The official MS-DOS thread

[IntelliMission]

Has anyone finished Gateway? I played it 20 years ago or so, but I left it halfway. It's an English text adventure, but it has graphics, you can even click on them, there is a list of objects and verbs... In the end it's like Myst with lots of verbs.

 

I just saw a recent review and the guy really liked the game, he says that the puzzles have just the right difficulty and the plot is based on a series of science fiction books:

 

I'm a bit frustrated with the standard 90s graphic adventures I'm playing lately because they are a bit bad (it is a very difficult genre to design, you always end up doing a game that's either too easy or too difficult), so I may give it a try.

[IntelliMission]

I'm really enjoying the Commander Keen series. I have already finsihed the first 2 and I am playing the third. Also, parts 4, 5 and 6 have a new graphics engine and they add things that they later carried over to Doom, like saving at any time.

 

Of course, you have to take it very calmly. I recommend using a DOSBox subversion (SVN), like ykhwong's, to be able to save the game at any time, but mostly to avoid going back to the main menu to choose "LOAD GAME". The special flavour of the saga is that a touch kills you and returns you to the beginning of the phase: the fun (and challenging) thing to do is to finishing all stages without saving in the middle.

 

Some of the most important problems are:

- Romero and Carmack wanted to be "more advanced" than the game they were inspired by, Mario, and they put crazy enemies that are jumping all over the screen. Exasperating.
- There are many things that kill you when you touch them, including almost all enemies.
- In part 3 there are some aliens whose shots go through the fucking walls and screw all your efforts.
- Romero designed levels that are challenging and fun, but sometimes he added things just for the hell of it: phases that you don't need to complete (they only give points/lives/bullets) and are real hell, buttons that when pressed cause a GAME OVER for "exploding the Earth" (in part 2)...
- Jumps are not exactly intuitive at first, you can choose the force and they have inertia immediately after landing.
- In the first 3 parts, you need to press CTRL+ALT to shoot, but CTRL is jumping and ALT is enabling/disabling the pogo stick. You end up shooting instead of pulling out the pogo stick + jumping many times.

 

The good is everything else, they are games that demand the best of you for the design of the levels. There are stages where you must lure the enemies to one wall so you can jump to the other side. In others, you have to reach difficult platforms by jumping on top of some little red robots that walk through the walls, the ceiling and the floor until they reach the end of the stage and then start again (or disappear if the floor continues to exit the level).

 

To give you an idea, these are my two most recent experiences:

 

1) Yesterday I abandoned a stage for impossible in part 3: I knew it was a "bonus" phase, but I had assumed that Romero had failed in level design, that it was incomplete. Well, it turns out that the fault was mine. I had not tried to hit a wall so that the enemy waiting for me at the top would follow me and fall to a lower part, allowing me to jump from where he expected me before and be able to shoot him 4 times without he touching me (it's one of the most difficult enemies).

 

2) In that same phase and just after achieving that feat, Romero, for the second time in the series, added an object that later was carried to Doom, an Egyptian symbol that gives you temporary invincibility for a few seconds. Well, my mental retardation made me take the invincibility when the elevator was going down and I lost 10 seconds going up, when I was supposed to take advantage of it while rushing to the exit. I thought I was going to die or spend 8 bullets trying to kill them (you have to wait for them to jump up to your height to shoot them: it's like the lateral movement in Doom, but in 2D platforms), but in the end I managed to lure them towards a small corner from a previous corridor and they let me reach the exit for some tenths of a second.

 

No wonder the crappy mobile reboot of 2019 was only downloaded by 5000 people and had to be withdrawn: the sauce of the game is its criminal difficulty. When I'm done with these, I think I'll try with Monster Bash, Hocus Pocus, or  Secret Agent, all in the same vein. So much MS-DOS graphic adventure  and Flash "escape the room" games was affecting my reflexes, these games are good for "waking up from slumber."

 

@jgkspsx Considering your avatar, did you finish all the games in the series?

