Remembering the best shareware-era DOS games that time forgot (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Remembering the best shareware-era DOS games that time forgot (2019)

arstechnica.com

130 pointsTomte95 comments

I was a kid/teenager in the 90s with little money and nowhere to spend it, so I pretty much lived on shareware games from cover disks. Scorched Earth felt almost like a pioneer(?) of the "you can customize every variable" game in a pre-mod era.

That "Capture the Flag" has a very specific aesthetic and looks very NeoPaint-y. I'm sure I saw a few games use that style. Was it a specific GUI toolkit?

While I'm rambling, I want to throw Conquest (1992) into the mix as it's where I got the bug for Risk and it, too, was very customizable like Scorched Earth: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Conquest_1992

Almost everyone in the DOS world built their own little GUI toolkit, implementing exactly as much was needed for each app. That was part of the charm IMO. We had a Cambrian explosion of graphical and interaction styles. Then things got gray, uniform and boring with Windows 3.1/95, and then fun again with the early web. I'm looking forward to the next fun UI style period - perhaps it will start with AR.

The GUI "toolkit" used by that CTF game (1993) looks like it was partially "inspired" by Borland's OWL for Windows 3.x (1991).

Comparison:

CTF Game: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Captu...

Borland OWL: https://sourceforge.net/p/owlnext/wiki/Replacing_usage_of_BW...

I wonder if it used Graphics Vision which was a GUI toolkit for DOS graphics mode that was compatible with Borland's Turbo Vision text GUI library. It resembled the look of OWL.

I had a fun mini hunt. I couldn't find anything earlier than 1995 - but I absolutely did not exhaust the search space.

The bitmaps for OK/Cancel don't match here:

https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe/mkm/gv210-1.gif

(From https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe/mkm/)

I say - still likely.

Do you remember the shareware games website HappyPuppy?

For some reason, a few years ago I tried to find out what happened to them, but it's like there's nothing but a few archive.org captures.

I first visited HappyPuppy in a text only browser, no idea what it was called, I was probably running Win 3.1 at the time. This brings back memories, very vague memories...

We loved Sleuth in our house. So much so that about ten years ago, I made a quick rewrite in JS with the permission of the original author. It's not completely identical by any means, but pretty similar, and still enjoyable to play.

Sleuth JS: https://www.bencollier.info/sleuth/

For the fully authentic experience, there's a version (or several) of the original DOS game on archive.org, of course.

Does anyone remember Redhooks Revenge? It was a maritime-themed trivia board game with risk battle mechanics for DOS. You can see the original here:

https://archive.org/details/RedhooksRevenge

I actually received permission from ImagiSOFT to build the sequel, titled Redhook's Revenge: Call of Booty which adds in 1000s of general trivia questions, which is freely available on itch.io:

https://specularrealms.itch.io/redhooks-revenge-ii-call-of-b...

I remember. I never imagined Is ever actually get any friends to play along with me but I also never imagined there'd be a sequel!

Yes! My mother and I would play this quite a bit together! Though it would always crash on us during certain quiz segments. But it certainly was the first time I learned of the term 'Union Jack.'

I'll give your sequel a try! Thanks for the nostalgic reminder!

I have fond memories of the thriving shareware/freeware game scene in mid 90s Finland. It was a legitimate cultural phenomenon, like demoscene to which it was closely related. Titles such as Auts, Wings, Turboraketti, Triplane Turmoil gave rise to a genre of their own, luolalentely or "cavern flying". Split-screen (and shared-keyboard) multiplayer was, of course, the way to play all of these. Other legendary titles of various genres include MineBombers, Tapan Kaikki, Liero…

Turboraketti! It spread well in Sweden too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boaddp6MPpc

Had to look those up on YouTube (had a Mac, not a PC). I am definitely missing that era of gaming. I'm wanting to write and play 90's games again.

Secret Agent ftw! Wacky Wheels! Commander Keen!

Will always have a soft spot for CK!

My dad introduced me to Keen, Prince of Persia (and other classics like Doom and Wolfenstein etc.) when I was tiny.

I still recall how he contrasted the comical/arcade-y movement in Keen to the "realistic" movement in PoP. I was 3 or 4 years old, mind. It was great to see this [1] on HN the other day - it led me to this [2] video which kind of served to explain to my dad and I how he got the movement so right. Sorry weird tangent.

Two other games I remember enjoying was The Incredible Machine and Chip's Challenge. TIM was amazing! Must remember to dig that out if I ever have kids.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538026 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbk5qH2-1S8

I believe both TIM and Chip's Challenge are available on Archive to play in browser.

