Remembering DOS-era gaming (giant jpg)

[Luke]

How could I have ever forgotten about Red Baron? Between that, Golden Axe and Willy Beamish, I'm shocked I made straight A's in middle school. My parents still have their IBM PS/1 somewhere in the basement. Might have to dig it out on my next visit.

Oh, back in the days where I would catch hell if I forgot to run shutdown before shutting down.

[noiseredux]

So the articles on the main site... we don't have anything for PC games?

...

Anyways, if some one wrote an article about DOS games for the main site, I'd definitely enjoy reading it.

yeah I feel like the idea's been kicked around in the past, but always seems too daunting an undertaking for anyone to volunteer for or something. I think maybe because "DOS gaming" is a pretty vast library. I think in order to cover any sort of PC games on RB things would have to be sort of split up. So maybe "DOS gaming of the 90's" would be one thing and "DOS gaming of the 80's" would be another. Or maybe things split up by processor eras -- grouping 286-era games in one article, 386-era in another and so on? And then I guess we could go on to publishing batches of articles from like Win95, Win2000 eras or whatever too. I don't know, just brainstorming. I'm not even quite sure Racket wants to cover PC games or not, so if anyone is especially knowledgable in this area and wants to work on an article, I'd suggest contacting him to figure it all out.

[Ziggy]

Oh, back in the days where I would catch hell if I forgot to run shutdown before shutting down.

yeah I feel like the idea's been kicked around in the past, but...

Yeah, I was actually trying to think of which group we could make a DOS article for. Defining Games? That would be kinda hard, because like you said, the library is vast. Hidden Gems is also possible, but I would much rather see a "Top X" type of article to be honest. Either that, or even Retro Gaming 101: DOS.

[CRTGAMER]

I remember that Shutdown screen! Still see it when I put in the WIN98 Drive. One nice thing about DOS was no shutdown sequence needed. Just turn the computer off, the good old days when the AT switch actually shut off the Power Supply. A lot of AT systems were standard compatibles, my PC case housed a 386SX, then a 486DX66 and finally an AMD 550Mhz. I think the fasted chip and board one could buy in the old AT setup.

A DOS gaming article would have to be huge. The DOS era had milestones of modern gaming with shareware, online gaming and FPS. Wolfenstein 3D really brought in the shareware concept and was huge, that FPS game and Future Crew Demos were the show off screens at computer shows. Come to think about it, the annual computer shows used to be huge, rows and rows of "Swap Meet" tables set up full of PC games. I remember at one show a Broderbund sales rep was confronting another vendor. The other clearing house vendor was selling "Not For Resale" Living Books bundles on the cheap, inexpensive computer games were a common thing to see at the shows.

Maybe just reviews of individual games as a starter? The published article could draw from the reviews and encompass the chip speed stages of 286-386SX-486DX. The hot rod chip of the day had the "Math Coprocessor", your computer was a wimp without the DX tag. The article could even go into the boot memory aspects of HIMEM,SYS and EMM386.EXE using the CHOICE.COM command.

Anyone remember XT which predated the 286? I tried to run a game from that era many years ago on a 486DX66; the game was unplayable because the computer was too fast!

[Key-Glyph]

So good. I have such a soft spot for these games.

[Erik_Twice]

What I find surprising is how fast computer games evolved technologically. Until 1990 or so, it seems everything was made for 1977 hardware, like the Apple II and they were seriously ugly. It's surprising how much everything changed in so little time.

[BoringSupreez]

What I find surprising is how fast computer games evolved technologically. Until 1990 or so, it seems everything was made for 1977 hardware, like the Apple II and they were seriously ugly. It's surprising how much everything changed in so little time.

It's because until Maxis and id came along, PC wasn't taken all that seriously as a gaming platform. There was no reason to push any limits.

[emwearz]

Damn Whacky Wheels was awesome.

[RCBH928]

How about Jazz or theme park?

Of the good things I remember about DOS is that games were usually very broad in range (not just FPS like now days) You get stuff from Doom to Monkey Island to Phantasmagoria to theme hospital.

Also I do not remember DOS having errors or failing, or telling me your computer is not good enough to run this game. It run was some where near flawless

[ZeroAX]

haha. I had forgotten that Tomb Raider was a DOS game.