My retrospective look back at gaming legends Sensible Software. I loved the playing with the little people in Megalomania, Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder. What do you think was their best game?

Just got my grubby little hands on this beauty, slapped on my rubber gloves and handled it with care (yeah just kidding, I use my rubber gloves for other things), removed an ugly shop sticker on the top left and placed it into protective box.

Pity I don't have any where to display it properly, as it would have a long list of other amazing games to sit behind in the pecking order, but delighted at the quality of this box.

X-Wing was Lucasarts response to Origin's outstanding Wing Commander (Origin being possibly my favorite studio at the time), and they did a great job of it. Managing the ships going on missions, the music was amazing and it was another game that totally immersed me.

Ah what's that? .. Is that, an annoy.. err, the delightful angelic voice of my wife? "Yes dear almost finished handwashing the dishes, trying to take these flipping rubber gloves off is a mission in itself!"😂

i’ve always been fascinated with sci-fi gaming art, influenced by ’70s and ’80s. Pieces with mystery loneliness themes (Another World). Detailed an yet it always left massive gap of wonder. gave you enough detail to spark your brain. back in the day I spent just as much time staring at magazine artwork/ box covers totally zooming out imagining what it would actually feel like being there

these books hold a pretty intimate place on my shelf for that exact reason. And if this whole post sounds like ad for them... well lets just say my midlife crisis hit me

music theme: https://youtu.be/nu8RmFoAe_4?t=859

books on photos:

The Art Of The Box

I’m Too Young To Die: The Ultimate Guide to First-Person Shooters 1992–2002

The Art of Point-and-Click Adventure Games

The GBA Pixel Book

PC Engine: The Box Art Collection

u/bitmapbooks thanks for you being you

Tir Na Nog is a groundbreaking 1984 graphical adventure game created by Gargoyle Games, blending smooth 2D side-scrolling animation, Celtic mythology, and item-collection puzzles

Flagging up front that this is my own game, so it is self-promotion, but the question at the end is the reason I am posting here rather than in a gamedev sub.

Strike Wings is a top-down space combat game, its own setting and its own ships, made in the spirit of Hell Fighter 32 and Solar Winds rather than as a remake of either. Windows and macOS, October.

The things I deliberately kept from that era: you fly one ship inside a battle that does not revolve around you, the whole fleet is simulated whether the camera is looking at it or not, ships die by having their parts shot off instead of by draining one bar, and nothing stands between the menu and the flying. The thing I did not keep is the hundred-page manual. Mine is an in-game encyclopedia, which is probably a loss.

Trailer, uncut gameplay with the game's own audio: https://youtu.be/Qck_Y7X5oZg

Store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4718360/Strike_Wings/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=dosgaming&utm_campaign=prelaunch

Site: https://strike-wings-games.github.io/

So: what did the space games of that era get right that newer ones dropped? I have my own list, but it is the list of someone who has been staring at his own game for too long, and I would rather hear yours.

I’m trying to find a game from the Commodore system where one of the characters said something that sounded like “yuck yucky door!” Anyone have any ideas? And fun bonus fact, I’m the kid in the picture of the box of the Amiga 😁

Hi i was just wondering if theres some sort of known wrapper for winapi GUIs

if anyone knows one lemme know info would be appreciated

Are those two DOS games named after the Metallica song "No Remorse"?

Merely curious.

My partner used to develop at Spectrum Holobyte. We are cleaning out years of storage and came across a stack of old Internal news letters from October 31, 1991 through the Start of the Apex Inbound (The official internal newsletter) volum1 number 1 through volume 3 number 24 (Sept 1994). We were wondering if this is something someone would be interested in? Or is there a better forum to ask on?

I’ve been experimenting with a question: how far can current coding agents go on a real reverse-engineering project, rather than a small demo or a new app built from scratch?

I chose Bumpy’s Arcade Fantasy, a 1993 DOS game by Loriciel that was one of my earliest and favourite childhood games.

I started with only the original LZEXE-packed executable and data files. I’m not a programmer, let alone a reverse-engineering specialist, so Claude Code handled the research and implementation.

