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Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org

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21–30 of 38 posts

Re: Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org

#21

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…

Hunting was half the fun though!

Re: Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org

#22

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 m…

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.

Re: Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org

#24

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…

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)

Re: Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org

#26
post #3

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

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

Re: Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org

#27

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…

Hunting was half the fun though!

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

Re: Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org

#28

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…

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.

Re: Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)
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