOSKEY /INSERT" instead. There is a less-memory using version called Enhanced DOSKEY.

[Anonymous No.10356542]

>>10353473
@echo off
dir %1 %2 %3

[Anonymous No.10356574]

>>10351968
Played too much Wing Commander. I bought every game and expansion pack. Funny thing was, I panned the cartoon series and by the time the theatrical film came out, I stopped caring. I gave all my Wing Commander stuff to some one I barely knew who was hyped about the movie. Things are funky and need to be fidgeted with for each game in the series is you use DOSbox, the later games are Windows games that aren't easy to setup right either. When I say not easy, I dont mean it is daunting, it isn't Plug and Play.

[Anonymous No.10356587]

Is it correct to say the Sound Blaster AWE32 is a better Sound Blaster 16, which in turn is a better Sound Blaster Pro 2.0?

[Anonymous No.10357407]

>>10356574
IIRC the first two games are mostly just speed sensitive. The first game wants a 25 MHz 386.

[Anonymous No.10357763]

>>10356574
I needed to use loadfix in dosbox to eat up memory because the voice pack needed a certain amount of free memory, but not too much
>>10357407
Also this weird speed issue because it's one of those games that runs as fast as possible. Only the "intended" cpu speed isn't obvious because it's not 4.77mhz.

[Anonymous No.10358286]

>>10357407
The thing I was having issues with was getting the CH FlightStick Pro working right, it felt like the axises maxed at 75%. I forgot what the fix for it was, but I did get it working.

[Anonymous No.10358317]

Is there a dos demo scene?

[Anonymous No.10358395]

>>10358317
I don't know much about it, but a cursory search reveals there's been demos going back to the 90's, and there's new ones being made to this day, so apparently yes. Here's one meant for use on the 8088 with CGA composite graphics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

[Anonymous No.10358797]

Which game needs the smallest amount of RAM to run? So far the lowest I've actually tried myself was the Frogger booter at 48k

[Anonymous No.10358903]

>>10351968
I don't think i ever beat Captain Comic. The space station stage was really hard i remember but I think i got past that. I got up to the cave bit I think

Street Rod 2 was awesome though. I used to play it heaps. I'd just do the aqueduct race for pink slips and then sell the car afterwards to buy heaps of shit and would just do that over and over buying all the cars and doing them up. I never finished that game either though. That mulholland drive stage was way too hard to control. If anyone wants to try it these people bought the copyright and you can download it for free here
https://www.streetrodonline.com/downloads

[Anonymous No.10358910]

>>10358317
does the name Second Reality ring a bell?

[Anonymous No.10358916]

>>10358797
DONKEY.BAS, I'd assume. It's not much of a game but it is one of the very first to be released for the IBM PC.

[Anonymous No.10358929]

>>10358916
It's quite literally the first PC game. It came bundled with PC-DOS for the original IBM PC.

[Anonymous No.10358941]

>>10352057
Just download RetroArch and get all the cores you want, figure out the autistic layout of RetroArch, and then browse the game catalogues for whatever genre you like and find something that looks neat.

The C64 has a lively community that is still active and you can readily find recommendations for it from threads and websites, so I would start there.

[Anonymous No.10359596]

>>10357763
Speaking of which, I tried to see how well Bio Menace ran on my 286 86box build (using EGA and a Sound Blaster 2.0), and it tells me it doesn't have sufficient memory for the music in-game. Now, it's running on DOS 6.22, so that takes a decent chunk, but still. And from reading about it, it seems this game was a bit of a pain to get running even back in the day. For what it's worth, it does seem to run relatively well as is, but most likely it does want at least a 386, which is to be expected given it came out in 1993.

[Anonymous No.10359773]

>>10359596
Game loads next music track in memory without unloading the previous, making it take up more RAM the longer you play with music on. I think you need 580k free to launch with music, and more if you want to play more than a few levels before it crashes. It's doable on a 286 if you have a chipset that supports RAM over 640K. There's a few DOS programs for remapping some ram over 1MB to the 640+ block so you can get 700+K of conventional RAM available, which would probably work wonders here.

