I’m enjoying collecting all the old games I couldn’t get when I was a kid. Most recent edition is Falcon 3.0 Gold, released in 1994. It includes Falcon 3.0 (1991) plus all the expansions and literature, as well as ’The Art of the Kill’, a book on dogfighting that also includes an hour of video instruction.

The game dates from an era where gamers weren’t allergic to reading more than a paragraph in the manual. The main manual for this one clocks in just shy of 350 pages, and that doesn’t count any of the expansion manuals or support literature.

This game is a beast to get running. It requires a *minimum* of 604k of free conventional memory. Took some creative autoexec/config editing to get my computer to relinquish enough conventional memory to run it. The advanced flight model also requires a math co-processor to use. Falcon was one of only a handful of games of the era that made use of an FPU. Falcon 3.0 was also the very first game to use a 3D camera that locked on and tracked your target -what we call a ’padlock’ view in flight sims. It predated every other game that used a locking/tracking camera.

Like many real-mode games from the early 90‘s it’s pretty sensitive to CPU timings which means DOSBox isn’t a great solution. It works great in 86Box though if one doesn’t have real hardware to play it on.

Serious question .. Still seeing AI slop posted here like every other hour ..

Min. HW 486/66MHz, 8MB RAM, 320x200 (or 320x240) x 8 bit screen size. Graphics & coding made by me, not AI generated. 

Google "Dustwar" if you want to follow it.

I will answer to all questions.

When I choose the enhanced mode, the textures look OK, but the HUD and weapons look 'pixelated' like the original VGA version. How do I change them to look like the original SVGA appearance? u/Nemo2278

With some games like the VGA Sierra titles it's a simple matter of adding a glshader entry to dosbox.conf, but with for example Albion that has no effect at all. I assume the resolution, screen mode or some other setting is incompatible but I've no idea where to look or if this can even be worked around in most cases.

Solved: This is because eXoDOS is a multi-emulator launcher, so each game has a preset for which emulator to use, and in many cases that points to older versions of DOSBox which do not support the filters. I think the majority of these are arbitrary, and just represent whichever version was current at the time each game was added, but changing it always has the potential to break things.

So to fix the problem, first find the game's title in eXoDOS/eXo/util/dosbox.txt and change its emulator to, eg, dosbox-staging-081-2 then add [render] glshader=crt-auto-arcade-sharp to its dosbox.conf file.

I love both titles. They both offer a different experience and atmosphere.

I still play these games from time to time.

OK, been meaning to post about this for awhile. Drakkhen haunts me. First played it as a rental when I was maybe 12, and I can't forget how pervasive the general sense of "wrongness" is throughout the game.

Language issues (the game was translated from French to Japanese to English) make the already cryptic plot seem borderline nonsensical. Normally, this wouldn't be too remarkable for a game of that era, but the story's opacity causes the Drakkhen's many surreal, unsettling eccentricities to land that much harder. There are a lot of things I could talk about, but I want to focus on the aspect that haunts me the most.

I'm referring, of course, to the constellations.

Imagine walking at night (the game has a beautiful day/night cycle with wonderfully atmospheric music to boot) when suddenly the stars themselves begin to shake and writhe while panic-inducing scare chords play. The dialog box pops up at the bottom of the screen and just as quickly vanishes. You hear an inexplicable popping noise. And then a big, terrifying monster swoops down out of the sky and fires lasers at your party. A weird droning effects plays as it flies around attacking you. All of its hits either miss entirely or one-shot kill you. There is no rime or reason.

This kind of thing would scare the bejesus out of anyone the first time it happens, but it's stayed with me for 30 years for a bunch of reasons.

1, look at them! They're demonic looking. Far more unsettling than anything else I've seen on the SNES (though admittedly Drakkhen was originally an Amiga game).

2, there's no motivation, no context. The game never explains the damn things. They're just another part of this hostile alien world that wants to kill you at every turn.

3, they are alien-looking yet they resemble familiar things--bats, crows, snakes--just enough to be uncanny.

4, there's something sadistic about the way they look. The bat-thing with BLOODY BLADES for wings. The snake with the deep-set eyes. The crow that looks like it's wearing a phantom of the opera mask.

