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posted by martyb on Friday September 10 2021, @06:47PM   Printer-friendly

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-best-vga-dos-games-period

Every major computing platform has, in terms of gaming, something special about it. The color palettes, the sound hardware, the storage mechanisms, the available keyboards and joysticks... they all lend flavor to the games developed for each system.

The sound of a Commodore 64. The funky colors of a ZX Spectrum. The pure black and white of the early Macintoshes. All wonderful in their own ways.

But DOS gaming... it might just be the most amazing of all. Especially the period of time from the early 1990s through to about the mid-1990s. VGA graphics. Sound Blaster audio. Lots and lots of 3.5" floppies (with the occasional CD-ROM).

And the games... Oh, my. So many games. Bajillions of them. While there were a lot of stinkers (counting them is as futile as counting the grains of sand on the beaches of the world), the great ones were truly spectacular.

Nay. Life changing.

What follows are what I consider to be the 10 best DOS games that capture that "VGA plus Sound Blaster" aesthetic. These are presented in chronological order... purely because ranking them any other way made my brain explode.


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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday September 11 2021, @06:42PM (5 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday September 11 2021, @06:42PM (#1177047) Journal

    Yes, Commodore 64 graphics smoked Apple ][ graphics. Audio, too, was vastly superior. If it wasn't for that horribly slow and clunky disk drive, much slower, larger, and more expensive than the Apple's, a huge step back, the C64 might have become the dominant home computer of the 1980s. It got close anyway. The PC's CGA graphics were arguably worse than the Apple ]['s, only 4 colors at a comparable resolution, while the Apple managed 6.

    Yes, you remember the Apple ][ graphics correctly. Adjacent rows could freely mix colors, adjacent columns, not so much. I vaguely recall the //e double hi-res mode. Never saw any game that used it. Sadly, by the time the //gs came out, I had moved on to the PC. I thought and thought about getting a gs, but the world had moved on, and I moved with it. Something like over 90% of the computers at the school were PCs. Soon I was the only person who still had an Apple ][, and if the platform was tired by 1983, it was moribund by 1988. Still a few games came out for it, such as Ultima V in 1988, but that was the last of the Ultima series for the platform.

    Commodore's last gasp, the Amiga, had really impressive graphics, but the price was too high. It wasn't just the money, it was also their stranglehold. By then, the PC had EGA graphics, roughly comparable to C64, with VGA in the wings, and when the precursors to the Sound Blaster audio card came out, that addressed the original woeful state of audio, bringing the PC into parity or better in all categories. I am astonished that Apple managed to survive, and turn around the MacIntosh, but they got one thing right: most people don't want to be power users.

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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday September 11 2021, @07:21PM (4 children)

    by sjames (2882) on Saturday September 11 2021, @07:21PM (#1177057) Journal

    The C64 floppy was just plain odd. The big holdup with it was the bit banged serial communication between floppy and the CPU. It could be made a lot faster by a hack that expanded the communication to 2 bit parallel over the same hardware (made popular by the Fastload cart). Than and changing a register value in the drive to speed up track seeking. The floppy drive itself actually had a 6502 running it (the C64 itself was a 6510A).

    In theory it should have been superior to the Apple][ where the floppy was managed by the CPU at low level (including converting the encoded 5and3 nibbles to bytes). In practice, they got it working and then stopped.

    • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday September 11 2021, @09:33PM (1 child)

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday September 11 2021, @09:33PM (#1177102) Journal

      There was a lot of low hanging fruit that went unpicked. Some shockingly bad design and coding.

      For example, while Apple DOS 3.3 was much faster than the Commodore, it was still badly done and far slower than it could have been. The stupidity was that it took slightly longer to read, decode, and memcopy a sector than it took for the drive head to rotate past the start of the next sector. And so, instead of being able to read a 16 sector track in one rotation of the floppy, it took 15 rotations. The simple idea of interleaving the sectors could cut the number of rotations to 2, while another simple idea, don't double buffer, that is, skip the memcopy by putting the data directly at its final destination, sped the processing time up enough that it could finish before the drive head reached the next sector. DOS 3.3 needed about 45 seconds to boot up. Aftermarket DOSes needed 5 seconds. I found one more thing that sped it up a little more, introduce a short delay in the format routine before beginning a new track, to allow time for the arm to move. Otherwise, after reading 16 sectors, the time it took to move to the next track caused the drive to just miss the start of the first sector, and it'd have to wait for nearly a complete rotation. I hacked another Origin Systems game, Moebius, and with sector interleaving sped the combat sequences up greatly, cutting the time from 20 seconds to 5 seconds.

