The Dosbox thread! Ha ha!

hamster

I had a go at installing Windows 3.1 under dosbox today and summer 1993 come flooding back! :eek: Omg!

Installed S3 drivers and set the res at 1024x768 and exited fully in dosbox back to dos and installed the sb16 drivers and set the irq to 7 (although I remember Doom and many dos games liked it at 5). Went back into windows and the heard the old ting. Might install the old Encarta now for the crack...

Anyone messing with Dosbox 0.70 recently? It really has come on from 0.65 last year. This is pretty amazing stuff. Let's install Borland C++ for windows.



Ran VistaPro the other day... I used to love this.

Ruu_Old

Brilliant stuff. Brought back ALOT of memorys. "Sorry we only have games that support Windows 95".

LoGiE

Wow I'd forgotten how hidious Windows 3.1 was! Brings me back to playing Prince of persia on a 386:)

hamster

LoGiE wrote:

Wow I'd forgotten how hidious Windows 3.1 was! Brings me back to playing Prince of persia on a 386:)

I know... That's why I went back to playing that shmup Raptor: Call of the Shadows - a year later in Summer '94 when the pc mags were ravin' about the new 100Mhz DX4s. Actually this shmup under dosbox is damn smooth my "lowly" p4 1.8Ghz 4 year laptop. I'm impressed.


I found it hard to shoot and take a scrshot at the same time

hamster

Hey... Old Classic Quake isn't too bad either - I remember this was terribly slow on my old 8Mb 486DX2 (1Mb Et4000 Tseng) - and even on a 16Mb P120 (4Mb vram Matrox Milleniium at the time) I was only getting 12-15 fps at 640x480 and about 20-25 fps at 320x200.
Dosbox on a P4 1.8Ghz is giving me about 20 fps. I'd say this is too fast on a E6700 2.66Ghz Conroe!

Seriously though nice to see this going well again via dosbox - whether it be on linux or windows. I wonder how dosbox is performing for Vista users?



edit: tried 640x480 and it does crawl - 4-5 fps

hamster

I thought it would be a bit of fun to post a scrshot of a golden oldie DOS game here every other day. I know many of these still work in XP - but for all these I will use DosBox 0.70+.

Today is its ZZT. Personally I didn't play this going back but I have come across a lot of links with people swearing that they wasted their youth on this. Anyone here play this? Here is the blurb on it:

ZZT is a DOS computer game by Tim Sweeney that was released in 1991. Its graphics are character-based, which means that it uses nothing but ascii text. This may seem outdated by current standards, or even by 1991 standards, but there is a good reason the graphics are as they are--what became ZZT was originally intended to be simply a text editor.
Read more about it at the Land of ZZT It's funny but it's name was meant to secure the last rung in the name listings. Another site called Z2 seems to be a hub for this game

hamster

I started a new thread for a DOS game a day here

hamster

Today's Dos game of the day is Wolfenstein 3D.

Wolf3D was released in 1992 - I came across this in 1993 with my 1st PC (8Mb 486DX2 - 66Mhz with a 1Mb Tseng card). This played nicely then and even today on dosbox

The blurb is:
As an escaped prisoner in a Nazi war prison, you will move smoothly through a 3D world full of amazing detail and animation Unlike other 3D games, you'll run through a sensational and realistic 3-D environment, with intelligent moving guards and opponents.



I honestly wouldn't play for long anymore but after playing the first few levels I still remember where the secrets were. The game really has that nice shareware feel about it - reading the instructions pages for example from the menu. I still like the short tunes.
I did come across the extra episodes later but stopped 75% through - by that stage DooM came along.

LoGiE

Wolfenstein! An all time classic:) I played through every episode way back when. I wonder does the original x-wing game work well? I still have the disks somewhere lol.



*Threads merged*

hamster

LoGiE wrote:

I wonder does the original x-wing game work well? I still have the disks somewhere lol.

Game of the Day - X Wing
Ok, I dug my X-Wing Collection CD and put it in and started dosbox and installed xwing.




After installing - I watched the intro - still not bad after all this time - hard to believe that they wanted the cd in the drive for playing the game itself (71Mb on the CD in total uncompressed).