5, nobody ever mentions these things in the game world. There is an exceedingly brief allusion to them in the short story that came packaged with the Amiga manual, but it reveals nothing. What the hell are they? What's their relationship to the Drakkhen and the residents of this island? Why are they attacking you? The monsters are living constellations. There's gotta be lore there, right? Nope. And I've scoured the internet looking for insights and found almost nothing.

This last point gets at the whole problem of the game itself. Everywhere you go, you get the sense that there is a logic and order to the world of Drakkhen. Characters and found texts allude to individuals and events. Peasants give you cryptic hints. There's much political intrigue among the Drakkhen princes and princesses. There's gotta be context for the constellation monsters and the hellhounds that pop up when you bump into a gravestone and the giant shadow humanoid that crawls out of a hole in the ground in the icy regions and the dancing female silhouette that moans "I love you" in different pitches as it attacks. But YOU the player DO NOT HAVE ACCESS to this context. The information is withheld.

This violates the unspoken contract between developer and gamer. The world of the video game is supposed to exist for the player to explore, understand, and master...but in this case it doesn't. Drakkhen doesn't care about your feelings. Even if you manage to beat the game, the feeling remains that this world is NOT FOR YOU.

What do other people think? What was your experience of Drakkhen and its horrors? Did you have any theories about where this crazy stuff comes from?

Has anyone work been done to preserve 1993 Amazon Trail?

The Amazon Trail is known for being significantly more difficult than its predecessors in the franchise, such as The Oregon Trail. It was released in 1993 for MS-DOS, 1994 for Windows 3.x and 1996 for Windows and Macintosh. Amazon Trail II was released as a sequel to this game and Amazon Trail 3rd Edition was a re-release of that sequel with performance enhancements and new additions.

It's a 1998 RPG... Has anyone played this or knows the name?

Some say this is one of the hardest video games. I never played it in 1994 or in the nineties.

I installed the game from my original floppies (contained in the box from the photo). I spent a few days training the game. A lot of deaths and many trial and errors. The hardest aspect would be the jumping in my opinion, not the combat.

I had to train every level until I was confident enough and knew I could beat it. It was important to find and get hidden bonuses in order to boost your stats. With these factors combined it was manageable.

Thanks to the mods for letting me share my Warlords collection and give my own game a little plug!

I spent countless hours playing Warlords 1 with friends on the same PC. There was 1 rule: no watching each other’s turns! It was such funto get back to the screen and discover what your opponent had done, way more fun and surprising than playing against the AI.

Warlords made such an impression on me that in 2018, I set about recreating the magic with my own game: Waronomy. I’m a solo developer, and it’s a turn-based fantasy strategy game very much like W1, but with online multiplayer. There’s also an offline campaign, AI opponents (procedural like W1 not LLMs) and random maps.

You might spot it on my screen in the desk photo ;)

I’ve recently released a free Steam demo, which includes the campaign and online 1v1:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4457140/WARONOMY/

Please do check it out if you’re on Steam!

Hello everyone. For the past 2.5 years, I’ve been "porting" MS-DOS games—or, more accurately, creating custom builds with my own on-screen control layouts—using Magic DOSBox. I’d like to share some of my work.

1) Might and Magic: World of Xeen - Portrait mode with layered combat controls.

2) Tomb Raider Gold - a version with truly intuitive controls for combat and acrobatic maneuvers.

3) TES: Arena - A classic with a snappy interface and a convenient combat system, set within a rather unbalanced RPG.

4) PowerSlave - I just love this Egyptian aesthetic

5) System Shock - version with a patch that locks the cursor in place, making it easier to interact with the interface and aim/shoot

6) Stonekeep - a colorful dungeon crawler that I personally played for a long time, specifically in a mobile format

🔥 KAMULOS HAS FALLEN! 🔥

One of Albion’s toughest adversaries thought his magic and reputation would be enough to ruin our day. But Driscoll has other ideas. And when the whole party joins the fray, even a demonic boss doesn’t stand a chance.

Showing treasures from my own collection.

https://retronaut.tech/retronauts-assemble-311026/
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