DOS Games Discussion

Hello everyone,
I would like to ask about computer users those care in DOS games, is there many people around world still care in DOS games although very modern and high games we saw in Windows for example ?, and why they still like DOS games ?

I'm from Egypt but I'm too an old DOS games player, I worked in DOS before Windows age and played much on DOS games in my childhood.

Mostly, nostalgia! "We still play..." I know I care about the platforms I had (Atari, DOS), and not about the ones I didn't (NES). And I have some curiosity about overlapping platforms, or ones I played with friends and grandparents (Apple, Amiga), but I don't care as much as the hours spent on Atari and Dos.

And occasionally, I guess, some people seem to be into retro archeology, "Papa had some cool games!"

I searched in google images about (NEC) and (Amiga), it's first time to me to hear about it, I think from images I saw it was nice devices, I think who used it still has good feeling and enjoyment of past days .


I used (Atari) and (DOS) before, but today in 2015 I ask myself much is it wasting time to care in DOS games now but I have good memories for it and how many people like me now those who interest in DOS games, Atari ... etc

Cool! Yes, the Amiga should have won the Dos/Mac/Amiga (i.e. Microsoft / Apple / Commodore) wars because of engineering brilliance and capability, but Dos won business and Mac won design/students, and while Amiga had a niche they ran out of money. But they have cool games, still. Like DOS era VGA but with mice and music and stuff!

There's some good Amiga emulation out there, WinUAE and clonto's Amiga Forever package.

I was Atari 8bit (Atari 400, 800, XL, XE), were you the same or one of the other lines? The AtariST was cool, but didn't really compete with the big 3 and sadly also ran out of money and died.

I guess old games won't make you money, but they can make you friends and give good feelings!

Well I can not really speak much on DOS itself. But I consider DOS gamers the same kind of breed as a console retro-gamer and that is what I am. The appeal of playing something you had as a child brings a warm kind of nostalgia. For me at least, I can remember the first time I played each and every game, the smells in the home, the weather of the day, the awe and wonderment of a good game, the long hours sitting in front of the TV, forgoing food, bathroom breaks and sleep...

And although games have upgraded many times over, there is still fun to be had in getting out an old game and or system, blowing off the dust whether it be from a cartridge or a cd, popping it in and watching as the old system screen booted up and then you begin to play the game. Plus to me at least, nothing beats playing the actual game the way it was meant to be intended. Downloading illegally or even it was legal is simply not the same. Nor is it playing an old NES game on the WiiU. I mean they try and all and it is worth the effort, but I would much rather own the cartridge, play it on the old console on an old tv and use the original controller... I do not even like using these new retro style controllers they have out these days. Most just feel... cheap... Either that or I know it is not the original... Ehhh... Maybe that is just me though...

So I assume it would be the same for a DOS gamer. Although I can not imagine fighting with the old DOS language to boot up a game would be much fun, but every other aspect of it should be. And if we are talking of old DOS games, there is a magic, much like on the old consoles, on how they could squeeze so much entertainment into such a small little disk or cartridge. How music took so much space. Why were some games with such a limited palette of colors. And yet beyond the graphics or sound, how much the game was still so fun and may very well be fun to play. And I am sure a Commodore or Apple fan still loves to use floppy disks and prefer the old sleeves and those boxes/cases that hold them.

Check out “Classic Game Room” (CGR) and also Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) on Youtube if you want some classic reviews. CGR is more round about with it's reviews from old and new and AVGN usually just does reviews for crappy games with a lot of adult oriented humor. Try both you should not be disappointed.

Is it just me? I somehow expect old games to be easy, as if they degraded over time. Many sure are just as hard as they ever were! But a few I understand better and are easier that way; still, as if puzzles were "simpler back then," which is just silly.