Into the game itself, the old buzz is there - the front and back shields, energy management, team orders, the map and timing each mission to perfection. Actually I started this series with the Aug 1994 introduction of Tie Fighter and then came back to XWing. One feature I liked was to match speed (hit return) of the target - really handy during close dogfights. Classic Game! I bumped the cpu cycles up to 6000 for my machine and I found it very smooth. A year ago - I did try Tie Fighter - wasn't as smooth - but then dosbox was on version 0.65 as opposed to the newer faster 0.70 version.

LoGiE

*Wipes tears from eye

So many happy memories playing that game. It truely was a masterpiece and pretty ground breaking for the time. I never really got into Tie fighter myself but I had borrowed it from a mate of mine. Was there ever a version released that worked with native XP?

hamster

LoGiE wrote:

*Wipes tears from eye

So many happy memories playing that game. It truely was a masterpiece and pretty ground breaking for the time. I never really got into Tie fighter myself but I had borrowed it from a mate of mine. Was there ever a version released that worked with native XP?

LoGIE, I have the Tie Fighter's Collection CD - it works under XP and also has a 640x480 mode. I play tested it fine last xmas - I'll see if I can find it.

Here is a ‘how-to’ on getting the old Tie Fighter Collector’s CD edition game to work on Windows XP.
http://boards.theforce.net/games_videogames/b10005/12830230/p1

Game of the day coming shortly

hamster

Here is a game I so badly wanted to play on my 486..... but Magic Carpet 2 badly needed a Pentium!



This game oozes atmosphere, tension and action. I loved the nightscenes - the crickets, the sound of people gossiping behind house walls. The moody midi music which I am listening to right now. The slick graphic engine for it's time. I never went far into the game as it was too sluggish for me at the time (486). On dosbox it's a joy to play. Time though is now short...Sniff. The people walking around is a nice touch.



Anyone play this game - Or the original? From memory, this game pitted you against other cpu players who collected mana (increasing collection rate and so on) and used it against you. Upgrading your castle was fun.



Pressing R gives you a high resolution option which is just as fast.

Mr. Presentable

I have Duke Nukem 3d and all the add ons. They won't run on my P3 500, because it's too fast!! Would Dosbox maybe run them on my XP Pro machine?

hamster

nipplenuts wrote:

I have Duke Nukem 3d and all the add ons. They won't run on my P3 500, because it's too fast!! Would Dosbox maybe run them on my XP Pro machine?

Good idea.... next game of the day (let's call it a double bill ) Duke Nukem.... I "wasted" two months playing and completing this classic before summer 1995 and loved every minute of it.



Like Doom it has a few extras, you could look up and down slightly. You could enter water filled areas, coloured lighting - like red alert areas for example. Some good weapons.... and loads of attitude... "Those Alien B%^$% are gonna pay for blowin' up my ride"... and "come get some". I remember the starting urban area had a good cinema prop and then there was jail in the next level and then some rocky cave type of levels. Later you played in space. All in all - it's was a great laugh. This 30Mb game packs a lot of fun!



In dosbox, everything works. I got 80+ fps at 320x200 and the mid 20s at the highest 800x600 (which is overkill really). 640x480 is nice and you get a comfortable 40-50 fps (and I'm using a fairly bog standard standard Intel D820 2.8Ghz cpu).



The midi tunes are very enjoyable and do not grate. I didn't try this on my older p3-800Mhz but I'd imagine - you'd still get a decent rate at 320x200 even then.

LoGiE

Old school Nuke'em! Who can forget the imortal words 'Shake it, Baby'

hamster

Many Descent fans here? I remember when this game came out - It was heralded as a Doom beater using all 6 degrees of freedom. A bit tricker to control but a lot of fun nevertheless and the mapping system looked straight out of AutoCAD at the time.



I had the shareware version and completed all 8 levels. Core of the story was to inflitrate mines (on the moon, then earth, venus, and so on out pluto). In the mines you destroyed the robots while finding the nuclear core and taking it out - once done - You heard a female voice counting down the seconds you had to get the hell of out there!



The robot designs weren't bad at all. Here is one straight from a slasher movie.



