Software Library: MS-DOS Games | Hacker News Reader

Software Library: MS-DOS Games

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112 pointsBrajeshwar50 comments

The game I made in high school is up there. You need to hit ctrl-f12 about 4 times for it to run at a reasonable speed.

https://archive.org/details/bob_and_his_amazing_journey_home

Clearly not optimized for mobile. I love it.

It's funny to see the first three there and feel so much nostalgia.

Prince of Persia: Massive nostalgia for the sound of those first 5-6 notes of the intro music in bold OPL3 MIDI, out of my oversized computer speakers. Inviting my friend over one weekend to play it, only to cheer him on as he beat the entire game. "...maybe you jump through the mirror...?!"

Doom: HS Physics teacher bribe. "In my hands I'm holding a stack of floppy disks with the Alpha version of a game called Doom. If you work hard today..." Worked so hard. Massive jump-scare weekend with friends over.

Wolf3D: "There's a full copy on the drafting class computers, and you don't have to shell out of anything, they boot straight to a DOS prompt!" What??! Incredible. Made every computer class after that year seem so restrictive. You'd walk in expecting to see CAD being done, and instead you'd see Wolf3D, POV-Ray experimentation, computer programming, and "I don't care, as long as you get your work done, hee hee" was the only response from the teacher. Loved that guy.

First time I played Doom as a kid I had nightmares for weeks. Looking at it now...

I remember being blown away by how intense and visceral the experience was, it probably helped I played it on my uncle's top tier 486 with a great sound system. Whenever I look at screen shots these I'm kind of shocked how pixelated the sprites were, I guess it wasn't a concern at the time.

CRT monitors made things look so much more vivid than on LCD. So when you look at old games today and think «Did it really look this bad and pixelated?», the answer is actually «no».

Ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_e...

Edit: typo

Doom didn't cause me nightmares as a kid, but when Dead Space got released I bought it, played a bit, then stopped because I didn't enjoy the jump scares at all. And I was an adult. Well made without question, but not for me.

I thought even Wolfenstein was creepy; today, not so much.

Are we losing our imagination or just becoming numb?

You should have seen Blood.

Indeed. We used to play different puzzle games after we finished the work in our Math Computer Lab. I was obsessed with Aargh! back then.

https://imgur.com/a/xwhp61J

It's very cathartic and nostalgic to go back and finish this one.

To this day I still think Prince of Persia is one of the best videogames ever made.

Don't get me wrong, Doom and Wolf3D were impressive tech breakthroughs and I played and enjoyed the hell out of them. But unlike them, Prince of Persia is still a genuinely good and enjoyable game, with impressive animations.

The sounds of the prince yelling while falling or being chopped in half are deeply ingrained in my brain...

Some personal picks of the DOS era: Basstour (somehow great fishing sim), BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception (RPG way before its time), Budokan (AFAIK still the most varied such game produced), Civilization (the original - "6,000 years of history in 640K"), Colonization, Descent (first free 3D action), Hero Quest series, Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries (best early sim), Pyro II (hilarious, original and addictive), Sid Meier's Pirates! (still play this!), Railroad Tycoon, Stargoose, Stunts (unmatched), The Land (huge indy dev effort), Transport Tycoon Deluxe (unmatched), Warlords II (hotseat). Of course, Dune 2 for its legacy popularizing the RTS genre from an obscure Amiga start, and Warcraft 1 & 2 thereafter, but they're borderline unplayable now.

> BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception

Great catch there. Ultimately too short but fantastic storytelling and for its day, a real sense of freedom. I remember playing this one a lot as a little kid, as well as seeing the BattleTech/Mechwarrior manuals in bookstores and having my mind blown. I enjoyed the modern PC title but it is far more tactics-oriented than RPG. I would love to see someone build a proper modern RPG in that universe.

This doesn't give me nostalgia as much as it reminds me of the huge headaches of PC gaming during the late 90's. IRQ's, sound card settings that didn't always work, boot discs, not to mention verifying ownership with a color wheel, special glasses, or find a word in the manual.

Almost every DOS game I played was cracked, so none of those annoyances for me!

The one game which wasn't, MicroProse F-19, thought it would deter me by asking me the names of various shapes of Cold War era aircraft. As if! It only served to teach me those few shapes I didn't already know.