And "Dos Languages" wasn't great fun but wasn't bad compared to the previous generations of Apple II, Commodores, and Spectrum ZXs with their various LOAD x,"",* commands to load games from tapes. Compared to that, 'dir *.exe' and 'sopwith' was cake, if the floppy disk didn't just boot the game.

I'm partly with the nostalgia crowd, but also since I have not always had time to play the lengthier games when newly released, I have returned to them in later years.

Easy old DOS games? No, in my experience they are sometimes incredibly hard and unforgiving, and require patience to figure out. The click-to-win type games just weren't around back then.

Something I like with the DOS system is that each game was almost self-contained, with all configuration files in one directory, and no Windows register to mess up. Ok, you had to fiddle with the initial startup files to get enough free memory and file-handles sometimes, but that was about it.

Today I'm very grateful toward DOSBox which lets me play most of the old games without keeping old computers up and running, and the Windows environment can be used for taking notes & making maps instead of using pen&paper.

Other emulators are available for many old platforms, which is how they can still stay alive today. At some time, all the old media & hardware will have degraded, so it is good such things are possible with faster hardware, so one can try out platforms that was missed in their heyday.

DOS Wolf wrote:Well I can not really speak much on DOS itself. But I consider DOS gamers the same kind of breed as a console retro-gamer and that is what I am. The appeal of playing something you had as a child brings a warm kind of nostalgia. For me at least, I can remember the first time I played each and every game, the smells in the home, the weather of the day, the awe and wonderment of a good game, the long hours sitting in front of the TV, forgoing food, bathroom breaks and sleep...

And although games have upgraded many times over, there is still fun to be had in getting out an old game and or system, blowing off the dust whether it be from a cartridge or a cd, popping it in and watching as the old system screen booted up and then you begin to play the game. Plus to me at least, nothing beats playing the actual game the way it was meant to be intended. Downloading illegally or even it was legal is simply not the same. Nor is it playing an old NES game on the WiiU. I mean they try and all and it is worth the effort, but I would much rather own the cartridge, play it on the old console on an old tv and use the original controller... I do not even like using these new retro style controllers they have out these days. Most just feel... cheap... Either that or I know it is not the original... Ehhh... Maybe that is just me though...

So I assume it would be the same for a DOS gamer. Although I can not imagine fighting with the old DOS language to boot up a game would be much fun, but every other aspect of it should be. And if we are talking of old DOS games, there is a magic, much like on the old consoles, on how they could squeeze so much entertainment into such a small little disk or cartridge. How music took so much space. Why were some games with such a limited palette of colors. And yet beyond the graphics or sound, how much the game was still so fun and may very well be fun to play. And I am sure a Commodore or Apple fan still loves to use floppy disks and prefer the old sleeves and those boxes/cases that hold them.

Check out “Classic Game Room” (CGR) and also Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) on Youtube if you want some classic reviews. CGR is more round about with it's reviews from old and new and AVGN usually just does reviews for crappy games with a lot of adult oriented humor. Try both you should not be disappointed.

These words are very beautiful and wonderful, yes we talk about a golden era for games and old systems, I have rich feelings for that era, I tried to find if I'm alone in this age 2015 or there's another persons like me and have that feelings for that golden era, my dear "DOS Wolf" your words proof that I'm not alone, and we can't forget that systems and games.

Rwolf wrote:I'm partly with the nostalgia crowd, but also since I have not always had time to play the lengthier games when newly released, I have returned to them in later years.

Easy old DOS games? No, in my experience they are sometimes incredibly hard and unforgiving, and require patience to figure out. The click-to-win type games just weren't around back then.

Something I like with the DOS system is that each game was almost self-contained, with all configuration files in one directory, and no Windows register to mess up. Ok, you had to fiddle with the initial startup files to get enough free memory and file-handles sometimes, but that was about it.

I agree completely, Rwolf.

As for the perception of older games being easy, of course some of the more modern titles can actually have a much more advanced AI (in games where this matters of course). There were still ways to make a more limited AI challenging though by giving it some advantages like more starting resources for example.

