8088 Games - CGA, EGA, even VGA, list your favs!

[Raven]

I've been playing Pharaoh's Tomb a bit in DOSbox and on my 486, awaiting my 5160 to come to play it properly on. I was wondering what games that will run on an 8088 you all enjoy.

As for me:
Pharaoh's Tomb
Commander Keen
Beast
Others I can't think of right now, lol. I'm probably not going to go as crazy with this list as I did with my DOS games list in that other thread, I'm looking for input for what to put on my 5160 when it gets here.

 

[Maverick1978]

Any of the Apogee CGA-style games are awesome. Monuments of Mars, Pharoah's Tomb, Paganitzu, Kroz, ZZT, Rogue, Caves of Thor, Outrun, and the Sierra adventure games... I used to rock those on CGA (or monochrome with color.com) for years!! Quite fun stuffs. I especially enjoyed the shareware CGA games from apogee and epic though - they weren't lacking anything with the lower color pallette as Outrun and the Sierra games were.

 

[digger]

Any of the Apogee CGA-style games are awesome. Monuments of Mars, Pharoah's Tomb, Paganitzu, Kroz, ZZT, Rogue, Caves of Thor, Outrun, and the Sierra adventure games... I used to rock those on CGA (or monochrome with color.com) for years!! Quite fun stuffs. I especially enjoyed the shareware CGA games from apogee and epic though - they weren't lacking anything with the lower color pallette as Outrun and the Sierra games were.

I believe you might be confusing CGA with EGA. Many of the Apogee games required EGA or higher.

 

[Raven]

Most of the ones he listed are CGA, at least the ones on his list that I'm more familiar with. Pharaoh's Tomb, Paganitzu.. Anywho as per the thread title EGA and VGA are fine too, as long as they'll run with an 8088.

 

[Maverick1978]

I believe you might be confusing CGA with EGA. Many of the Apogee games required EGA or higher.

Nah... My first family computer was a 486. I used it a LOT. But MY first computer was a monochrome 386 DX-25 that I used color.com to enable CGA graphics. It was on that machine that I did most of my shareware games - all of the games I named were either CGA-only (the shareware games), or had a CGA mode (Outrun, some of the Sierra Adventure games including SQ1-3, PQ1-2, KQ1-4, Zeliard, Thexder, etc)

Besides that... I collect classic DOS games from Apogee, Epic, and Sierra. My original Sierra collection is nearly complete, with several of the sealed variety, and while originals of Apogee and Epic games are hard to come by, I have their entire collections in all flavors in my digital collection, including CGA and EGA/VGA variations of the same games, if available. What I'm working on with those games are trying to collect original, true floppy images and when I can, boxed/complete games.

 

[Raven]

Anybody else? I'm still looking for more games to check out on here. I'm considering a V20 upgrade so that may open a few doors soon..

 

[Lutiana]

Maniac Mansion runs ok on a 8088 in CGA or EGA mode. King's Quest 1, Space Quest 1, Leisure Suite Larry 1.

There was this one game that I can't remember what it was called, but at one point it had a screen that had some of Guns 'N Roses lyrics printed on a tablet (Paradise City).

Check out this site if you are looking for a list of games to try and get hold of.

 

[fs5500]

Hello.
I have many of IBM PC Retail Game BOX and Disk Images.
Especially I have the following Taito games I have.

Arkanoid (1988 Taito) / CGA - EGA - Tandy (5.25" 2D x 1EA)
Arkalnoid II Revenge Of DoH (1989 Taito) / CGA - EGA - Tandy - VGA (5.25" 2D x 1EA)
Operation Wolf (1989 Taito) / CGA - EGA -Tandy - VGA (5.25" 2D x 2EA)
Renegade (1989 Taito) / CGA - EGA - Tandy - VGA (5.25" 2D x 2EA)
Sky Shark (1989 Taito) / CGA - EGA - Tandy - VGA (5.25" 2D x 2EA)

I have over 50 kinds of 5.25" 2D games as Retail BOX.

I also have many of Floppy Disk Images of 5.25"

 

[station240]

Death Track, the original not the fake new version. Only runs properly on an Xt machine, 286 is too fast.

 

[commodorejohn]

A lot of Epic's early titles will run on an 8088 system. Jill Of The Jungle and Solar Winds are particularily choice. The iD Software crew also did some great stuff back in the day; Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion is tons of fun, and let's not forget Wolfenstein 3D!

 

[barythrin]

Pretty sure we have a lot of these threads but sopwith, F-15 Strike Eagle, Striker, Fleet Sweep, were all fun games. Wheel of Fortune was good, Jeopardy was way too hard for me as a kid but may be acceptable now.. back then I could barely get through reading the question before a computer would buzz in and answer the question. Simple arcade like games that I had fun playing: Centipede, Moon Bugs, Digger, Pengo.

Good games in general: SpaceWar, Castle Adventure, any SSI TSR game (whip out that D&D Compendium!). Crystal Caves I think er..maybe not (just saw picture).. there was a pre-Jill of the Jungle game where you were a caveman side scroller jump and run game.. trying to remember the name but I know I played that on our 8088. lol there it is.. Dark Ages. Maybe I'm wrong about the 8088 but I'm not sure, I stuck with that system for quite a while. Even tried playing/using Virtual Reality Studio ("create and play in your own virtual reality world" and Space Station Oblivion (slow but was a true 3d game maybe on a faster chip it'd be good).. uh.. k..)