Playing it now though - it's a bit of a pixellated mess - but Descent II supports higher resolutions - 640x480 and 800x600 (as far as I remember... I can't find my backup just right now ) Descent is definitely one of the Dos Golden Oldies.

Retr0gamer

Yuor bringing back a lot of great memories other than Raptor. That game was awful. Had to laugh at my PC friends, when they were playing raptor i was playing Thunderforce 3. That quickly stopped when Doom came out.

Descent brings back a lot of memories, I got it free with my first PC.

I was also one of the few that really enjoyed Magic Carpet. It took awhile to figure out what the hell was going on but after you got the hang of it it was gaming bliss.

Any chance if you can see if Blood works. Really want to play it but Windoze XP messes up the sound so it's almost unplayable.

hamster

Retr0gamer wrote:

Any chance if you can see if Blood works. Really want to play it but Windoze XP messes up the sound so it's almost unplayable.

Yup, I last played this in 2001 - I have it zipped - I'll extract it and try it out. Coming up.... "it burns it burns" - some pretty good soundbites from that game.

hamster

Blood.


Blood. A Tougher version of Doom except you are some kind of Avenger (RetroGamer - you gotta help me out here ). You start the game coming out of a crypt with the tombstone pushed aside - you utter the words the creepy line I live again!. You then proceed to kill 1000's of undead with an array of weapons - starting out with a pitchfork!

In the scrshot above I'm getting 27-30 fps at 640x480.

Later I found a flash gun. Very useful against the undead zombies who eventually go up in a ball of flame - it burns it burns



I ended up face down in the mud in 5 minutes. I picked "Well Done" difficulty. Outta practise. I played this back in 1997 I think I got to a part where you were on a train on a railway - which was a good design for the time. A good Doom era game to get into. Supports res all the way to 1024x768. I got 28 fps at 640x480 which is really high enough. A conroe cpu would storm this at 800x600. At 320x200 it's too fast (read: ultra smooth) at 91 fps. Dosbox 0.70 I repeat has vastly improved! :eek:

the_new_mr

WOW!!!! Talk about a trip down memory lane Duke Nukem was a classic!! "Nobody steals our chicks... and lives"

Must get the new version of dosbox.

I got Skyroads going on it and I thoroughly enjoyed myself! You can download it totally legal!! Finished all the levels except for the last one. It is a BI-ATCH of a level!! Got a feeling the emulation of dosbox 0.65 had something to do with me not being able to complete it (or at least I'm hoping so ).

Ruu_Old

Blood was/is a brilliant game. Dosbox really is the business. I was playing Dune 2 the other day, great thread hamster.

Retr0gamer

Excellent. i'm going to try Blood tomorrow. it's one of the best build engine games around and puts most new FPS games to shame. Was dying to play a decent FPs today but none of the games I had appealed to me except Blood. Thanks Hamster.

As for the storyline I think you pretty much summed it up. You come out of a crypt and kick ass

There really was some great humour in the game especially for evil dead and horror fans.

hamster

No problem RetroGamer - this is fun. Actually when I unrared my backup - I noticed it was v1.00 - sure enough there was a patch (brought it up to 1.11) you can get the patch from here. My retro dosbox mounted game folder is already ready 250Mb (100Mb zipped) - and I have yet to try some other classics - I hope to relive one of my favorite Origin games next and nope it's not strictly one of the Ultima series.

Retr0gamer

Just gave dosbox a go a few minutes ago and was playing Blood perfectly in 640x480 on a very modest PC. I tried dosbox a few months ago and it was very finnicky so gave up. This release is a whole lot better and very easy to use. Would have been up all night playing blood only my mother kicked me off

I'm really regretting giving system shock to my mate since he has gone on holidays for 10 months. It's one of the games I always wanted to play and now after 4 years when I can actually play it I don't have my disc

Another big thanks to hamster for bringing this release to my notice. My brother won't be listening to his ****ty rap music on my PC tomorrow. I've now got 20+ years of retrogaming to catch up on.

hamster

Ultima Underworld 2: Labyrinth of Worlds.