[Anonymous No.10359869]

>>10358903
I loved both SR games. Didn't know about this website though. Thats awesome of them

[Anonymous No.10360415]

>>10359773
Meh, seems like it'd just be easier to load it on a 386. It may run better, too.

[Anonymous No.10360683]

Is it just me or it seems like there aren't really any notable speed sensitive games for the 286? Like it's a CPU that isn't worth checking out as much as 386 CPUs not just for games but general functionality too.
Plus what's cool with a 386 is that there's hybrid 386/486 motherboards, so with the same board and general configuration, you can go from a 16 MHz 386DX, to a 100 MHz DX4, which is pretty crazy considering the 486 architecture is about twice as powerful per clock. So if you start with a 16 MHz 386DX, that gives you the ability to upgrade to a CPU that's 12 times as powerful on the same board.

[Anonymous No.10360792]

>>10359596
Games that were a pain in the ass to get working because of memory?
>you need to have over 600kb of your 640kb of conventional memory free
>just make a boot disk bro

[Anonymous No.10360821]

>>10360792
Weird. I can run it with 558432 bytes (545 KB) on DOS 3.30. I use the files from the GOG version in 86Box if that makes a difference

[Anonymous No.10360861]

>>10360683
>Is it just me or it seems like there aren't really any notable speed sensitive games for the 286?
Yeah, seems like this is the case. There's games that only really work on a 4.77MHz 8088, and after that there's games that want a 25-33MHz 386. The 286 is only really notable in that a good chunk of early 90's games made well after it was in vogue still work perfectly fine on one (such as the CGA/EGA Apogee and id Software games, for instance).

[Anonymous No.10360941]

>>10356379
>Delete the line from your config.sys
You mean autoexec.bat?

[Anonymous No.10361298]

>>10356379
>shsucdx and xcdrom
Man, the difference is crazy. Goes from using 52K down to only 8K (also for some reason cutemouse shows up as that smileyface1 after running memmaker, dunno why. Still works perfectly though)

[Anonymous No.10361310]

>>10361298
God damn, that is pretty good.

[Anonymous No.10361381]

>>10361298
>>10361310
Yep, thanks to all the modern replacement drivers we have, we can get DOS tweaked in a way that would have had someone in 1992 willing to kill someone for. 610+K free conventional RAM? No problem. CD-ROM, Mouse, Sound Blaster, network, and SCSI card drivers all loaded in upper RAM with upper RAM still free for programs? Sure. We can even use hacks to steal some EMS/XMS RAM to add to the 640K to make DOS see, use, and report over 700K of free conventional RAM.
Hell, if that one Ultima game didn't demand it's own special snowflake memory manager, we could probably run that today without a boot disk. It's never been better to be a DOS gamer.

[Anonymous No.10361663]

>>10361298
Retard here. How do I go about using these over the default drivers?

[Anonymous No.10361724]

>>10361663
Easy way for dummies is starting by installing this so it creates the proper lines in your autoexec.bat and config.sys
https://winworldpc.com/product/ms-cd-extensions-msc/125

Once installed put shsucdx.com and xcdrom.sys in the CDROM folder that was created by the installation
Edit autoexec.bat and replace mscdex with shsucdx
Edit config.sys and replace gscdrom.sys with xcdrom.sys
Remember to keep the rest of the lines these are on the exact same
Reboot

To check if the drivers are loaded type:
mem /c/p

[Anonymous No.10362424]

>>10361724
Good shit, m8. Now, I suppose they should be able to be used with Phil's DOS startup menu, right? The one that allows you to choose a wide variety of startup options with various combinations of conventional, expanded and extended memory, along with mouse and/or CD-ROM support:
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ms-dos-starter-pack.html

[Anonymous No.10363248]

>>10362424
Yes, but the paths are going to be different. It's only a matter of putting shsucdx and xcdrom somewhere on your drive and editing autoexec.bat and config.sys to use them instead
I think Phil uses the mscdex that's already in the DOS folder with a fresh DOS 6.22 install

[Anonymous No.10363950]

>>10363248
Cool, thanks for the tip. Now, I'm just trying to figure out a good 386 build to set this all up on using 86box. I'm thinking a 33MHz build with 4MB, a Cirrus Logic card, and a Sound Blaster 16 should do for most games up to 1991 or so.