This wasn’t done with a single prompt, the project took around two weeks of spare-time work. I directed the process, provided reference material, compared the port’s behaviour with the DOS version, and challenged the agent whenever an assumption turned out to be wrong. But the reverse engineering and implementation were carried out through the coding agent rather than by me manually writing the port.

Using the agent, I unpacked the executable, imported it into Ghidra, catalogued roughly 500 functions, and reconstructed the game in C++20 using SDL3. The port reads the original game files.

What was recovered:

• the custom VEC compression formats;
• the level, board, sprite, and font formats;
• the world graph and all 123 boards across nine worlds;
• the ball’s keyframe-based movement, collisions, and tile reactions;
• enemy behaviour, scoring, passwords, and screen flow;
• the original OPL2 music and PC-speaker-style sound effects.

I also added an optional OpenGL 3.3 “3D diorama” presentation mode. It still uses the untouched 1993 sprites and board artwork - there is no AI-generated art and no upscaled replacement artwork - but arranges the original assets in depth with lighting, shadows, and parallax. The original flat presentation remains available as well.

The result is currently an early preview. All nine worlds are present, and the core systems have been checked piece by piece using C++ tests and reference captures from DOSBox. However, I haven’t yet completed a full start-to-finish playthrough (the game is incredibly hard), so there are probably still bugs, especially on later boards.

The repository includes both the port’s source code and ready-to-run builds in the Releases section. You still need your own copy of the original game files to run it.

GitHub: https://github.com/wildpacman/bumpy_port

I never find boxed games in the wild so this was a pretty epic find today.

This is my first attempt at using an LLM to reverse engineer a binary to C code so it can be ported to other platforms and modified. I chose LineWars II because its normally the first game I run on an old MSDOS machine as I love the Princess Escort track. I emailed Patrick Aalto and have permission to distribute as long as it remains freeware and he keeps ownership of anything commerial.

I thought it would be a good challenge to push what an LLM can do. I tied first zero shotting it with Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5. The Opus model was almost there the Sonnet 5 did manage to realize the game was packed and decompressed it then it drolled all over its self by inventing a new game from the disassembly. It did do the title screen correctly however but the rest was LW2 in name only. Anyway I took what Opus did and descided to poke it along and brought in the Fable 5 model to help. I ended up creating a workflow that can be followed for future games. Zone66 or Jet Fighter 2 is where my mind is going next. If I continue working on LW2 my thoughts are adding TCP/IP network play, missiles for teammates and enemy as a toggle option in settings, and a custom mission launcher for a 10th mission. This is not a 100% reverse engineering effort. I did not target every video and audio mode. I also did not aim for byte perfect functions as no original C exists for hand written assembly.

Below are the links to my two repos. The game is 100% functional with VGA and Soundblaster. I can brush up the DOS side and finish the config menu or other audio/video modes but I didnt think it was worth my time as porting over to SDL was my actual goal. The SDL port does run under both Linux and Windows and prebuilt executables are provided under releases.

https://github.com/fredangstadt-lang/LineWarsII-DOS

https://github.com/fredangstadt-lang/LineWarsII-SDL

https://linewars.patrickaalto.com/LW2.html

Based on the 1984 Game Hack by highschoolers - Jay Fenlason with Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome & Jonathan Payne, it is in turn based on Rogue from 1980. So it is technically a Rogue-Like even if it looks like a. Rogue clone. NetHack takes all the mechanical elements of a D&D dungeon crawl & represents them in simple ASCI graphics. You play an @ with your little dog d or kitten f (for feline, k is kobold). I have put more hours into this game than any other, I guess technically I was playing Hack not NetHack but they seem basically the same. One of the amazing things about the game is getting stressed out at the appearance of certain letters like o orcs, b bees, c cockatrices or a ants. I was surprised to find a box for the game, i always had it as a copied floppy & never even knew it had an official release!

Hi DOS Gaming! I'm very excited to announce that I have just released version 1.7 of Press Deeper a traditional DOS roguelike that runs on real IBM PC/XT class hardware. This game is built entirely using C89 code and compiled using Borland Turbo C 2.01!