The first game I remember playing on my own is the first Commander Keen. I was very proud of being able to start and run it on my own from DOS (I was 3; using a text-only input mode is difficult when you're pre-literate!)

Commander Keen was the first game I ever played. Took me a long while to figure out he had a raygun. Shooting was some weird combination of inputs, like ctrl+space, not the first thing you try.

... also

* Raptor: Call of the Shadows.

* Magus.

* Jill of the jungle.

* Mystic Towers.

* Terminal Velocity.

The Psygnosis logo was legit the coolest thing I ever saw when I was single digit years old.

>> Shooting was some weird combination of inputs, like ctrl+space, not the first thing you try.

Ctrl - jump

Alt - pogo stick (after you obtained it)

Ctrl Alt (pressed at the same time) - fire blaster

If you did not time it well you could end up doing an "advanced" pogo high jump (by pressing Alt just before Ctrl) when you intended to zap a Vorticon.

Commander Keen 4 improved the controls with a dedicated fire button. It also had one of the best control schemes, gameplay, and art for that generation of platform games.

Yes! I get the intent of link's list as little-known games, but Command Keen (and the precursor id team) and Escape Velocity feel like they should at least be mentioned.

They're far enough back a lot of people won't be aware of them, yet modern enough they're still playable.

I bought raptor on steam a while back...

Pharaohs Tomb stands out in my memory. An early apogee game (pre commander keen) - I haven’t played it since floppy disks came in two sizes, but man was I into this game https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/pharaohs-tomb/

I played the hell out of a game that only had 4 colors. 'Pyromaniac' and the filename was pyroman.exe (It looked a lot like sleuth, the first game on the list). You had to go through buildings trailing a burning fuse that you couldn't let catch you, and also there were cans of gas that would explode across several walls. Higher levels required quite a bit of strategy, intentionally starting fires so they would burn out by the time you needed to go through the area, strategic placing of gas cans etc.

Make it to the final level you get to burn down the Kremlin. Good times.

Please don't tell the parole board, I'm still doing 8 to 20 for arson.

All games had only 4 Colors in cga

But some of us had EGA or VGA in that era. In fact, some of the screenshots in the article shows more than 4 colors.

Composite CGA is 16 color.

Composite CGA was Tandy only. Can confirm stock CGA was 4 color, 4 different palettes which allowed IBM to claim "16 colors*"

Nope. All CGA cards supported a composite 16-color mode with reduced horizontal resolution. You're thinking of the PCJr and Tandy specific modes which support higher resolutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#With_a_...

That’s text mode with graphics characters.

You might like Pyro II v2.2 - https://archive.org/details/PyroV2.2.3SW1991MichaelOBrienAct...

This is the game, thank you for finding it for me. I mis-remembered the name. I'll give it a go again when I get home.

There's a certain time period where I feel like everyone remembered their games by the DOS executable name.

piratesg.exe

One of my favorite games was Liga [0] (German for league, a football managing simulation), got the shareware in some gaming mag, later sent 5 DM in an envelope to the author and got an envelope with a floppy disk of the full version back :D Not quite DOS Era, but still old. The only DOS game I played was Prince of Persia at my dad’s workplace because we didn’t have a family PC until Win 95.

[0]: http://www.ligapro.de/ (Not Liga Pro, scroll down further to "Liga 1.24 als Vollversion", apparently it’s free, nowadays :D)

I played a text based adventure game called (I think) “Bad King” that was on one of those “1000 free programs” shareware/freeware CD’s when I was a youngster. Every time I try to find it on the internet I’m stumped. It was my first introduction to text based adventure games, so I’m dying to find it. If anyone has heard of it please drop a line!

Also I believe on the same or similar shareware CD was Stars 2.b. That was my first experience using a LAN to play a multiplayer game with other people. That’s been easier to find, and still a nostalgia bomb for me.

There's groups on facebook (classic gaming) or reddit (/r/tipofmyjoystick) that will help out if you can describe it.

this one https://archive.org/details/BADKING ?

I still have some DOS games on my computer, including ZZT (which is now FOSS), Pharaoh's Tomb (from Apogee), Jill of the Jungle, and others, including some that I had written by myself. Apogee and Epic made other DOS games too.

I did not know of many games listed in this article, so I will read that too, now.

Scorched Earth was my favorite among that list. I spent many hours playing it on my Packard Bell 486x.