[Anonymous No.10363982]

>>10363950
I suggest using one of the boards that supports both 386 and 486 (not the IBM ones because they have MCA slots which is ass, in fact I suggest avoiding IBM machines after the 8088/8086 because they're often too much trouble for no good reason).
You can easily just swap just the CPU at any time and basically have a build that lets you play a decade of DOS games

[Anonymous No.10363987]

>>10358929
Which is why I mentioned it.

[Anonymous No.10364073]

>>10363982
Another good tip. Seems like the 386-only boards are a bit too old and can't even auto-detect hard drives, whereas the 386/486 boards can. I'm actually thinking of sticking to a Sound Blaster 2.0 for this build instead, whereas the 16 can go on a 486 build instead, together with a GUS, perhaps.

[Anonymous No.10364243]

Yep Wolf3D on a 4.77 MHz 8088

[Anonymous No.10364842]

>>10364243
What's the framerate like?

[Anonymous No.10365734]

>>10364842
Cinematic

[Anonymous No.10365934]

Since everything’s gotten expensive I have an excuse to churn through my DOS and micro backlog next year, I’ve been watching a lot of DOS YouTubers as well

[Anonymous No.10366662]

I like the original civilization and simcity even though i'm awful at playing both

[Anonymous No.10366753]

>>10366662
If you are having fun, then you are doing fine. There are so many sandbox games on PC, in that generation, you could just enjoy playing, for your own goals. A few years after Sid Myers Railroad Tycoon came Chris Sawyers Transportation Tycoon.

[Anonymous No.10367095]

>>10364073
Alright, I finally finished setting up the 386 for the most part. I did end up going with a SB2.0 together with an MP-401 and MT-32 emulation combo as well (never heard Prince of Persia with that setup before, it's pretty cool) for maximum sound compatibility up to around 1992 or so. As for the video card, I saw the board supports VLB, so I thought to try the biggest and baddest VLB card on the list (the Tsenglabs ET4000), but it seems a few games freak out a bit with such a monster and require compatibility fixes or some such. Perhaps it's too much for such an old setup, I dunno. Might just revert to the ISA16 Cirrus Logic I had on there before, which was working perfectly fine. I don't think I'll bother installing a CD-ROM drive or Windows on it, either. I'll leave those for the 486 build.

[Anonymous No.10367529]

So many games were being churned out even in that era. The highs, like Silent Service 2, and Dr Brain series that began in '91. The abject disappointments like the Terminator 2 pc game. And all the stuff in between like Temple of Apshai and Scavengers of the mutant World which were near impossible and often unfair but still wildly intriguing.

Supaplex, Airborne ranger and the top down Rambo game (first blood?) were pretty awesome too.

[Anonymous No.10367547]

>>10356542
> IF %ERRORLEVEL% EQU 0 echo batch scripting will never die ¦¦ echo everything you ever loved is gone
Boot scripting your games for optimum results

[Anonymous No.10367558]

>>10356587
Can't recall many drawbacks to the awe32 aside from the original card being long but I didn't come across any chassis that weren't made for that, being very early pentium era. Wavetable synth was a massive improvement if games used it. Sb2.0 was quite primitive, some sb16 had an 'asp' socket to add an audio dsp which seemed good in theory but never heard one... And I had the crappy 8 bit mono sb1 that still beat pc speaker by miles

[Anonymous No.10368134]

>>10367558
Well yeah, anything beats the literal 1-bit PC speaker, even if some devs managed to make it do some cool things regardless. I kinda wish the CSM had come out a bit earlier. I quite like how it sounds, even if it's technically inferior to the Adlib. It's why I'm sticking to a Sound Blaster 2.0 for my 386 setup, as it retains compatibility with the CSM.

[Anonymous No.10368136]

>>10368134
*CMS, fugg

[Anonymous No.10368386]

>>10368134
>>10368136
CMS is neat, I wish more people tried supporting it

[Anonymous No.10369382]

>>10368386
It got support in like 200 games or so, so that's something. Pretty crazy, though, how outside the Tandy, the PC got by on just the speaker.