[+jgkspsx]

I think I beat all of them except for Keen Dreams. Including the Game Boy game. If there is one I didn’t beat it was Episode 3. I remember that one being real nasty.

 

The new trilogy is way kinder and more fair (still not a pushover, especially Episode 5!), and it controls better. They are my favorite platformers to this day.

[newtmonkey]

Hello DOS ladies and gentlemen.

 

I've been playing a lot of games on my dedicated MS DOS machine lately, as well as doing various and sundry modifications to my machine, so I though I'd summarize my activities.

 

Mods

1. I ended up removing an old serial/parallel port "card" (actually just a plate with wires to connect to the motherboard), since I wasn't using these.  I disabled both in the BIOS to free up resources, just in case.
2. I replaced the SiS video that came with my used motherboard with a decent S3 card.  Image quality seems noticeably nicer, sharper and with better contrast.
3. I got a kit of "PC screws" on Amazon, and replaced the standard case screws with thumb screws.  A minor thing, but it filled my heart with joy.

Games

 

Wolfenstein 3D

A nostalgic favorite from when I was young, I remember this being a bit of a killer app back in the day for MSDOS gaming.  It ran perfectly fine on my ancient 386-16, and we wouldn't see a console that could run it as well (or better) until the 3d0 or Jaguar!  Anyway, you might think it's too simple to enjoy now, but it's a lot of fun.  Just employ the good old "pick a wall and stick to it" technique and you will never have a problem with the mazes.  Without having to worry about mazes, it's just a great action/arcade game that plays great even just with a keyboard.  I completed Episode One on difficulty level 3, and had a blast!

 

Space Quest: Chapter I – The Sarien Encounter

I was in the mood to play a graphic adventure, and decided to go with this one.  I went in mostly blind, and a few hours later I was able to complete it (I had to look up a couple of hints).  Outside of a couple very unfair parts, I felt this game was pretty cool, and I had a good time with it.  I'd like to go on to SQ2, but will probably switch to King's Quest 1 or Leisure Suit Larry 1 first.

 

---

 

Let me show you some fancy MSDOS action now. 

I have The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Two - Hand of Fate (what a title lol) running on the PC.

I was really pressed for space for my dedicated DOS gaming machine, so I ended up making some space for it on the printer stand in my office.  It took some time to find speakers that were decent but small enough to fit, but I'm happy with the setup now.  There is no room to use the mouse, so I just place a clipboard halfway under the keyboard, and it works just fine.  I can store the clipboard below when not in use to keep things compact.

 

It's a lot of fun having this system in the corner like this.  No distractions, no Internet, just gaming.

 

 

Edited August 30, 2022 by newtmonkey

[Keatah]

4 hours ago, newtmonkey said:

I got a kit of "PC screws" on Amazon, and replaced the standard case screws with thumb screws.  A minor thing, but it filled my heart with joy.

Yes it's amazing how an absurdly simple upgrade tweaks the panties just so.

 

I have a modern i7 I did the exact same thing to. The next mod to it will be to remove the optical drive and replace it with HDD. Decided to do the optical drive as an external.

[schuwalker]

Picked up Altered Destiny from Accolade. For some reason I glossed over this one though I recall the ads looked intriguing.

 

I'm slowly getting into it time alloted - like what I'm seeing so far.

 

 

 

Edited June 18, 2023 by schuwalker

[newtmonkey]

@schuwalker's post motivated me to start up my DOS machine for some gaming:

 

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos

I've tried to play through this several times, but the combination of real-time combat and some annoying areas later on always stops me from completing it.  I decided that this is the year I finally complete this game.

 

I actually had made decent progress during my last attempt, so I resumed my game.  There's still a lot I don't like about this one (interface, boring but tedious combat where enemies constantly respawn), but it sure does look and sound nice.  Even so, I ended up getting quite addicted and played for three hours last night over a couple of sessions.

 

Based on previous attempts, I know the upcoming area is a real pain.  Hopefully I can get through it this time!

