Wow there goes 45' replaying Dune 2! Thanks.
DOS Zone
51–60 of 87 posts
Re: DOS Zone
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still not correct to call them DOS games as you can't run them on DOS.
That is an interesting semantic question, though - I would say something that needs an extender still counts as a "DOS" program, and I can't quite see the line between that and early Windows. I believe the line exists, mind, but I can't figure out how to define it.
Some of these games are absolutely not DOS games though and no amount of semantics can change that. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City requires Windows 98 and DX9 or newer, for example, and it is available here.
edit: I see Vice City has been removed following a DMCA request!
Re: DOS Zone
#53My games! My youth.
Most of them are here.
Feels good .
Re: DOS Zone
#54First thing I did was pull up Sim City 3000 (I have so many hours of play time on this that never got recorded anywhere) to see if the simulation speed goes nutso like I remember on my old Windows ME MS-DOS Compaq back in the day. Every time I played the game on any XP or newer PC I get speed limited in Cheetah mode and it feels like it takes _forever_ for my city to develop. Not even installing WindowsME on an emula…
by our age an. experience we finally know how to edit binaries or inject code to cheat in any way possible heheh
Re: DOS Zone
#55What the...? Those aren't DOS games, there are plenty Windows DirectX-based games in this site.
Fun fact: earlier Windows OSes ran on top of DOS.
Windows 1-3 ran on top of DOS, with a small caveat for Windows 3.x
Windows 3.x running in 386 Enhanced Mode had a very small multi-threaded preemptive kernel, which it used to handle its MS-DOS windows. So whilst each Windows program ran cooperatively within Windows and had no memory protection, Windows itself and each DOS window it opened were pre-emptively multitasked and had better memory protection. This wasn't very well documented, but it's the beginnings of Windows no longer running on top of DOS and instead taking over control of the machine.
Windows 3.1 also introduced "32 Bit Disk Access" which used a custom disk driver to bypass DOS and the BIOS and speed things up. Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups) extended that to "32 Bit File Access", which bypassed DOS for file operations.
Windows 95 only used DOS as a bootstrapper. It would be completely incorrect to say that Windows 95 "ran on top of DOS", as once Windows 95 finished booting it had effectively pulled the rug out from DOS and was handling all I/O, memory operations, and so forth. It would be like saying that Linux runs on top of GRUB - GRUB is no longer in control of the machine, so it's just not true.
Not that I'm saying you were stating Windows 95 ran on top of DOS, you understand! I'm just putting this information here for educational reasons and expanding on your comment. ;-)
Re: DOS Zone
#56First thing I did was pull up Sim City 3000 (I have so many hours of play time on this that never got recorded anywhere) to see if the simulation speed goes nutso like I remember on my old Windows ME MS-DOS Compaq back in the day. Every time I played the game on any XP or newer PC I get speed limited in Cheetah mode and it feels like it takes _forever_ for my city to develop. Not even installing WindowsME on an emula…
Doesn't this just run in the browser?
Re: DOS Zone
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still not correct to call them DOS games as you can't run them on DOS.
That is an interesting semantic question, though - I would say something that needs an extender still counts as a "DOS" program, and I can't quite see the line between that and early Windows. I believe the line exists, mind, but I can't figure out how to define it.
Yeah, many of the things we consider part of what an "Operating System" provides to programs today were provided by DOS Extenders (or forwarded to something like windows if running under that).
DPMI was pretty much an "Operating System API/ABI".
Re: DOS Zone
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but in defense of the author site and from a personal perspective, the copyright laws are very skewed and allow for being paid for life for a craft that has been made once. Even heirs benefit from it for life. Isn't that wildly unfair for all the other jobs where you are paid for your work once for all? And irrespectively from the fact that what you designed has been produced by the million and still running...
> allow for being paid for life for a craft that has been made once It costs on average 7$ to buy a craft that took maybe 2 years for a team of 10 developers (since we are speaking of DOS era games). Are you suggesting such works should have been paid 7$ just once by one person? Reasoning like this is why most gaming companies pivoted to either use Denuvo or to make pay-to-win, ad-filled products. I cannot blame them…
Let's not pretend any of the original developers from the early 2000s or even worse, from the 90s get any money from these old games you buy.
Re: DOS Zone
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> allow for being paid for life for a craft that has been made once It costs on average 7$ to buy a craft that took maybe 2 years for a team of 10 developers (since we are speaking of DOS era games). Are you suggesting such works should have been paid 7$ just once by one person? Reasoning like this is why most gaming companies pivoted to either use Denuvo or to make pay-to-win, ad-filled products. I cannot blame them…
Let's not pretend any of the original developers from the early 2000s or even worse, from the 90s get any money from these old games you buy.
The site pirates games that are still being sold by their original devs, like “Ports of Call”. Even for some games published by bigger companies, some of the original developers get a small cut on lifetime sales. So I don't need to “pretend” anything.
Re: DOS Zone
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not pretend any of the original developers from the early 2000s or even worse, from the 90s get any money from these old games you buy.
The site pirates games that are still being sold by their original devs, like “Ports of Call”. Even for some games published by bigger companies, some of the original developers get a small cut on lifetime sales. So I don't need to “pretend” anything.
That can happen yes but it's rare, usually they just got their salary and the rights were sold/re-sold/sold again to larger media conglomerates merge after merge.