[Anonymous No.10369837]

>>10358903
This style hits you different

[Anonymous No.10370335]

>>10368134
>nothing worse than PC speaker
Well there was Disney Sound Source. It actually sounds great in the 5 games or so that supported it. And the speaker was battery powered! Creative Labs was possibly the most supported brand by 386 era even if some other cards sound better so probably a good choice just for that reason

[Anonymous No.10370395]

>>10367095
Did you end up sorting out the video issues in those games? The TLIs didn't support some operations, but you could might get lucky with the TLIVESA driver if you haven't tried that already

[Anonymous No.10370663]

>>10370395
I may have exaggerated the problem. It's just EGA games flipping out a bit if you don't set them to SVGA compatibility (I forgot that could be an issue). Unless I encounter other problems with VGA games, I think I'll just leave the ET4000 in there. Wolfenstein 3D runs like a dream on this setup, though I'm sure Doom will make it buckle. Gonna see what else it can handle.

[Anonymous No.10370727]

>>10352061
don't know about 86box but you can force pixel perfect scaling in dosbox staging

[Anonymous No.10371071]

ExoDOS version 6.0 is out boys

[Anonymous No.10371097]

>>10366753
It's rare to see Railroad Tycoon mentioned as RT2 and TTDX are more popular on the board. I still find the first one really charming and it laid the basics for the genre.

[Anonymous No.10371135]

>>10355870
chromebook with the screen removed maybe

[Anonymous No.10371918]

>>10352061
>>10370727
Pretty sure the key is to add the modelines that DOS used so the games display exactly like they should. I know that's what I did back when I still had a CRT monitor.

[Anonymous No.10372001]

>>10351968
i played the shit out of this and the hugo house of horrors trilogy from an over 9000 in 1 disk i had

[Anonymous No.10373047]

>>10371135
Any shitty office PC will do the job. Maybe something like those Dell Optiplex Micros or comparable Lenovo ThinkCentres.

[Anonymous No.10374834]

last bump

[Anonymous No.10376854]

One of the first games I played as a kid was Thexder. You could be a plane or a robot. Pretty dope anyone else play this?

[Anonymous No.10376892]

>>10376854
Haven't played it but the OST of the sequel is pretty good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK-_Dtr5UsI&t=239s

[Anonymous No.10377216]

If I just wanted to build a PC with the widest possible compatibility with DOS and early Windows games without regard to speed-sensitive games that require specific processors or frequencies or special snowflake sound card support, what would be ideal? Perhaps a Pentium MMX 233 with an AWE64 and an S3 Trio64 plus a Voodoo?

[Anonymous No.10377309]

>>10377216
Correct. I fine tune the speed of my 233 MMX using a DOS utility called SETMUL. It lets you slow down the CPU by data and code caches, branch predictions, and v pipeline. Alone, you can slow down the MMX 233 to the equalvalent of a 486SX-25. Using slow ISA graphics cards will bring overall speed to 386 levels.

[Anonymous No.10377367]

Windows 3.x wuz here

[Anonymous No.10377480]

>>10377309
Right, I've seen videos by Phil where he advocates for the P1 MMX for DOS gaming precisely because of this, though I was referring to a situation where you say fuck all that and just roll with stock speeds to play the widest possible variety of games, even if that results in some of them being rendered unplayable due to being too fast.

[Anonymous No.10378709]

>>10351968
captain comic is bullshit developed in 1997, the first pc game with scrolling was commander keen. masters of doom said id was the first to figure out how to do this

[Anonymous No.10378870]

>>10378709
wot

[Anonymous No.10378892]

>>10377367
Windows 3.0 came out in 1990 you dipshit.

[Anonymous No.10379754]

>>10378892
This thread covers up to 1993.

[Anonymous No.10379928]

>>10378870
scrolling on pc didn't exist before commander keen. read a book retard. masters of doom said id did it first because no one else knew how to do it.

