91–99 of 99 posts
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.
Scorched Earth was my favorite among that list. I spent many hours playing it on my Packard Bell 486x.
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,…
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 "toolk…
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.
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.
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?
Are "Capture the Flag" and "Scorched Earth" really that obscure?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 "toolk…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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_...