The copy protection quiz in the first instalment of Leisure Suit Larry taught me trivia that wasn't really applicable to real-life conversations.

That quiz was for age verification though, not copy protection.

Oops, that's right. I thought the answers were listed in the manual.

I could probably still today answer 2/3 of the Wing Commander questions without looking them up. It was 100% back when I played the game daily.

Example: Maniac's age is 23.

"Your sound card works perfectly."

HMI Module Alpha Humana on approach to Space Station Mercury!

I know this was the test sample in the sound configuration utility for a lot of mid-90s games – but do you know the origin of it? Anybody?

Anyone else remember in this era it was common to get a disc with a ton of games on it?

I remember having one as a kid with like 25 games on it and just flipping through playing each for like 10 minutes

Recall playing a lot of Ant Attack from one of those discs for some reason

Tokened shovelware, as in they shoveled as much onto a CDROM as they could. Sometimes, they'd accidentally include not just shareware but licensed software... oops.

The "Shovelware Diggers" YouTube series does a great job documenting these: https://www.youtube.com/user/Pixelmusement

Oh neat thanks for sharing that channel

I one time bought some 4 in 1 box set with Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, The Hunt for Red October, and two other games, I forget. For some reason, the games were stripped of all display drivers except glorious 4-color CGA graphics.

One game had a teal sky, and a hot pink ground, and there other had a pink sky, and teal ocean.

https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive

Thanks to that I was able to locate a game[0] I had been searching for for years by investigating likely candidates on a "1000+ Games!"[1] or somesuch CD.

[0] It was Space Exploration Mission Alpha[2]. A lunar lander clone where you play as aliens visiting all of the Sol system planets. I never did find the non-shareware Space Exploration Mission Bravo, so if anyone knows Jeffrey R. Marken please drop me a line, I'll gladly pay the $16.75.

[1] A bald-faced lie

[2] https://archive.org/details/SpaceExplorationMissionAlpha_102...

You want to check out this archive: https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive

Oof looking through that takes me back to the era of big CD binders

And scratched disks was such a problem, I remember trying weird toothpaste lifehacks to fix them

Ended up buying some games twice due to that

Yet somehow the thrill is gone these days even through we have unlimited games on the mobile app store.

By "disc", you mean CD? I remember this a lot once CD-ROM became huge in the mid 90s, but most of my DOS shareware came on 3.5 inch floppies.

Time to install dos box and replay Master of Magic, again.

That game (and x-com) helped me learn autoexe.bat and config.sys. I had to do all manner of memory, DMA, & IRQ fiddling to load a mouse and soundcard. Probably why I'm in tech today.

A trick I learned is that if you started it with wizards.exe instead of mom (don't remember if it was .com or .exe) it would skip the intro video which used about 60k more RAM than the rest of the game. Also, nwcdex (the novell CD-ROM driver) could load into either EMS or XMS while the microsoft version could not.

Getting the right command-line java options for combinations of Minecraft mods seems to be the modern equivalent

No need to even install dosbox, archive.org has a JS powered emulator right in your browser. Just press play.

So much nostalgia. Good music in those games as well

There is a text mode game called starship which is a very good game. And it is here :)

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Starship_Invasion_1984

I wasted lots of time with it years ago. Remember to reduce speed at first.

or just download eXoDOS and eXoWin

I'm curious, what's eXoWin's size? I'd guess there are a lot of CD games included.

Compressed, as distributed:

  eXoDOS: 603.8GB (562.4GiB)
  eXoWin3x: 371.3GB (345.8GiB)
  eXoScummVM: 145.0GB (135.0GiB)

Funny thing is, they say the "lite" version, which doesn't contain the games, only the frontend & metadata, is 52 _GB_!?!?! Maybe they meant MB? (No, I just checked the actual torrent, it _is_ GB...)

afair frontend includes manuals for all the games

700GB

https://archive.org/details/Scramble_20180830

yes!!! best free dos game ever!

This reminds me that I have a couple games that I still have never seen available online, I should upload them to archive.org.

Oh man, I havent played jill of the jungle in like 25 years. Thank you for this nostalgia

it's available for free on gog, too.

https://www.gog.com/game/jill_of_the_jungle_the_complete_tri...

clouds of xeen. word.

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