[Anonymous No.10379962]

>>10379754
my mistake, I saw "pre-1987" and jumped on that

[Anonymous No.10381065]

>>10379928

[Anonymous No.10381073]

>>10379928
Smooth Scrolling. Carmac was annoyed that this feature was such an easy thing on consoles (because they were tailor made for this) but PCs had to spend a ton of resources to try to do it and look choppy anyways. So he sent out to make an engine that had nothing to envy the NES and such. It's why he started with a Mario test which he sent to Nintendo

[Anonymous No.10381081]

>>10351968
captain comic is such a comfy game. first game i tried to hack, too.

[Anonymous No.10381483]

>>10379754
Well in that case. . .
>you can almost *taste* the obvious SMB2 inspiration here

[Anonymous No.10382493]

>>10381073
And even after Carmack, the scrolling of DOS games wasn't super smooth like on NES games, since they usually ran at a lower framerate, and it still hitches a bit. I could be wrong, but the first PC game that comes to mind with scrolling that's actually on par with consoles is Jazz Jackrabbit.

[Anonymous No.10383553]

[Anonymous No.10383595]

>>10378709
Narrow that phrase a bit. The first sprite based 2d x86 DOS game with software based smooth 2d scrolling.

Wait wut. There were 1d smooth scrolling games on x86 PC DOS, ala NES without mappers. Of course, there were. There were also 3d games existed since inception too. Not to mention the non sprite based smooth scrolling 2d games. Of course, we are excluding all the non x86 DOS systems. I know it is complicated. But kids who weren't adults in this timeframe have to skitter from wiki to fandom.com to cobble together gaming history... Poor kids.

[Anonymous No.10383712]

>>10382493
Wanna talk about DOS games in 93?

[Anonymous No.10384049]

So, /vr/... FM or MIDI? What is your preference in DOS games that support both?
https://strawpoll.com/w4nWrKvGQyA

[Anonymous No.10384239]

>>10384049
midi is a control protocol it doesnt make any sound

[Anonymous No.10384417]

>>10384239
You know precisely what was meant.

[Anonymous No.10384426]

>>10384417
I don't. There are a whole slew of MIDI devices out there.

[Anonymous No.10384492]

>>10384417
it doesnt make sense, you can control a lot of things with midi nigga

[Anonymous No.10385094]

>>10384426 >>10384492
Nta but if you don't know, just listen and maybe learn.

>>10384049
I couldn't afford the good sound cards until they started to become a standard feature in the atx era. The midi instrument set of early SB cards was ass and that's all I had. Having wavetable samples was way better and more cpu efficient, I imagine, but didn't play many games with it. Descent was great on awe32 though.

Arranged FM was king for me before red book for that reason alone. Honestly for the extra work making it, and the extra system resources used it probably still would win. Unreal / UT are good examples why.

[Anonymous No.10385187]

>>10352396
>>10352967
Gaming's Original Sin was wanting more than 16 colours.
CHANGE MY MIND

[Anonymous No.10385210]

Mechwarrior (1989)
The first 3D game I ever saw.

It blew my fucking mind

[Anonymous No.10385217]

>>10377367
I can still hear "I am micro-mannnnn" in my mind. Damn bros, take me back to the times when I was just gaining sapience, exploring games and thinking that they were full of mystery and wonder

[Anonymous No.10385218]

>>10382493
>I could be wrong

[Anonymous No.10385249]

>>10358916
>>10358929
>Written by Bill Gates
>Extremely memory efficient
Something doesn't add up here...

[Anonymous No.10385260]

>>10358317
>Is there a Dos Demo Scene?

https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=MS-Dos

[Anonymous No.10385268]

>>10383595
...Are we doing the pre-Keen four-way smooth scrolling thread again?

https://youtu.be/nGs6bIEI3D0

[Anonymous No.10385357]

>>10351968
We used to have threads like these all the time before mods allowed Dreamcast/Gamecube/Ps2/Xbox. I'll never forgive them for that.

Anyway pic related was my favorite game on my Apple II C.

[Anonymous No.10385370]

>>10385357
The Dreamcast was allowed pretty early on, way before the others, but yeah.

Also, this is an x86/DOS thread, friend.

[Anonymous No.10385392]

>>10385370
My bad, You're right. I do remember Dreamcast. Also here's my favorite MS-DOS game from that era. I played through it last year and finally made a perfect city around the caldera of an extinct island volcano. pic not related.