This game was the first pc based game I ever played. I ordered this with a new 486DX2 back in May 1993. It truely was an amazing step up from Amiga gaming in the sense that the sense of realism went up quite a few notches. I had barely heard of the Ultima series up to that time as I wasn't much into RPGs - But this game opened the flood gates!
The game came on 5 floppy (6Mb). Once installed it was 11.5Mb and 500k per save file. This time I installed the patch to avoid the "Servant Strike" bug - although I never had this problem back then. Again Warren Spector was producer of the game.


The game is in 3D but by today's standards obviously the game window is fixed and rather small. Everything is pixellated up close obviously. In game characters are all sprite based like the upcoming Doom at the time but you can look up and down slightly (1 and 2 keys). But this game has a wonderful story and RPG elements. You can fish, gain and improve skills (ie repair armour and Lore) and find magical items. Casting spells is handled with the 8 circles of spells. Each group more powerful than the other. And keep a few torches handy, also Armour degrades so get it repaired regularly.

The nice intro illustrates how you get into trouble and who you are up against.



You start the game in Lord British's castle and are a guest - The Guardian entombs the castle with Blackrock and goes on to take over Britannia. Lord British asks you to find a way to break the spell. I remember really feeling entombed with the servants, Dupre, Iolo and the crew. Before I knew it I felt a real need to help these guys!

Without giving too much away for those who may not have played it before (surely not!) - you work your way to base of the Castle foundations and find a large blackstone gem with 8 faces - each representing a world from which you find a part of the solution to breaking the overall spell. This game is a masterpiece and can be played at your leisure over a month or so. I particularly liked the Scintillus Academy - it is a world of tests. The Pits of Carnage is a great place for duels and has a Gladiator feel about it. I can't remember but there is one place where you end up in a short wireframe 3D maze about 3/4 way - a nod to it's heritage. I would like to get back into this game sometime again! These static screenshots do not do the game justice!

Here is where you start - you manor bedroom.


Those 8 worlds:
* Britannia (You start in the Castle)
* Prison Tower
* Killorn Keep
* Ice Caverns (The ground is slippery here - watch out)
* Talorus
* Scintillus Academy
* Pits of Carnage
* Loth's Tomb
* Ethereal Void

I remember I had a NX sound galaxy soundcard at the time. It wasn't 100% Soundblaster compatible so I actually did not have all the sampled sounds like clanging closing/opening gates. On mine, it sounded like muted farts - But the midi music was there and that was ace! I mean it was background story music - that did not grate or get in the way. When later when I got a soundblaster 16 I found the sampled sounds too loud and annoying especially the footfalls so I left it set to ADlib sound.


Having a chat with Lord British.

The story is the most gripping part of this game and the sense of progress as you go on. There is at least 60 hours worth of gameplay here if you try everything. Make sure look under every waterfall and crevice! Under Dosbox I found this smooth once I bumped the cpu cycles up to 8000 cycles.



Btw if use DOS32A for any dos game that used a dos extender going back (ie Doom) - you'll find it faster again. There are several ways DOS/32 Advanced can be "plugged" into your 16-bit and 32-bit protected mode applications and games. The simpliest way to replace the old DOS/4GW DOS Extender provided with many programs is to copy DOS/32 Advanced executable file dos32a.exe into the directory where you installed the software (the directory containing dos4gw.exe file), delete the old dos4gw.exe file and rename dos32a.exe to dos4gw.exe. You can always preserve the old dos4gw.exe file by copying it into another directory, and if the program you intended to run with DOS/32 Advanced is not 100 per cent DOS/32 Advanced compatible, you can always recopy the old dos4gw.exe DOS Extender back. uw2 doesn't used this though - it allocates about 2Mb-3Mb EMS memory at the start.

Shigsy

You should check out Street Rod 2, its a classic. I ran it 1st with DosBox about 3yrs ago and a couple of times since. Loved that game, got very hard when you owned about 10 cars fully suped up and nobody wanted to race you for pink slips BTW, anyone every successfully complete a Mulholland Drive race in SR2? I always got to a grey path thing that made me crash, no matter how slowly i drove over it

Dr Bob

hamster wrote:

Blood.