[newtmonkey]

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos

I completed this tonight!  It was alright.  It started out pretty fun and charming, but after reaching its peak with the Urbish Mines dungeon, it just got kind of dull and tedious.  Luckily, it ended on a high note, as the final dungeon was pretty decent.

Edited June 23, 2023 by newtmonkey

[LatchKeyKid]

Just curious as a question popped up in my head when I was watching videos about classic 8086 processors.   I personally lump everything from the 8086/88 to the 486 into DOS gaming and pretty much define the next generation with Windows 95 and the Pentium processor.  As someone relatively oblivious to the PC retro scene, is that generally true for others?  On the one hand, the 486 was the last of the processors in the "86" name that came out in the 80's whereas the Pentium (along with Windows 95) both came out in the 90's and ruled most of that decade instead.  On the flip side, the Pentium came out before Windows 95 and was around for two years of pure DOS gaming but I don't really mentally lump it into that category which lasted until the multicore chips started coming out along with Vista in the mid '00s.  I fully admit there may be a personal bias at play because I only upgraded to a Pentium after Windows 95 came out but figured I'd ask.

Edited July 12, 2023 by LatchKeyKid

[+Gemintronic]

DOS gaming was still a thing until Win ME really, really hid access to the command line. 

[LatchKeyKid]

1 minute ago, Gemintronic said:

DOS gaming was still a thing until Win ME really, really hid access to the command line. 

You're technically correct but that wasn't the impression most gamers will have given the differences in experience/interface.   Do you consider the Pentium as part of the retro DOS gaming scene then?

[+Gemintronic]

Just now, LatchKeyKid said:

You're technically correct but that wasn't the impression most gamers will have given the differences in experience/interface.   Do you consider the Pentium as part of the retro DOS gaming scene then?

 

I know I was still buying DOS games until it was too much effort to reboot into DOS mode.  Around the Win ME to XP is when I stopped seeing DOS games on the store shelves.

[LatchKeyKid]

Fair enough.  I pretty much stopped when I got Win95 personally as I was never really a fan of DOS and honestly wasn't proficient at using it either which definitely factored into it.

[zzip]

10 minutes ago, LatchKeyKid said:

Just curious as a question popped up in my head when I was watching videos about classic 8086 processors.   I personally lump everything from the 8086/88 to the 486 into DOS gaming and pretty much define the next generation with Windows 95 and the Pentium processor.  As someone relatively oblivious to the PC retro scene, is that generally true for others?  On the one hand, the 486 was the last of the processors in the "86" name that came out in the 80's whereas the Pentium (along with Windows 95) both came out in the 90's and ruled most of that decade instead.  On the flip side, the Pentium came out before Windows 95 and was around for two years of pure DOS gaming but I don't really mentally lump it into that category which lasted until the multicore chips started coming out along with Vista in the mid '00s.  I fully admit there may be a personal bias at play because I only upgraded to a Pentium after Windows 95 came out but figured I'd ask.

For me it was Windows 95 more than any processor change.      Win95 hid the dos prompt from users as much as possible, you usually didn't need to make autoexec.bat/config.sys changes or worry about your lower 640K memory, so it was like a completely new platform.   Windows games couldn't run in DOS and DOS games sometimes had trouble running in Win95,  I kept a DOS boot disk around for awhile for those troublesome games.

[wierd_w]

Here's something fun!

 

https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU

 

Use with jemm386, jemmex, or qemm 7 or higher.

 

It seems to work on my old potato toshiba laptop, but the volume's a bit low.

Edited July 13, 2023 by wierd_w

[82-T/A]

On 7/12/2023 at 3:57 PM, LatchKeyKid said:

Just curious as a question popped up in my head when I was watching videos about classic 8086 processors.   I personally lump everything from the 8086/88 to the 486 into DOS gaming and pretty much define the next generation with Windows 95 and the Pentium processor.  As someone relatively oblivious to the PC retro scene, is that generally true for others?  On the one hand, the 486 was the last of the processors in the "86" name that came out in the 80's whereas the Pentium (along with Windows 95) both came out in the 90's and ruled most of that decade instead.  On the flip side, the Pentium came out before Windows 95 and was around for two years of pure DOS gaming but I don't really mentally lump it into that category which lasted until the multicore chips started coming out along with Vista in the mid '00s.  I fully admit there may be a personal bias at play because I only upgraded to a Pentium after Windows 95 came out but figured I'd ask.

