Much more DOS and old PC gaming coverage please!!

[ChipTune]

I love the mag and the balance is about right with regards to coverage for different machines, but I have noticed a little bit less coverage of DOS and old PC games.

I have had every console under the sun over the years but one thing remained constant.. my PC.. which I would always use for games while owning the latest console(s) and well after selling them off for the latest thing.

I grew up seeing DOS games on PCs while in my dad's offices over the years .. leisure suit larry, leaderboard golf, weird mario clones in the school computer rooms, playing wolfenstein 3d and sim city in my lunchbreaks at school..

playing the latest shareware games downloaded via a painfully slow modem.. things like Jazz Jackrabbit, Hocus Pocus, Halloween Harry, Jill of the Jungle (which I saw featured in the mag several months ago), Dangerous Dave, Inner Worlds, wacky racers, and many many more.

Then there were the 3dfx years with games like Screamer, Motorhead, Ultimate Race Pro, Unreal, and many games that were also on the latest consoles, but played better (provided your pc was up to spec)

Seeing DOS games gives me a huge nostalgia rush, and I still play them now and then on DOSbox, so it would be great if you guys could cover more games.. you know, like Little Big Adventure, Crusader No Regret (I think I saw No Remorse in the mag recently(?)), Hexen, Commandos etc etc


Also check out Zeliard as it's an awesome little metroidvania title that deserves a mention in the mag!

Cheers

[jdanddiet]

One of my favourite eras and I'm always working on new features. Hope to see some more soon.

[The Laird]

The PC gets a lot more coverage than some other machines that were certainly more succesful, over here anyway, as games machines. The recent X-wing article proves that, I don't think it needs more at all.

[ChipTune]

The PC gets a lot more coverage than some other machines that were certainly more succesful, over here anyway, as games machines. The recent X-wing article proves that, I don't think it needs more at all.

Just because you love to disagree with everything I say

[The Laird]

Nothing of the sort. The fact a DOS game made the cover last month tells you enough.

[NorthWay]

The PC
...
I don't think it needs more at all.

The PC could roll off a cliff and die violently in a ball of flames for all I care, but I begrudgingly acknowledge that that wont happen.

Want to do some PC game? Pick something you couldn't get somewhere else at least. Something good preferably, not something you played because that was all you had.

And LSL does not need being done again I hope.

[MattyC64c]

I wouldn't mind a bit more PC love now and again. The X-Wing series article was rather good I thought, perhaps we could have a few more like that?

Playing games in DOS is something I look back on with the 'rose tinted specs'. When you could get games working, they were great. When you had to mess around with config.sys and Autoexec.bat files, then it did my head in. When games made the slow move from DOS to Windows, things got a lot more user friendly IMHO.

Perhaps an interesting article could be the rise of dedicated 3D graphics cards and 3D graphics processing in general. I would love to read that.

[ChipTune]

It bemuses me when I read articles or comments about how 'difficult' or even 'nightmarish' it was to run DOS games back in the day.. I used it from 1993 until windows 95 got going properly in about 96/97 and I never had any issues.. type in a simple line, or create a bat file.. choose your soundcard and joystick.. boom.. done.. what the f()ck is so hard about that.. maybe I just had a good PC or something.. but I found it just as user friendly as my Amiga 600.

People who hate on PC gaming are just console snobs who think PCs are like rocket science and require some kind of degree or telepathic skills to get working.. when in my experience as a PC gamer for nearly 20 years now is that : you buy a pc, you get a decent graphics card, you install game, you play game

Plus you can patch it ASAP should it require it (something that even xbox 360 & PS3 do constantly nowadays) and you could download excellent mods, maps, total conversions etc etc to give games a new lease of life. none of this bullsh1t DLC payment stuff on modern consoles!

[TMR]

It bemuses me when I read articles or comments about how 'difficult' or even 'nightmarish' it was to run DOS games back in the day.. I used it from 1993 until windows 95 got going properly in about 96/97 and I never had any issues.. type in a simple line, or create a bat file.. choose your soundcard and joystick.. boom.. done.. what the f()ck is so hard about that..

If you were willing to put the learning time in to understand batch files, spent time reading up on the IRQ settings for your various cards and were lucky enough to have a decent hardware configuration it wasn't particularly difficult but for more users than not it was more hassle than they wanted and could rapidly turn into a nightmare; cheap and cheerless "compatible" cards were the bane of many PC users' lives, leaving programs without the resources they were supposed to provide or in more extreme cases, seeing the code bottle out to DOS or crashing entirely because they weren't properly compatible.

