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

arstechnica.com

71–80 of 99 posts

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

#71

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 wa…

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

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

#72
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.

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

#73
post #27

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 o…

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.

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

#74

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,…

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.

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

#75
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...

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

#76
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.

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

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

#80

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,…

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...
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