However I suppose that one of the main reasons behind old games seeming more easy is the fact that you're so familiar with them that playing becomes less of a challenge. In these cases built-in difficulty levels are very welcome. But you can also use self-imposed restrictions (e.g. not saving and loading games within a level, even if this is possible; or refraining from using certain weapons/abilities/resources that would otherwise give you an advantage) to increase difficulty and replay value.

parakletos wrote:These words are very beautiful and wonderful, yes we talk about a golden era for games and old systems, I have rich feelings for that era, I tried to find if I'm alone in this age 2015 or there's another persons like me and have that feelings for that golden era, my dear "DOS Wolf" your words proof that I'm not alone, and we can't forget that systems and games.

Thank you. There was a UK retro magazine that used to be sold in the USA, but I can not longer find it. And they had their own website that I thought I had faved, but apparently not and now I can no longer find it. And if I had found it, I no longer recognize it any more.

Funny... I was going to say older games were built more robust and made to not only take our money, but make us cry. Granted I was a child in most of these older games and thus I may not of really understood the game's mechanics, but I have not so fond memories of certain ones, especially on the SEGA Genesis and even the SNES that I simply could not pass no matter how hard I tried. Going back to these games, although I may be better at them- having a different and more mature mind set, understand the real world around me thus understanding the in game world, more eye and hand coordination, etc. they are still hard.

And there are still games that beat the heck out of me and leave me laying there sobbing in a corner... And I mean not in a great kind of way either. I also am not talking about crap games that just had poor mechanics, but simply the game was brutal and unforgiving. I have read some where about this before, games purposely were ratcheted to high degrees of difficulty. Even if you could add extra lives, I do not remember most having a difficulty setting. You just had more opportunities to get your balls kicked into your throat...

Seriously and most of these games did not even have a password system as a saving grace. (Some games had hidden passwords, but I do not count those.) You just needed to get beat until your eyes were black and blue, your nose broken, lip busted and ribs cracked. But also a lot of these games if you think about it, if they were not so hard, because they actually were in fact short when you take out all the filler, people would not feel they received their monies worth if it was too easy.

I think it took time for developers to understand, yes we want a challenge and not a cake walk, but we wanted to not have to sit in front of the screen for five hours straight or longer. Or as most of us had to do... shut the TV off, but kept the console running all night when sleeping and or all day when at school or work, because you had not finished the game yet. There are some things I enjoy about nostalgia... but that is not one of them. Looking back yes, I can brag about it and reminisce with others, but as far as wanting to do it again? No, not like that.

A couple of examples are the Super Mario Bros games. The first ones on the NES you did not have a save feature. You either finished the game in one setting or you did not, although they did have warp zones and or whistles to whisk you quicker to the end. But the later games and I can speak more of Mario 64, took it to a whole new level. You could save when ever or at least between levels. Collect stars to get to higher levels and or secret ones. Not everything was readily available in one go. It sometimes took several, some times many play throughs to get every nook and cranny of a level or area.

And Crash Bandicoot, although I can not speak for the second game, but the first was very hard. But it was not as if it was so difficult, even though it was, but that the way it saves is after every so many levels and even then only after you finish a bonus stage. That means you could of struggled through an entire set of levels and think you are doing great, but run out of lives and have to restart all the way back from your last save, perhaps seven levels ago... that is just bad.

But in the third and final installment on the PS1, Crash Bandicoot: Warped, it was perfect in graphics, game play and how you saved. They had a bunch of enjoyable mini games, more fun death animations, quirky extra moves, and best of all you could save after every level with out any restrictions. It was a get in and play for just about any one. But there were also more extra side things you could do to make it harder, like collecting all the apples to get to the bonus level. Destroy all boxes for something else and completing a level under a certain time limit for another, as I recall.

