Dos games

Post Reply New Topic

Have you heard of dos games?

This'll sound bizarre, but I always freaking LOVED DOS. It did whatever I told it. None of that "doing unknown things" in the background" crap that Windows does. There was something simple and pure about it, and it was good. You gave it a command, and it bloody well did it. And then it sat there. It was good indeed.

I have... too many DOS games to count. Way too many. I dont know where most of them came from. Some of my favorites are Jetpack, Round 42, Flightmare, Arctic Adventure, Kroz, Rogue Runner, Sim Earth, and.... too many to list. I'd have to think about it a bunch more to come up with more particular favorites.

I'm so glad for things like DOS Box and such so that I can still play alot of these old games. I miss those days though, I really do.

How many dos games were made in 1981?

I havent the foggiest idea.

Favourite DOS games so far are King's Quest VI and Broken Sword.

Can't forget, the "Theme" bullfrog games (theme park, theme hospital).

Commander Keen, Cosmos Cosmic Adventures, Captain Comic, Scorched Earth, Crystal Caves, Dangerous Dave, Police Quest Series, Space Quest Series, Kings Quest Series, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max: Hit the Road, One Must Fall 2097....

I could be here all day listing dos games that I own / enjoy...

But I will give an honorable mention to ZZT, although it was a QBasic game, QBasic ran in DOS, so I guess it should be counted as a DOS game, and I guess if we are counting ZZT we also have to count Gorillas!

ZZT


Gorillas

I agree, my favorite DOS program was called Xtree Gold, It was kind of like a no frills windows, that actually worked.
It did what you told it to, and didn't do anything on its own and it had a built in hex editor! (good for changing your save games / modding games)

MS-DOS is quite possibly one of my favorite operating systems ever. It's minimal, no-nonsense, light on resources, extremely configurable, and actually rather simple to use once you learn how to navigate the command line. The only real problems it has are that it's strictly 16-bit, and it doesn't have a unified driver architecture, so programs that want to make use of more advanced hardware like 32-bit CPUs and 3D accelerated video cards pretty need to provide their own drivers and DOS extenders. Naturally, developers got sick of having to include these things a long time ago when the Win32 API became relevant, so DOS's hardware support is pretty much stuck in the 90s.

I'd LOVE to see a 64-bit version of DOS with standardized support for things like SMP, hardware accelerated graphics, and TCP/IP, although all of these things would have to be optional. I'm thinking it could be like a simpler, more lightweight alternative to Linux. I know there's the FreeDOS project, so I might just have to learn to program and start working on my own fork of it.

Anyway, back on topic, some of my favorite DOS games include Ultimate Doom, Syndicate, Descent II, One Must Fall: 2097, Warcraft II, Dungeon Keeper, Duke Nukem 3D (lots of titles starting with "D" ), Carmageddon, Tyrian 2000, and Llamatron 2112.

ZZT, I freaking LOVED that game. I spent soooooo much time with it. America Online was our internet provider at that time. Waaaaayyyyyyy back when computers werent perpetually online like they are now, and when everyone had 56k connections. They had a big gaming-related section, and one of those sections was a download/upload area for both ZZT and Megazeux (for anyone that hasnt seen Megazeux, it's like a dramatically upgraded ZZT; I played the hell out of both though). So it was real easy to download stuff that others had made, and to upload ones that I'd made.

Ahh, I miss those days. They were good.

Ugh, the nostalgia. It hurts.

I really enjoyed a lot of games for DOS. I loved Warcraft 2, Master of Orion 2, Civilisation, One Must Fall 2097, Tyrian, Solar Winds, Traffic Department 2192, Abuse, Full Throttle, The Dig and Descent. I have no nostalgia for the DOS era or operating system though, with managing memory, drivers, and dealing with esoterica such as IRQ assignments and COM ports.

Traffic Department 2192! That's another favorite of mine! Dune II kicks ass as well. ^^ I should also give shout-outs for Falcon 3.0 and Turrican II.

I miss DOS.. I wasted so much time trying to beat Zork, yet I never did.

The original Doom games, Wolfenstein 3d and Warcraft 1 & 2 are all DOS games and some of my favorite

You make it sound a lot more difficult than it really is. I always had a lot more trouble with Win95 than I did with DOS.

Exactly. DOS only seemed complicated until you got used to it. After that, regardless of what you were doing, it was a breeze to use. I always had somewhat underpowered computers as a kid, so I was used to doing screwball things with it to get stuff to work properly, but as I knew the OS well it wasnt a problem.

Wheras WINDOWS.... it's basically a channeled catastrophe in the form of an OS. One problem after another. Some users seem to spend much more time fixing stuff than using it. I've always seen it as something that only APPEARS to be user-friendly.... until soon the sugary facade falls away, and you're left with only the hideous reality underneath. And then the fun begins. And by "fun" I mean "no".

Yep, Windows is not user friendly whatsoever.

The only user-friendly part about it is the off switch.