[Anonymous No.10385410]

>>10385392
Simcity 2000 was peak soul

[Anonymous No.10385667]

>>10385392
>>10385410
I only ever played the Windows version way back when. Is there any reason to play the DOS original?

[Anonymous No.10385724]

>>10385667
Having played both the Windows version is better. Has higher resolution and better UI

[Anonymous No.10386620]

>>10385724
I should get it running, then.

[Anonymous No.10387007]

>>10358929
>first PC game
Surprisingly difficult to define. Do you mean the first game on the IBM 5150?

[Anonymous No.10387015]

>>10385210
Artic Fox predates that. 1986

[Anonymous No.10387045]

Years ago, a /g/entleman from the netherlands posted a picture of his room and had a really cool 5150 poster on his wall. We worked it out, and he took like 8 pictures close-up of various parts of the poster. I stitched it together and translated it to english. Here's a copy of the final product for you all, as this thread would appreciate it.

https://file.io/TttBs1vIMq0F

[Anonymous No.10387059]

>>10387045
here it is in low res. The linked file is suitable for printing a poster.

[Anonymous No.10387230]

>>10385094
>implies im wrong
>concedes in his post that there are many devices controllable with midi that have different sounds
based retard

[Anonymous No.10387273]

>>10385210
did this have online multiplayer
i remember getting online with a dos game that looked very similar to this
the level was some shitty underground maze tho

[Anonymous No.10387310]

>>10387015
Elite on the Acorn BBC Micro, electron, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum say hi

[Anonymous No.10387731]

So I found out 86box actually lets you use a Pentium II clocked at 100MHz, which was never a thing (the lowest-clocked PII was 233 MHz). This is still pretty neat, however, because my laptop is kind of a potato these days and struggles to run a processor clocked any higher than that. After days of fucking about, I managed to install Windows 98 on it, together with a Voodoo 3 and an AWE32, and even managed to get the DOS drivers for the AWE32 working so I have fully functioning sound in DOS mode. Windows itself works well, with a teensy bit of slowdown at times (emulation-wise, that is). On DOS, 486-era games like Doom appear to work very well with this combo, as do a lot of older fare, though I'm sure speed-sensitive games are gonna throw a fit. Next I'm thinking of trying some Glide stuff and see how well that goes.

[Anonymous No.10387827]

>>10387045
Geez deleted already. Is someone at IBM DMCAing this ancient poster?? This kind of thing has landed IBM where they are now.

[Anonymous No.10387832]

>>10387230
Wut. Wrong anon bro.
I have used midi for game audio and music control since about 1992

[Anonymous No.10388317]

>>10387832
It's gotta be some kind of autism.

[Anonymous No.10388327]

>>10351968
Picrel good. Zelda II bad. The buffoonery of this board.

[Anonymous No.10388342]

>>10388317
Presumably just too zoomy to have heard of PC games that used midi to play music using the internal instrument set of a sound card. Or to fucking read at that.

[Anonymous No.10388353]

>>10388327
>bbbut muh animation
Other anon may be too quick to judge a game on <1 minute of play. Captain Comic was great for its time but was a little roughly animated and the status bar is pretty odd so could be dumped before it had a chance. Honestly it didn't grab me until I tasted that sweet blastola nectar through the first doorway.

[Anonymous No.10388361]

>>10387731
This post deserves a you. Grats for successfully resurrecting a system like this!

[Anonymous No.10388393]

>>10388361
I wish, anon. Read the post again. It's using 86box, not a real PC. I do have a couple old rigs that are pretty competent, but I moved very far away and left them at my folks', and I'm considering having them sell them off since they've been struggling for cash lately.

[Anonymous No.10388516]

>>10387827
I’ll try another file sharing site tonight when I get home from work.

[Anonymous No.10389726]

>>10388393
All of this reality is a simulation though, right? What is one more then

[Anonymous No.10389949]

>>10385268
It is rather funny that people quote an Irish Brewery for facts. Not withholding that they are wrong so often. There is no reason to do another x86 smooth scrolling thread, the console warriors will just pop in and deny it and quote some flimsy source. Why belive your lying eyes?

[Anonymous No.10390006]

>>10385094
You sir are the king. Here's your crown.