 

Obviously, it's OK to think this way, but you want to consider the time frame of this change. I worked at CompUSA when I was in high school. I worked there for basically a year before I graduated and went off to college... so this was from 1994-1995 time period. I was there for the Windows 95 roll out, and being in the DC Metro Area (the one in Tyson's Corner), I even got to sell Win95 to Tom Brokaw when he came in (though I had no idea who he was because I was a teenager and didn't watch the news).

 

Anyway, the point is that this was 1995. By this point in time, the Pentium 133 had already been released and was available for hard-core gamers or people doing CAD or significant math functions. The P90 was already fairly common at that point, and many people had the Pentium 60 already. But also during this time, you had a lot more competition for operating systems as I'll explain.

 

Windows 95, when it came out, wasn't immediately adopted by everyone. The newer computers started coming out with it, but literally just a few days before release... you still had computer companies selling their computers with everything from OS/2 Warp, GeoWorks, etc. Matter of fact, just a few years before, I bought a Leading Edge computer that came pre-loaded with GeoWorks. Most people, if they had Windows at all... it was Windows 3.1 or 3.0 still. People didn't upgrade as often, because other than gamers, you could still pretty much do the same thing on a 386 DX-33 as you could a Pentium 133... and that is, connect to Prodigy or CompuServe, use Word Perfect 5.1, or use the digital Encylopedia Britannica, etc. 

 

I'd say that by the time Windows 98 came out, pretty much everyone had moved to Windows entirely. But even at that point, most games were still DOS based, and didn't use the Windows kernel at all. It really wasn't until Windows 2000 (using the NT architecture) that games actually started to make use of the Windows operating system, rather than simply viewing it as a shell to get out of. Just some examples... games like Doom and Quake were all DOS based. Quake came out after Windows 95 did, but was still DOS based. It took at least 3 years before most companies started making their games exclusively Windows-based. I'd say that 1997-1998 time frame was when companies really started moving to Windows. It was part of the reason why Windows 98 was released was because there was such difficulty with the OS's ability to work with different hardware, the quickly changing technology (XT/AT to modern BUS, serial to USB, ~Sound Blaster to AC'97 compatibility, etc.). There were so many iterations at that time, that they had to keep releasing version after version because there was no specific mechanism for handling updates properly. You had Windows 95, Windows 95 Plus (came with other features), and then the service packs, and then Windows 98, and Windows 98 SE (which is the best of the "DOS BASED" Windows OSes). Until they finally released Windows 2000... which solved almost all of these problems by bringing it into the NT architecture.

 

Funny thing is, a lot of people don't understand this, but Windows Longhorn (Vista), uses the exact same kernel as what's being used in Windows 7, Windows 8, and even Windows 10 uses 90% of the original Windows Vista kernel. Windows 11 appears to be the first one with a totally re-designed kernel.

 

 

On 7/12/2023 at 4:01 PM, Gemintronic said:

DOS gaming was still a thing until Win ME really, really hid access to the command line. 

 

I never used Windows ME because I'd made the jump from Windows 98 SE to Windows 2000, and I kind of viewed ME as a really shit version of Windows XP. But I think if I remember correctly, it came out before Windows XP and was supposed to be the "jump" from Windows 98 to the features that people desired from Windows 2000 (and what would come from Windows XP), but still on the old x95 kernel... so still only 16-bit and not on the NT Architecture?

 

When Windows 95 came out, there was a file you could edit... a hidden file, I think it was MSDOS.SYS in the root C folder, and there was a line called "BootGUI=1"

 

If you changed the 1 to a 0, it would boot to DOS... and a lot of us gamers in the mid to late 90s would do this so that we could go into whatever game we wanted to.