Blood. A Tougher version of Doom except you are some kind of Avenger (RetroGamer - you gotta help me out here ). You start the game coming out of a crypt with the tombstone pushed aside - you utter the words the creepy line I live again!. You then proceed to kill 1000's of undead with an array of weapons - starting out with a pitchfork!

In the scrshot above I'm getting 27-30 fps at 640x480.

Later I found a flash gun. Very useful against the undead zombies who eventually go up in a ball of flame - it burns it burns



I ended up face down in the mud in 5 minutes. I picked "Well Done" difficulty. Outta practise. I played this back in 1997 I think I got to a part where you were on a train on a railway - which was a good design for the time. A good Doom era game to get into. Supports res all the way to 1024x768. I got 28 fps at 640x480 which is really high enough. A conroe cpu would storm this at 800x600. At 320x200 it's too fast (read: ultra smooth) at 91 fps. Dosbox 0.70 I repeat has vastly improved! :eek:

What sound settings did you use in Dosbox for this?
for the life of me I've only been able to get it working with cd audio, despite the audio setup test working fine??
Blood is excellent , Blood II is...ok but not as good (and bugged to hell too ...)

Retr0gamer

luas_dublin wrote:

What sound settings did you use in Dosbox for this?
for the life of me I've only been able to get it working with cd audio, despite the audio setup test working fine??
Blood is excellent , Blood II is...ok but not as good (and bugged to hell too ...)

I had this problem as well until I noticed when you start up dosbox it actually gives you what soundcard settings to use in the initial text blurb.

hamster

Dos game today kids is the grand-daddy of the C&C series. C&C itself! Here in it's original lovely blocky vga graphics that only a GDI Mammoth Tank can look good in.



I dug out the my zipped c&c - been awhile! This 11 year old classic hit the shelves in spring '96. I loved this game! Remember this building? This was from my last save file dated 28/02/97.



This game has aged well and is still nice to play (in a window anyway)!

hamster

The original Ultima Underworld has quite a good story. You are locked up in the Stygian Abyss for a crime you did not commit - kidnapping the daughter of a king. You are forced to find his daughter. I remember playing this game so far until my save file became corrupted - ie, items carried were duplicated or lost - now with the uw patch hopefully it will not occur again. I have settled down on this game - Ultima rpgs really do have interesting story yarns!

Here I am talking to the King of the Green goblins - who has a rather large ego and is not too fond of his agressive rivals - the Grey goblins.

Shigsy

Hey Hamster, try Street Rod 2 next and post some pics Quality game

hamster

Street Rod 2, I never had this game - but here it is. 1.2Mb in total. Support Adlib sound. Woohoo. Runs in VGA 320x200 with 16 colours. After running in dosbox... The title screen pops up:


After a moment, I get into the game:


But my garage is empty so, I look at the old newspapers and see a car for my $1200 budget. A 1966 Ford Galaxie. Gotta start somewhere.


I get the car on the road to fill up the tank at the nearest garage. Wonder will I make it?

And fill her up please... and look under the hood.


Why do I do this? To challenge insecure drivers and win their over chicks! I can smell the greese off those burgers from here!


Shigsy, I took this guy on for a challenge and once I got the car moving he had gone to the moon and back... and then I had a transmission fault and headed back to the garage losing $50 on the bet. Feel free to tell us how to handle this baby! Music is all "shuck up" adlib. Sounds like the game was a lot of fun upgrading cars piece by piece.

I consoled myself with a handy paint job! lol!

Shigsy

lol nice 'first look' article Sounds like you revved the hell out of your engine. You need to go up the gears just before it hits the red line each time. If you change too late you can cause damage to your transmission and engine. If you click on the little book thats on the shelf in your garage (below the radio) it tells you the condition of every piece of your car so you know when you need to replace parts. The general idea is obviously to earn money by winning races so you can afford to improve your car (or cars if you own more than 1) by upgrading everything from the engine to the tires, with a surprising level of detail. WHen your considered ready you will be able to take on 'The King' in a Mulholland drive race. Beat him and you have completed the game, no easy feat Before you go driving, don't forget to tune the engine or the car will run terribly :P Worth playing a few times, once you get to know whats going on its great fun, even nowadays.

hamster

Shigsy wrote:

lol nice 'first look' article Sounds like you revved the hell out of your engine. You need to go up the gears just before it hits the red line each time. If you change too late you can cause damage to your transmission and engine. If you click on the little book thats on the shelf in your garage (below the radio) it tells you the condition of every piece of your car so you know when you need to replace parts.

