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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Woot! Sid Meier's Colonization is there. Hands down one of the best games of all time.

Wing Commander II collection, but no Privateer? That game is why Star Citizen even exists.

Frontier: First Encounters but no Fronter: Elite II also puzzling. Not sure I've had a computer in the least 30 years without Wing Commander or Elite II installed (or Wizardry VII, or Civ, or Daggerfall, or, or, or...)

Privateer was very tricky to run because it barely fit in 640k, and took a special config. I wonder if that makes it hard to emulate.

It was the best of the wing commander series by far.

Agree wholeheartedly, I recently came across a piece of graph paper in an old box with the systems and price histories for trading. The Righteous Fire add-on storyline was probably the best.

I wrote my own AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS menu to select the right config and sometimes run a different .BAT file again. Still have a version of it and pulled it up for nostalgia: Colonization, Warcraft, Doom2 (single and network modes) and SC 2000 were other options I had setup.

I did the same! Honestly don't remember how I figured all that stuff out without internet and stack overflow.

Also, my friends would call me and ask for the secret code to start Doom. I'd begin: "cd doom2"....

I can't quite remember how those things were figured out either, but I think it was probably partially word of mouth. Games also had tips for memory configuration in their readme files or manuals. There was also at least one book I had at home that my father had bought that had all kinds of details on the workings of DOS (and PCs of that era in general).

The good old days of floppy disk swapping!

I used to spend a bit of time browsing Computer & Game magazines at the local newsagency and library. I think some of what I picked up came from the likes of PCMag, C+VG and a lot of trial and error.

In my limited experience, it has been easier to get a good bunch of conventional memory available in DOSBox (and out of the box -- no pun intended) than it was in MS-DOS.

A freshly "booted" session seems to show 632k free right now. I can't remember ever getting that much free on MS-DOS, although my configs probably included cd-rom drivers and whatnot.

I raise you HoMM3

Heores of Might and Magic 3 was a windows release, the last game in the series playable on DOS was HoMM2.

My point was about "best games of all time". While Colonization is a good game, Heroes is the best in TBS games.

aha, but this is a thread about DOS games, which is why I got confused.

Privateer was so great. I also have some fond memories of it being one of the first games I “hacked” by editing the dialog with a hex editor.

Agreed! Love Colonization. Wish there was a remake. First game I thought of when seeing this list.

Privateer was amazing too.

There is a Civ IV-based remake:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_IV:_Colonization

It's actually a pretty good remake. I liked both this and the original a lot back in the day.

was not a fan of the gameplay modification they made in the remake, but with the addition of the fan made mod "The Authentic Colonization" it's much close to the original.

http://www.freecol.org/

There is a link between these games that means a faithful update isn't possible. Both involve slavery. In both, the player can actively trade human lives, including the capture of slaves. Even in Colonization, where such depiction may be historically accurate, it is just too sensitive an area.

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