 

Man, all of this brings back memories of living in an apartment at 19. I'd dropped out of college, worked at a hardware store, and just played games over the weekend. I shudder now at how carefree I was about my future and how little I actually thought about anything other than day to day. No plans, no goals... just living day to day and having fun. It wasn't until one of my friends offered me a job at a market research company before I became a programmer, went back to school, met my (now) wife, and the next 20+ years is history. LOL...

 

 

On 7/12/2023 at 4:04 PM, LatchKeyKid said:

You're technically correct but that wasn't the impression most gamers will have given the differences in experience/interface.   Do you consider the Pentium as part of the retro DOS gaming scene then?

 

Totally. The Pentium came out in the 90s. Granted, by the mid-90s, most gamers were still using a 486 because they were expensive... but the Pentium was what more or less bridged the gap between the DOS and Windows era. Pentiums really became popular around ~95, at the same time that Windows was starting to receive full adoption (which I would put in the ~97 time frame).

[wierd_w]

WinME was 'a shit version of win2k'.

 

It used the same version of WDM, but strapped to a hybrid real/flat mode kernel from 9x, rather than pure flatmode, like 2k. It thus had issues with drivers right out of the gate. Software expecting to walk all over hardware and software like it could with 9x, found that the system 'took umbrage', and shit broke. A Lot.

 

I too avoided it, and early-adopted win2k, and just used vdmsound for my dos games. (DosBox too immature on its emulation core.)

 

I too was 'in the trenches' of retail during the 90s as a teenager, and did my best to understand the other OS offerings out there.

 

There was a fair amount of buzz about BeOS and BeBoxes in the early 2000s, but it dried up fairly quickly.

 

Neither OS/2 nor BeOS actually completely died though. The first became eComStation, (and now, ArcaOS), and the latter became Minuet and co.

 

Geoworks dried up and blew away.

 

Linux has risen to prominence in server and client roles. (Though I use it as a desktop just fine.)

 

 

[Austin]

On 7/12/2023 at 3:57 PM, LatchKeyKid said:

Just curious as a question popped up in my head when I was watching videos about classic 8086 processors.   I personally lump everything from the 8086/88 to the 486 into DOS gaming and pretty much define the next generation with Windows 95 and the Pentium processor.  As someone relatively oblivious to the PC retro scene, is that generally true for others?  On the one hand, the 486 was the last of the processors in the "86" name that came out in the 80's whereas the Pentium (along with Windows 95) both came out in the 90's and ruled most of that decade instead.  On the flip side, the Pentium came out before Windows 95 and was around for two years of pure DOS gaming but I don't really mentally lump it into that category which lasted until the multicore chips started coming out along with Vista in the mid '00s.  I fully admit there may be a personal bias at play because I only upgraded to a Pentium after Windows 95 came out but figured I'd ask.

The Pentium is also known as the 586, however, Intel eventually dropped that numbering scheme in later follow-ups (i.e., the Pentium II).

 

But yeah, trying to lump certain processor types into a theoretical "DOS era" gets kinda muddy. DOS titles were continued to be developed and released at retail well into the late '90s, despite Windows '95 and '98 becoming the standard. Given you could still go into pure DOS mode in those operating systems, maybe we could look at the late '90s as being more of a transitional period of the "DOS era".

Edited July 29, 2023 by Austin

[wierd_w]

"DOS gaming" has epochs within its own genre.

You have:

 

The Text-Based / Hercules Monochrome epoch

The CGA based Epoch

The EGA based Epoch

The MCGA/VGA Epoch

The SVGA Epoch

 

In terms of CPUs that are contemporary with each:

 

Text-based through CGA epoch is 8088 through 286, roughly.

CGA epoch through EGA Epoch is late 286 through 386

EGA epoch through early VGA epoch is 386 to 486

VGA through SVGA is 486 through early Pentium

 

Anything after that was into the "Windows Gaming" era.