You can actually still buy it: http://www.whicken.com/scorch/index.html

I wish it was on gog or steam. I'm lazy but would love to just have it work on the steam deck without me buying it, backing up the zip, configuring dosbox etc...

Seems you should be able to play at least the Shareware version online: https://archive.org/details/msdos_SCORCH15_shareware

EDIT: this seems to be the full one, but I'm not sure how one would check (never played this game): https://archive.org/details/ScorchedEarth

I would not call "forgotten" Scorched Earth. Even there is a remake in 3d.

Atomic Tanks is an open source clone of Scorched Earth taking it to it's natural conclusion. Then there's the open source 3d version... Scorched3d. Still a good time waster when you are on hold.

Scorched Earth was great fun. Was going to suggest Nuclear War, but I see that's actually from '89...

I found a Jill of the Jungle box in a land fill a decade ago.

I also remember cosmo's cosmic adventure, jetpack, dungeons of drakklor, galactix, vga miner, Hugo's house of horrors 1-3, ancients, kilo blaster, skyroads, dracula, xargon, captain comic, commander keen, chopper commando, ken's labyrinth, brix, solar winds.

Never heard of the ones in the article.

I wish these were all available on Android so that I could play them on my phone.

However, UI issues, my own technical incompetence and laziness (if they don't come up after a Play Store search then I don't check much further) stand in the way.

Unless someone has any suggestions? I would think DosBox would not work well on a small screen?

I think it would depend on the game you were running.

Monitor resolutions were low in the DOS days so a lot of the text and UI elements were relatively large to make them readable.

The virtual keyboard mapping would probably be the hard part.

DoxBox does IMO work well on Android but it's clunky to set up - you likely need some variant of a "hacker keyboard" installed to make initial setups easier for games, and then AFAIK you'll probably need to also install another keyboard of choice that supports the buttons your game needs.

All in all it likely is worth it for some games if you're nostalgic enough for them but don't feel like playing them when you're at your PC.

I've had more success playing old PlayStation games, personally (on ePSXe these days but I've used RetroArch in the past, which I should probably look at using again).

Thank you. Sounds like DosBox is worth it. I will give it a shot!

I second DosBox. Always fun playing Oregon Trail (on Win 3.1 no less!) on my Android phone

Say it with me kids Jazz Jackrabbit.

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was my childhood in the late 90s. That plus MPlayer was the height of online multiplayer for me. Turns out all you needed was 56k for a lovely online experience.

Traffic Department 2192 was a favorite of mine for it's edgy plot and awesome music.

The Land. http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=The_Land

Islands of Danger. https://archive.org/details/IslandsOfDangerTheV3.2SW1991Carr...

Moraff's World https://dosgames.com/game/moraffs-world/

I was going to bring up Carr Software's Capture the Flag as soon as I saw the headline, and was pleasantly surprised to see it made the cut for the article. A few years ago I finally got around to ordering the full version for my dad, and it was nice getting to tell Mr. Carr how much we had enjoyed his game over the years.

Carr also made Pirate Battles and Treasure Island, at least one of which I remembered from my childhood, whereas I've never played Capture the Flag.

The sprites used in the shareware game I played remained etched in my memory, along with the red and blue colors for the teams, the top-down view with vibrant colors, the Windows 95 GUI, and keywords like "trapper" and "scout" (the other game apparently had "digger") but I had forgotten the name over the years and took me a lot of searching to find it again.

There are some communities like Reddit's tipofmyjoystick that are geared towards locating games by description, and the process inspired me to contribute to curation/catalog sites for games. Abandonware sites fulfill much of that latter niche now, but these are not abandonware!

After I found the game's name, I found that there were very few Google search results for "shareware pirate battles carrsoft" or "shareware treasure island carrsoft". There's room for more shareware catalogs and searchable, browseable thematic directories.

He still sells a bundle of his games at carrsoft.com and I bought them recently. Highly recommend!

Epic MegaGames had some great shareware games: https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/profile/epic-megagames

I remember playing OverKill a lot and I think we actually ended up purchasing the full game to unlock the remaining planets.

Are they related to today’s Epic?

Yes -- they dropped the "Mega" in 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games

Once I get my arms around gamedev a little more, one of my planned projects is a remake of Fire Fight[0], which isn't on this list but it's still in the spirit of the thread.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Fight

ZZT and One Must Fall 2097 were my favorites.

I remember having a large collection of shareware DOS games. Once playing one of the games our family PC died. My father blamed me for contracting a virus from those shareware games. So I stopped playing them. Now I'm pretty sure it was actually a disk failure because of the specific sound the HDD made.

