Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org | Hacker News Reader

Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org

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96 pointsdragontamer37 comments

The mere site of DOS games makes me feel so nostalgic. Takes me back to when I was a kid, sat in my room playing games from the CDs that were stuck to PCWorld magazines, on the 486 (that I nagged to get upgraded from the 386, and a CD drive for). "Simpler times, happier times", I guess.

Loving the work of archive.org.

CD drive was such a massive improvement over floppy disks, a true revolution of that time. It had/has its own problems (scratches, degradation of organic stuff inside medium over time), but compared to having games on 30 floppies, split by archives, and then seeing 17th and 24th one having bad sector or some other issue... people are often nostalgic for good ol' times, but definitely not for this stuff. I wasted so much time and nerves basically doing nothing, just watching progress bar and praying it works...

There were some self-correcting archive formats back then (.par ?) which could rebuild even damaged archives by adding only few % of size, but that wasn't my story on 386 back in 1993.

My first step before installing any MS-DOS product was to copy the software, and use the backup floppies instead of the originals, naturally this did not work with those that used strange floppy formats as copy protection.

I picked up a handheld version [1] for like $10 on sale and was surprised that it was actually an excellent rendition. Then I also picked up a card game [2] at a thrift store and it was one of the worst games I have ever attempted to play, literally unwinnable. Oddly the reviews are good, which definitely makes me doubt reviews. (Exploding Kittens also gets great reviews and every game of theirs that I've played is terrible... clearly I need to stop being so credulous)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/The-Oregon-Trail-Handheld-Game/dp/B07...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Oregon-Trail-Hunt-Food-Card/dp/B074LX...

The card game has pretty low marks on Board Game Geek, so you’re not the only one:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/205322/oregon-trail-card...

My girlfriend just picked up the Carmen Sandiego one for around US$ 13 at HomeGoods Store, they are selling for $40+ on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Fun-Sandiego-Handheld-Electroni...

I really want to take it apart and see what's inside it, but it works great and I don't want to mess it up.

I've heard of this game a lot but this is the first time I played it. It was... really easy? That was unexpected. Wife got typhoid and dysentery but she survived. Baby broke an arm and a leg somehow but also survived.

At a glance it would seem like buying food is for chumps and you can easily get tons of food very quickly with hunting for a fraction of the price. Although the banker class has so much wealth they can just buy enough supplies to breeze through the entire journey up front.

Re>> "It was... really easy"

Says the guy posting on Hacker News in the year 2022. Tell that to my 6 year old self in 1990 who didn't have a computer at home and only used a computer once a week for an hour during "computer lab" time and had to share with 2 other kids equally as dumb as myself on some old Tandy computer. Personally, I much preferred Lemmings.

Eh. Yeah sure things are hard for kids who aren't very good at figuring out basic concepts. But a lot of games from that era were actually genuinely really hard and still are. I just thought this one was supposed to be a really tough game.

Haha, yes. I was being a bit snarky, I apologize if that didn't quite come through. You are completely right; it is a very easy game. I went back and played it through about 5 or 6 years ago and was surprised by how easy it was compared to my memory. I suspect that many people who played it as ankle-biters themselves probably have a skewed memory of its difficulty.

Many of the difficult games from that era were game games ~ they were difficult be design, to be brain teasers. The Oregon Trail, by comparison, falls into the educational games specifically aimed at lower-elementary school. Similar games from my school's weekly computer lab...

- Treasure Mountain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HAxdTacsgQ

- Reader Rabbit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re-3D8TSYd8

- Mixed Up Mother Goose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r28woUwTib0

- Where In The World is Carmen San Diego https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL-13NZAXuE

I played Mixed Up Mother Goose as a child and later took a job at the same company as one of the developers (not Sierra or Mattel). It was kind of disorienting.

Now try as the farmer. It was easy because you were a banker.

farmer is easy too. buy like 6 pairs of oxen, 5 sets of clothes, spare of wheel/axel/tongue. and the vast majority of the rest on bullets with like 100lb of food to just get you started

then you just hunt and hunt and hunt and hunt. and only shoot at bison/bears and the occasional pair of deers.

and then you trade primarily trading food for anything else (as food is cheap to you, 100lb should just cost 1-3 bullets on average depending how bad a shot you are)

For an extra challenge I play on hard mode: Spend all your money on grandfather clocks.

This is what I planned to do for a second run as farmer. I got hit with a fire and lose all my clothes near the start. I found that to be pretty funny. Hunting was too tedious to see if it was still a viable run in the long run.

Hunting was half the fun though!

I would agree if you were allowed to leave once you collected all the meat you could carry.

That mattered less (mostly) when you were six and the alternatives were Mavis Beacon or a multiplication worksheet :-)

I remember racing to complete multiplication worksheets for candy prizes. They were super fun.

I know this is the DOS version, but seeing this makes me hear a juddering Apple II floppy drive in my head every time.

Yeah, this looks and plays positivity premium compared to the green-on-black Apple II+ we had in school.

Back from a time when developing a game meant porting it to half a dozen different systems with wildly different capabilities and expectations.

Twin Cities public television has a nice documentary on the creation of Oregon Trail

https://youtu.be/QpV7dCBB3o8

I had no idea this was a minicomputer BASIC game. My middleschool's HP-2100 had Star Trek, but not Oregon Trail.

https://www.filfre.net/2011/03/on-the-trail-of-the-oregon-tr...

Here is a link to the HP-2100 game being played:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAI8Ysqbq7E

Here's the code:

https://www.filfre.net/misc/oregon1975.bas

My nostalgic Oregon Trail version was the deluxe one from 1992. It has VGA graphics and MIDI!

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_Deluxe_The_19...

It brings back many fond memories - this is the game that made me start programming as a teenager!

I died of Dysentery

Apparently you got better.

Don't die of dissent' Terry.

Kids these days just don’t understand old school games. No saves and can’t turn off the console. Not to mention brutal games like Oregon Trail where you could just randomly die of Dysentery and game over. Guess I’ll have to ask my mom for a GamePro mag or strategy guide so I can beat it.

My favourite game from around that time is Ports of Call:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Ports_of_Call_1989

Ok, having really gotten into optimizing games in the years since Long Covid took me out of the labor pool. (I played universal paperclips 100 times)

It took dying a few times to finally get over my class resentment and start as a Banker (ewwww) instead of a nice honest farmer. It's better, but not a guarantee of success.

A similar game is Pirates!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJOjSQ0yv8U

I like that one of the most popular c64 games was partially written in BASIC.

Which is also available on archive org (as well as the Gold version of it): https://archive.org/details/msdos_Sid_Meiers_Pirates_1987

Related: I built a microsite to search all of the Archive.org games, to try out sql.js-httpvfs in a single-page app: arcade.gs

Shameless promotion to my twitter handle for retro tech adverts. I've been posting those amazing old tech adverts out of magazines 90s, 80s and older.

https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts

Stop by if you are on twitter.

great game, these pixel arts are gorgeous!

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