[Anonymous No.10390045]

>>10382493
You're not wrong despite how often people will claim the contrary. Even into the Pentium era smooth scrolling at 60fps just wasn't a thing because simply copying all that data to the framebuffer tied up the CPU so much you were lucky to have any time left to do anything else. It wasn't until hardware assisted blits and directdraw became standard that 60fps 2D was "solved" on PC.
The games people bring up as smooth are usually half framerate. By PC standards that WAS smooth. Keen ran at 40fps for instance.
Later games could in THEORY run at 60/70 but it required RAM bandwidth that didn't exist in reality. Zoomers can achieve better than reality in dosbox and think that was normal. And boomers gaslight themselves into believing this was how they ran it "back in the day."

Similarly PC users try to gaslight console kids by claiming the NES could only scroll smoothly with mappers. This wasn't true. Without a mapper you had to update all tiles every 8 pixels scrolled, which sounds like a lot but it's just tile data so 32x28x2=1792 bytes which is a heck of a lot smaller than the 64000 for a full VGA screen. EGA/CGA was smaller, but the data format was abusive. The C64 was tighter at 40x25. Only PAL machines had enough CPU left for useful logic, NTSC had to scroll only part of the screen.

[Anonymous No.10390559]

>>10390045
I do recall certain pinball games scrolling quite smoothly, though that's purely vertically.

[Anonymous No.10391115]

>>10390045
Yep. Not that Anon but for some reason a lot of people make shit up when it comes to retro PC gaming, probably because it's easier for your lie to sound plausible to the average normie with all the different hardware configurations and stuff. For example people lying about running Doom smoothly at full screen size on a 386, or people lying about running Quake at over 60 FPS at launch when even with the best CPU available (Pentium 200 MHz), the game would run in the mid 40s and only at the lowest resolution possible

[Anonymous No.10391535]

>>10390006
You still butthurt about being caught making an idiot of yourself? On an anonymous board.

[Anonymous No.10391640]

>>10391115
I get what you are saying. Being 25-35 years ago is, no doubt, a factor. I can say for certain a couple of people I knew in 1990-91 coded smooth wireframe 3d transforming polygons and a smoothly scrolling background and text- not game engines as such though. It isn't such a leap for me to to think it would have been possible for a game to scroll smoothly. I can't think of any though.

BTW I distinctly remember Doom benefited as much from having 8MB+ ram as it did from having a 486Dx to run on. ROTT too. Also I got really excited about testing the first Pentium 2 I saw with Quake. At top res (1024x768?) it was still unplayable!

[Anonymous No.10391851]

>>10356379
Thank you Anon!
These tips will be very useful on my 486 I'm building
I'm only able to get about 566 k of the 640 free currently.
I'll have to try some of these out

[Anonymous No.10392313]

>>10391640
For quake to be playable (15-25fps) on my p166 it was 320x240. After I got a k6-2 300 going to 640x480 was still terrible, it was better to gain the fps at 320x340. 640x480+ was the realm of 3d accelerators.

[Anonymous No.10393010]

>>10392313
I know this is going beyond the scope of the thread, but what was the minimum CPU that could run Duke3D at 800x600?

[Anonymous No.10393021]

>>10393010
Not sure. I never played doom or Duke. I was playing through ultima 7 and 8 I think.

I dunno it's a lot easier to render than full 3d like quake so probably okay on a p2 200 or something

[Anonymous No.10393489]

>>10393021
>p2 200
It's an option they added in 86Box for slower hosts but it doesn't exist in real life. The lowest clocked P2 that actually exists is 233 MHz

[Anonymous No.10393501]

Uhhh. Why did mods bumplock the thread?

[Anonymous No.10393571]

>>10393501
It's 2 weeks old. All 2 week old threads on /vr/ are bumplocked due to a spammer who was bumping old threads then deleting his post to create churn in order to knock threads off the board.

[Anonymous No.10393596]

>>10393571
I see. I actually didn't realize the thread was this old

[Anonymous No.10393683]

Good thread. See you guys on the next one.

[Anonymous No.10393827]

>>10393489
I'll set my multipliers and bus however I want, you can't stop me.