Absolute favorite: Ragnarok / Valhalla by Norsehelm Productions, released 1992-1995.

https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2020/02/game-354-ragnarok-19...

There is a new book on the history of shareware - "Shareware heroes". It's a good overview. https://unbound.com/books/shareware-heroes/

Unsure if DOS, but I rather enjoyed Quenzar's Caverns: https://archive.org/details/QuenzarsCaverns_1020

There was also a game called God of Thunder where you play as Thor that played in a fashion like Legend of Zelda (collect items, bring to an NPC to advance, fight bosses) but can't think of the name now. It was playable in DOSBox on Windows 7, haven't tried it elsewhere yet. IIRC, you had to type in the run commands rather than just double-click to play, but that may have been me not taking time to set up something easier.

Special mention to Sango Fighter, it was a Street Fighter knock off that actually played pretty dang good on a 486/33, had decent art if not great audio. Mechanics overall were not bad but not amazing.

I consider epic pinball something that time has forgotten, mostly because I am amazed there has not been a proper spiritual successor (that I am aware of)

Moraff's world was my first experience with a 'roguelike'.

Randomly generated worlds, rpg stats, trippy monster art. Had a NESW view, more or less turn based.

Anyone have the Shareware Breakthrough disc? Was a CD a with a red brick texture. Wonder how much time I sunk into that when I was a kid.

I don’t remember a lot of the games off the top of my head except Merlin and Gladiator https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wZaK-yH50eA

archive.org has many results for "Shareware Breakthrough", look through them to find the right one.

I remember playing games along the same lines (a few years earlier than the author) on the Amiga buried in free game archives and collections. Or possibly early networked systems; my memory's cloudy.

I haven't seen them again. I've always wondered if some of them were partially finished personal projects that never were released widely enough to survive.

There was this "Star Trek" game for the early PC. (Fly your ship around, defeat bad guys, dock at starbases...)

Pretty sure they managed to use every character in the character set, and every color as well.

It was real time, and even had good sound effects (for a raw PC speaker).

And it was unplayable off of a 4.77MHz machine.

Can't remember the name, but I recall it fondly.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, from Interplay might be a candidate?

It looked like this, in the enhanced/later version

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

Possibly you're thinking of Begin: A Tactical Starship Simulation[1]?? That, however, was not real-time at all but turn-based, since it was a direct descendant of the old mainframe Trek game.

[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/begin-a-tactical-starship...

I played that quite a bit at one point. However, after a while, you figured out some strategies that were pretty tedious but very hard for the computer to beat as I recall.

There were a bunch of games based on the original "Star Trek" game. You might be thinking of "Star Fleet"

https://www.mobygames.com/game/star-fleet-i-the-war-begins

The tell tale the I recall is that when you "warped out" (or whatever), there was a sound of the drive spinning up, since it was real time, spinning up the drive took time. When the buzz peaked, you were ready to go.

I also remember the display being more busy than what we've seen here so far.

I don't recall a splash screen, and it was all CGA.

It was definitely '84-'85 time period, a friend just bought a new Tandy 1000 from Radio Shack that we played it on.

Does anybody know the name of this DOS game with a turtle who could shoot at things (not enemies, it was non-violent as all hell), featuring puzzles and random Cyrillic letters like Ж?

Perestroika?

Paganitzu, Hugo's House of Horrors, Corncob 3D, Jetpack

Supaplex!

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21245827

Especially the commenter on my post: Rocks and Diamonds is great.

cosmos cosmic adventure

They forgot to mention Pizza Tycoon :)

Are "Capture the Flag" and "Scorched Earth" really that obscure?

Probably not. Both of these were staple party games in my household.

Scorched Earth was well known in my group of friends; Capture the Flag was not known at all.

Sorry. I was too busy playing a DOS port of Nethack I found on a dial-up BBS...

Pouring one out for Tyrian.

Obligatory mention of my new book, Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet https://sharewareheroes.com

It tells the stories behind some of these games, and many others.

I heard your recent interview on the Retro Hour podcast. Thanks for writing this. I’m looking forward to reading it.

That was good fun. I love talking to Dan and Ravi; they always ask good questions. Hope you enjoy the book!

scorched earth is the only one of these i've played

i also loved worms, which felt like scorched earth with lemmings

Scorched Earth was so good!

Doom?

Blake Stone!

I don't think time has yet forgotten Doom

"That time forgot".

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