And then you have people who prefer an older Elder Scrolls game compared to a newer one, not because of the newer graphics, but because everything feels like it is handed to the player, instead of having to work for it like the older one. Same thing with why some people prefer MUDs or IFs. (Multi-User Dungeons and Iteraction Fiction. World of Warcraft in text form only, but 100x larger, more races, more job classes, more weapons, and expanding every day and for free, while IF is like a Stephen King of Harry Potter novel that you play and interact with just about anything.) You have to type what you want to do. It feels like it has much more freedom and in fact you do, although some may be a false sense. I can not explain it all here now, but if you ever played one you know what I mean. But we can all agree, at least a good one has much more freedom in actions and a really good one will make it feel like anything actually can be done. They can put games like Elder Scrolls or Gothic to shame and both are a great series of games with lots to do. But only if you like to read... and if you read all this then you must really like to!

Magazine: probaby Retro Gamer? Wiki of their rocky history. I loved that magazine. A friend would import them and we'd share.

And there certainly are crap old games worth forgetting!

I wonder if there's something about our brain's development from late childhood into teens and early twenties that make us remember and want to repeat the experiences we have? I salute your game list, but they aren't my "special" game list, and mine certainly isn't other peoples. It's very interesting. But it's exciting to be alive during those early years of an industry being born. Kind of like parents and grandparents talking about movie theaters, radio, and television. Very cool.

Personally I love the graphics of (good) AppleII/Mac/CGA/EGA/VGA games, before graphics were good enough to be cartoony or realistic, but we were beyond Atari 2600 'blobs'. The graphics were somewhat like chess pieces; enough to have shape and descriptive notes, yet minimalistic and symbolic more than actual or descriptive. Not that I don't love beautiful modern graphics and particle effects.

Quadko wrote:Magazine: probaby Retro Gamer? Wiki of their rocky history. I loved that magazine. A friend would import them and we'd share.

And there certainly are crap old games worth forgetting!

I wonder if there's something about our brain's development from late childhood into teens and early twenties that make us remember and want to repeat the experiences we have? I salute your game list, but they aren't my "special" game list, and mine certainly isn't other peoples.

What I said was not really a list, just in my mind what others could possibly recognize and understand. My list would be much too large to post for all my favorite games that I have ever had the chance to play through out all my years.

And I am not sure about that magazine. As I said I had searched for it and the main screen of all the sites I was looking at I could not recognize. That of course does mean it was not it, just that they must of done a massive overhaul which is a shame. Because they simply had a picture of a game with a small description and rows and rows of them. Then you clicked on which one you liked and it gave a full description and many more pics of said game.

Quadko wrote:Magazine: probaby Retro Gamer? Wiki of their rocky history.

I wonder if there's something about our brain's development from late childhood into teens and early twenties that make us remember and want to repeat the experiences we have?
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Personally I love the graphics of (good) AppleII/Mac/CGA/EGA/VGA games, before graphics were good enough to be cartoony or realistic, but we were beyond Atari 2600 'blobs'. The graphics were somewhat like chess pieces; enough to have shape and descriptive notes, yet minimalistic and symbolic more than actual or descriptive. Not that I don't love beautiful modern graphics and particle effects.

I think it's a good point when we talk to repeat the same experiences, but why we don't search about reasons that make us like and love that kind of games like DOS games, one of solutions to get emulation softwares like DOS-Box and play that games again under Windows XP for example.

May be graphics moods too like CGA/EGA/VGA attracted us, may be playing much with keyboards, so tools of playing games.

I have little experience in DOS programming languages like BASIC, Pascal and Windows languages like Visual Basic, why we don't think to program games close to DOS games but with Visual languages under Windows, but I think programming need much of us to learn it well and improve our skills and to know about industry of games, small experience isn't enough to make a game.

We can note too the stories and styles of every game of DOS games, it's not like Windows games or modern games, you feel that DOS programmers before were free to choose unique and new stories and styles for there games.