      I improved several other games. One was Dark Forest, a computerized version of an Avalon Hill game, Wizard's Quest. Took 30 seconds to compute how many armies a player received, and was sometimes wrong. I fixed the bug and sped it up so it took 1 to 10 seconds. The original code was just plain bad.

      • (Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday September 14 2021, @08:00AM

        by sjames (2882) on Tuesday September 14 2021, @08:00AM (#1177639) Journal

        I had almost forgotten those details, in spite of the time I spent messing around with the floppy on the Apple][ at school. Such fun as reading half tracks and other early copy prevention trickery, boot code tracing, etc. The odd thing is, there was interleaving in DOS 3.3, it just wasn't effective or useful interleaving.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11 2021, @09:52PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11 2021, @09:52PM (#1177110)

      As you can probably tell, I'm an Apple enthusiast, not a Commodore enthusiast. But each system had advantages, so there was plenty of room for both. Early on the Apple was just better in general, with the PET having no sound at all and only character graphics, no bitmaps, and no color. Later on though, the Commodores (either the VIC-20 or the C64) had better graphics and sound, but were inferior as computers. The VIC had only 22 columns of text, which was terrible. It had better color than Apple but it only had 4KB of memory, which just wasn't adequate in the early 80s when most Apples were shipping with 32K and almost none with less than 16K. On the positive side it did have a cartridge port, so executable code could be in ROM, while the Apple was loading everything from disk. By the time the VIC grew to 32K, Apples had 64K.

      The C64 and //e repeated this, with the C64 having better graphics and sound but the Apples having more memory, a much better disk (and usually two of them), and an 80 column text display, matching the PC. You could do word processing on an Apple that was comparable to the PC, except for having less memory. But Appleworks was vastly easier to use than Lotus or WordPerfect.

      Apple, unfortunately, artificially limited the //e to 128k instead of the 1MB it was designed for, because Apple wanted everyone to buy the inferior but more expensive Apple /// (sounds familiar). You could get aftermarket RAM expansions up to 1MB and Appleworks and a few other programs would use them, but most software assumed that you would only have 128k.

      Commodore, of course, shot themselves in the foot with their awful disk drive. I remember that the drive was supposed to be a lot faster, but there was a bug in the shift register they used, so the speed was artificially limited. For some reason, compatibility maybe, they couldn't fix it later.

      When the Amiga came out, Commodore couldn't decide whether to compete with game consoles, the PC, or try to continue the increasingly outdated concept of the "home computer", so they basically did none of the above and (combined with political problems in the company) let their technical superiority go to waste. Apple was so busy trying to get people to buy worse computers for more money that they broke their actual good computers and tried to avoid selling them, even though people really wanted them. Atari had some really underrated computers, but they got wiped out by the video game crash. This is why everyone uses PCs. Microsoft had the good sense to just show up and stay out of the way, and the good luck that IBM allowed them to sell DOS to everyone instead of just to IBM.

      • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday September 12 2021, @12:04AM

        by sjames (2882) on Sunday September 12 2021, @12:04AM (#1177128) Journal

        To me, the HUGE advantage of the C64 is you could convince your parents to buy one, while the Apple][ was above $1000 which made it a hard no for many.

        Soon after, the IBM PC clone took over the world. Ironically, that was mostly because IBM's management never took the PC seriously.

        Next to the various Apple][, the Mac looked like an appliance. That appealed to some, but most wint with the PC either because it was a "business machine" or because it was far more hackable than a Mac. Ah the joys of buying a memory upgrade that comes in a tube. The soft crunch as your thumb seated each chip.