Good tips. It's not a bad game - sounds addictive once you get into it. Yup, I blew the engine - revved it to sky-heaven! I didn't spot the green book. Nice one.
I'll look this again when I get out of the Stygian Abyss! Will put up another dos game later today.

hamster

I couldn't help but mention UW again. These origin rpgs really have soooo much richness in them. Here I am on level one with the lot nearly auto-mapped out. I'm marking off any items that I pick up.


Dos game of the day coming up shortly...

hamster

Here is the dos classic System Shock. This is the cdrom version. As far as I can tell, the difference is the intro, the ingame speech and the 640x480 option. There is a groovy tune going through once the game begins... but I might turn that off to hear the groans and noises of fear!
The game starts with introduction of the hacker and the task that befalls him to get out of trouble. The introduction is quite nice and explains the start well.


Then it's off to start a new game... Btw, All settings such as difficulty was left at 2 (all options scored from 00 to 03).. any veterans who played this through - was there any real major difference regarding the puzzle difficulty from 2 to 3?


The game then starts with me awake in the medical room. I got a nice screen showing me all the controls. I can expand this to full screen and can turn using the screen or mouse. Just like Ultima Underworld.


Looking around I can see my first object. The Help system really gets you started. Scrolling feels smoother compared to UW. And there is infomation everywhere you look.


From everything I heard about the game - it's the story and the atmosphere that makes the game. Especially the idea of the emails you pick up along the way - a certain Rachel guides you through your goals.


Later I pick up a voice clip from Shodan herself. She sounds so sure of her self. Good to know that security level is on level 9. Gulp! :eek: Speech makes a big difference on the cdrom version. (btw, here I set the screen to indeed 640x480). Nice and still fast.

Can I quit my job so I can complete this? Awww.

Retr0gamer

System Shock is next to play for me after blood.com Was always a game I really wanted to play.

The game looks and feels like Ultima since it's the same engine updated and a certain Warren Spector was behind it as well.

Wossack

excellent thread

some great memories in here, mind if I stick up one or two later when I get in from work?

hamster

Wossack wrote:

excellent thread

some great memories in here, mind if I stick up one or two later when I get in from work?

Sure! Please Go right ahead. I mean to get around to Driller, Castlemaster and a few others If you have anything that is not on this list let me know! I really like to know what was your favourite folks.

hamster

I remember trying Alien Breed - Tower Assault. This game brings back memories of a hot summer in 1995. Played this one from a demo on PCFormat's CD.
Playing it now is not bad - just I'm not good at these shmups. Sounds are good and creepy with that background eerie noise.

Here is a shot of the title screen: The music is excellent - short but rousing tune. Like yeah, I want another go.


Here I start on level 1, too afraid to get out of the room.


Just curious - did anyone get far into this game? I never went beyond the first level. It's feels easier than the original Alien Breed.

hamster

Dos game of the day is UFO - Enemy Unknown. What a game this is. Hunting down Aliens, killing or capturing them and then upgrading your technology, your bases and your kit. Awesome game for it's time! I remember first seeing this game on demo in April 1994.

The background music is nice to listen and hard to tire of - no mean feat. The graphics are perfectly functional and I like the detail on the zoomable world map.
.
I just chased a UFO from France to the Ukraine but it was too fast and outran my starting chasing ships.
I find the UFOpaedia amazing. I love the information packed within and the way it updates from your discoveries - a nice touch (ADOM is another game that does this - monster memory).


Eventually you do get a UFO down and you get to send the troops in...

I think what makes this game so interesting is all the extras that go on around you as you play the game such as Funding from Nations for research, weapons and support. It's another game I didn't finish. It's hard to believe it hasn't really aged that much in the sense it's as exciting and fresh as it was back then.

Anyone finish this?