It didn't bother me at home because i was still running a Workbench 3.0 A1200 '030 as my primary machine for everything until well into Windows 95's lifespan, but my day job during that period was A) selling games for various platforms and B) trying to make the DOS games work on customers' hardware when they couldn't get them going for themselves.

[badda]

There's lots of dos gaming in the magazine. Dos stands for disc operating system, and were found in many computers (Atari, Commodore, Acorn, Sinclair, and more) throughout the '80s. Dos was a generic term relating diskette-based home micros.

Of course, I know you mean MS-DOS / PC-DOS x86 computing. Just pointing out how the term dos changed from the '80s into the early '90s gaming scene.

[HalcyonDaze00]

The only PC game that needs to be covered is the Championship Manager/Football Manager series.

[oli_lar]

It bemuses me when I read articles or comments about how 'difficult' or even 'nightmarish' it was to run DOS games back in the day..

Plus you can patch it ASAP should it require it (something that even xbox 360 & PS3 do constantly nowadays) and you could download excellent mods, maps, total conversions etc etc to give games a new lease of life. none of this bullsh1t DLC payment stuff on modern consoles!

It never bothered me much back then either, though we had a Sound Blaster so that was probably why. There were still plenty of times we had to get computer repairmen in - half the times because I'd fiddled with some settings.

What does bemuse me is how people have so much trouble with dosbox. Downloaded, installed and drag game.exe onto dosbox shortcut - voila,I've never had to mess with it to get it working.

You should try Nox, its a real hidden gem. Works on Win 7 with W98 compatability enabled too.

[kelp7]

It bemuses me when I read articles or comments about how 'difficult' or even 'nightmarish' it was to run DOS games back in the day.. I used it from 1993 until windows 95 got going properly in about 96/97 and I never had any issues.. type in a simple line, or create a bat file.. choose your soundcard and joystick.. boom.. done..

Soundcard? You're lucky, some of us remember the *REAL* DOS gaming of just the PC internal bleeper and CGA graphics I was gaming on the PC around '87 onwards to about '90 or '91 and there were actually some real gems back then, but I have to admit a lot of the games I played (like Saboteur, Impossible Mission, Wizball, Arkanoid) were all just games you could get on other platforms. I don't remember too many games I encountered that were specific to the PC, not even Starflight (which the magazine really REALLY needs to cover at some point, it pre-dates Star Control by a few years I believe and was a big influence on Star Control 2 which has been mentioned in the mag before now).

Anyway, I agree, more DOS gaming in the mag please

[theantmeister]

Pah! CGA! You were lucky! When I were a lad we had nothing but Hercules Monochrome! One colour, orange, and we were glad for it!

BTW, Screamer wasn't a 3DFX (glide) game. Also, I notice it was given 2 stars in Retro Rated! WTF?! Screamer was awesome!

[slacey1070]

It bemuses me when I read articles or comments about how 'difficult' or even 'nightmarish' it was to run DOS games back in the day.. I used it from 1993 until windows 95 got going properly in about 96/97 and I never had any issues.. type in a simple line, or create a bat file.. choose your soundcard and joystick.. boom.. done.. what the f()ck is so hard about that..

If you were willing to put the learning time in to understand batch files, spent time reading up on the IRQ settings for your various cards and were lucky enough to have a decent hardware configuration it wasn't particularly difficult but for more users than not it was more hassle than they wanted and could rapidly turn into a nightmare; cheap and cheerless "compatible" cards were the bane of many PC users' lives, leaving programs without the resources they were supposed to provide or in more extreme cases, seeing the code bottle out to DOS or crashing entirely because they weren't properly compatible.

It didn't bother me at home because i was still running a Workbench 3.0 A1200 '030 as my primary machine for everything until well into Windows 95's lifespan, but my day job during that period was A) selling games for various platforms and B) trying to make the DOS games work on customers' hardware when they couldn't get them going for themselves.

This.... . . I remember getting a new PC, getting it home... and nothing dos-wise would run. Frustrating and not user friendly. Our IT department at the time put together a document to help people game at home.

That in itself says enough...

If you didn't have any issues, you were a) lucky b) only played minesweeper.