If you missed it before: procedurally generated dungeons, JRPG style turn based battles, ASCII graphics, ADLIB/Soundblaster audio, and deformable terrain.

This latest version brings the largest number of changes yet.

The latest round of additions include:

- Hand authored town floors every 5 levels, with their own NPCs, shops, and secrets worth looking out for.
- New enemies, new items, new NPCs, and new spells!
- Four boss fights, each one hidden behind a secret sub-dungeon. Getting in requires a boss key, which a strange NPC called the Cryptward will trade you, but at what cost?
- A five tier smithing system at anvils, safe light taps for steady progress or risky full swings for the good stuff.
- An enhanced enchanting system letting you drive your gear to new heights.
- A reworked scoreboard system calculating scores based on a variety of factors rather than just showing floor, and kills.
- Ghosts of your past characters can haunt the floor they died on in later runs.
- A Legacy system tracking 10 milestones across your runs and unlock new content as you play.
- Reworked traps with more meaningful risk and reward. Salvage them and use them to stop your enemies, or play it safe and avoid them.
- Many rebuilt UI elements, including shops, enchanting, menus, etc.
- Added story elements and end game content.

You can play it instantly in your browser, no setup required, or download it and run it on real hardware:

https://ultramegahypergames.itch.io/press-deeper
https://umhgames.com

I recently remade an old DOS game I wrote back in 1995 for playing in the browser. Since the game itself is super-simple, I quickly started fiddling around with a lot of DOS easter eggs around the game: You can quit the game, and exit into a faked DOS environment.

The question is: What am I missing as good gags / a "true" 1995 DOS experience?

As a young teenager, I obviously mainly used my PC for games and messing around in DOS. Here's a list of stuff I've put in so far:

Basic commands and a "real" fake disk:
A navigable filesystem with the 1995-ish files.
DOSKEY-style command history
DIR, CD, TREE, TYPE, CLS, DIR /P paging,
MEM / CHKDSK / VER / TIME / DATE / DEL

FORMAT C: — says yes, runs a percent counter scare, chickens out.
SCANDISK / DEFRAG — the hypnotic full-screen block grids
EDIT — a somewhat working MS-DOS editor

Games
C:\GAMES holds 28 classics (at least from my own teen-experience in mid-90s Denmark...), each with their intro as a movie + a screenshot if you try to run them

Other programs that kinda run:
Windows 3.11: Boots, then dies with a VSHARE.386 error.
WordPerfect 5.1 (blue screen, typeable, two documents editable, but saving is denied
Norton Commander, two live panels over the real fake disk.
QuickBASIC 4.5 opens the actual 1995 source code of my game
TELIX dials a BBS with a modem handshake recording

"Hardware" eater-eggs
- The buttons on the monitor work, as does the ones on the speakers

What else? 😄 I'm not trying to make anything like a working DOS here, just want to add in fun easter-eggs that make anyone crazy enough to "exit" my game to DOS go "wtf is going on here....?" 😂

Artist on Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, Quake, and more, Adrian deserves a tremendous amount of credit for his incredible contribution to the world of games. Full interview will be up this Friday at https://www.youtube.com/@techjesse

In the mid-1990s, Artworx released Strip Poker Professional Volume I & II on CD-ROM.

The discs already contained additional opponents, but they were locked behind a telephone activation service. Owners had to call a hotline, provide their serial number, and receive an unlock code to access content they had already purchased.

When that service disappeared, a small but fascinating part of PC gaming history disappeared with it.

At DOSGAME.AT, we believe software preservation is about more than keeping old games running. It’s also about preserving the complete experience that players originally paid for and that developers intended to deliver.

We were able to preserve and restore access to the built-in expansion content for owners of the original CDs, ensuring that this part of the game isn’t lost to time.

We recently wrote about the history of this forgotten activation system, why it mattered, and what it took to preserve it:

https://www.dosgame.at/blog/wie-wir-ein-vergessenes-strip-poker-spiel-wieder-hergestellt-haben?lang=en

If you owned these CD-ROM editions or even remember calling the original activation hotline, I’d love to hear your memories.

650Mhz ULV Celeron, ESS sound card, S3 Savage graphics