Retr0gamer

Enemy unknown was voted best PC game ever onone of the big games sites. One of my mates is always raving about it's predecessor laser squad and how you could hide in the toilets in multiplayer well before goldeneye

hamster

Retr0gamer wrote:

Enemy unknown was voted best PC game ever onone of the big games sites. One of my mates is always raving about it's predecessor laser squad and how you could hide in the toilets in multiplayer well before goldeneye

Yup. That UFO Enemy unknown really has that epic feel about it. Starting out small and spreading your bases watching everything right down to your every ammo clip. Started out with a small raid today on a tiny ufo.

After the battle - wasn't much I was only up against a tiny alien (I started with Beginner mode since it was so long ago).

Actually I had to throttle the cpu back in the battlescape mode above as it more simple than the globescope (map) mode. Notice the blue dosbox bar above set to use a mere 6% of cpu (this is on a cheap €70 D820 Pentium D we're talking here).

It was a nice feeling getting back to base with a job well done.

hamster

Another game I love is Battle Isle 2. I am still looking for players btw! Please let me know if you want to try a turn by email game. Once every few days (or whatever) - the turns can take 5mins-10mins each.

Battle Isle 2 is fabulous single player (or multi-player game by email). The game is hex turn based and features nicely satisfyingly destructive battle sequences (which is quick and optional) when taking on the enemy. The enemy by the way is Titan - a computer controlled army consisting of tanks, troops, railguns, buggies and heavy Fortress tanks. All this takes place on terrain that varies with the weather. One minute you got imposing tanks rumbling at you in the dust. Next minute you are safe as they turn into mud caked giants in the rain. In winter your light vehicles can cross rivers.
Example of mission 2 in the single game (about 10-12 missions if I remember).

All these points increases the opportunity for classic strategy. You can hem in your enemies, jam their radar - fight from the right terrain type - all while making sure your fuel and ammo lines are open.... and doing your damnest to break theirs! What a game. Give me a line if anyone is interested in a game - as we can use our own maps.

Follow this old thread ). Works a charm in dosbox.

Here is an example of a multiplayer map zoomed waaay out.

This example shows off the airpower and Navies that Battle Isle 2 has. The most powerful piece is the Zenith Battleship can hit a target 8 hexes away in a turn (if it hasn't moved) and can sink/destroy a target in a single shot - but is vunerable to subs.
Btw, there is a new java frontend for dosbox. It's handy for tweaking your configuration for multiple games. DFend is another (but hasn't been updated for a long time). You can get that here. Looks like this:

Retr0gamer

Seems like advance wars on a bigger scale

Wossack

hamster wrote:

Sure! Please Go right ahead. I mean to get around to Driller, Castlemaster and a few others If you have anything that is not on this list let me know! I really like to know what was your favourite folks.

Ill have to try and post some stuff tonight, have a couple not on your list alright Very impressed with the dosbox emulator(?), and had a great time playing UFO - never played it before! Unfortunately, it crashed on me soon as it tried loading the crash site stage Have to try and find another version of it, one that runs in dosbox.

jimmythekidd

mmm this thread is a mad trip down memory lane,
hows the networking go under dosbox? I'll try it myself today anyways...
I'd love to set up a nostalgia lan and play some doom/duke3d/blood/c&c/anything else that supported multiplayer, seeing C&C brought back bad memories of setting up modem link games and having call waiting interrupt and drop the game just after I've built up a massive base...

Wossack

haha yea, hacking together horrible modem strings to try and get quake 1 working over the phone line... and then just lag-warping around and gibbing myself in lava - ah those were the days

Trode

hamster wrote:

Anyone finish this?

Yep, only on Beginner, but then thanks to a bug you have to finish it on that setting anyway(besides, it's fairly challenging even then).
UFO is fantastic, one of my all-time favourite PC games. It's still impressive how they managed to give the hackneyed 50s B-movie setting real edge and tension, rather than going for the easy laughs.

Duggy747

You guys should try out the OpenGl versions of the classics Doom And Duke Nukem; vastly improved graphics while keeping the classic look at the same time, genius! An OpenGl version of Blood is knocking around but I think it's unfinished.

I have to get back to playing these games, I have the all the full versions hanging around somewhere deep in my laptop. Have to give DosBox another go as the last version I tried (which was AGES ago) sucked balls and was too fidgety!