 

[hargle]

i played a ridiculous amount of Ultima III on my PCjr when that game was fresh. I probably played that game about every day for well over a year. The amount of depth for a game (for an 13 year old anyway) that they managed to pack into a 360k floppy was amazing.
I'll just say that I played this game SO much, that when U4 came out, and supported EGA graphics, I didn't think the game looked right anymore and lost interest.

If you're into 8088 friendly platformer games, Jumpan is quite a fun game. 30 levels.
Best played on a PCjr though, so you can get 16 colors.

 

[barythrin]

Oddly I only played Janitor Joe on my 8088 which is weird because it looks JUST like the cover of the Jumpman. In fact I bought it off ebay trying to figure out if it was the same game but wasn't. I still remember my friend (young) trying to figure out how to get up a latter and kept jumping at a wall (I won't say where ;-)). I was slapping my head (yeah I couldn't believe my 7 year old friend jumping at nothing) and then a hidden latter appeared with a secret room. Never would have assumed that game to have secret areas and honestly never got good enough to figure out if/where there were others.

 

[Agent Orange]

I was poking around on a closet shelf and wouldn't you know a boxed version of "Sorcerer Lord" fell into my hands. I didn't even know that I had it. Its pristine - I don't ever remember even looking in the box. It came with a 720 KB 3.5" floppy as well as two 360 KB 5.25" floppys. The date printed on the disk is MCMLXXXVIII, which unencrypted computes to 1988 (I think). I popped the floppy in my big box and ran "sor_lor.exe" from my DOS drive command line. The game menu came right up. The selections were as follows:

1. CGA Colour Mode
2. CGA Mono Mode
3. AMSTRAD PC1512 16 Colour Mode
4. EGA
5. TANDY 1000

The good news is that it ran fine in the EGA mode on my new hex core with the 5850 video card. A tad fast though. The box also had the ready reference card, a brown construction paper map, and the "Players Guide".
I'll have to check it out on my 1000SX and see what its all about. The box had a "PSS" logo but no mention of country of origin or who the author was. With there being reference to "COLOUR" on the menu, I suspect it came from Canada or somewhere in GB. Right, Tezz?

 

[Maverick1978]

Oddly I only played Janitor Joe on my 8088 which is weird because it looks JUST like the cover of the Jumpman

Funny you mention that... I never caught Jumpman, but spent many a time playing Janitor Joe simply because it was a freely-available remake of Jumpman, which I'd always heard good things about!

 

[EverythingIBM]

I had the opportunity to try out "castlevania" for DOS, which is CGA. Uses PC mono speaker (yeah, castlevania music on a mono PC speaker & sound effects, it starts to get real crazy and insanely fast beeping).
Although playing it in windows 98 is a bit of a job. It'll keep giving you a "cannot divide by zero" error, if you keep trying to load the game a few times it'll eventually go. It would be great to try out on the 5150 once I get some spare 5" low density disks... and DOS (not sure what version it needs though, obviously an older one).

Other cool CGA games would be commander keen (haven't really tried them out before, but I do know about dopefish). I'm a big fan of Tom Hall games... it's too bad he left id software, I'm sure doom would have been a lot better. Tom recently had a stroke, so, hope he's recovering nicely! My best wishes to him.

And of course Ultima, can't go wrong with a good Richard Garriott game, but I've only had a chance to play a little bit of those: and it was mostly the newer ones. Ultima Ascension was included with the Voodoo 3 driver CD if I'm not mistaken.

In all honesty, I like VGA better than CGA (yeah yeah graphics don't make a good game, but they can make a good one better); by the time I started playing games, things like Age of Empires 1 came out. Besides, the Amiga 500 had way superior graphics (like James Sachs' artwork for Defender of the Crown), PCs were still in the dark ages: but when they caught up, the sudden advancement rendered the Amiga 500 back into obscurity. Kind of like how 3Dfx was ahead in Graphics technology, but soon as the other companies caught up, the race was over and they became bankrupt. One of my theories for Commodore losing money however was Jack Tramiel's leave, you get stupid CEOs in companies and then management ultimately transcends into bankruptcy. One example of comparison is comparing Louis V. Gerstner jr. who kept the IBM divisions together in order to revive the company -- then comes along highschool dropout Samuel Palmisano who goes and sells a whole bunch of IBM's divisions (PC & printing) just for a quick buck into his own pocket! I hope Sammy is enjoying that one billion he got from Lenovo.

Here's Richard taking his space tour (yeah, thumbs up to Ultima):

 

[Raven]

iirc Wolfenstein 3D was a 286+ game that really shines on a 386+. There's a hacked Wolf3d for 808x CPUs or perhaps you could get it to run on a V20/V30, but I'm pretty sure the original wasn't intended for the 8088. Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

 

[commodorejohn]

I had the opportunity to try out "castlevania" for DOS, which is CGA. Uses PC mono speaker (yeah, castlevania music on a mono PC speaker & sound effects, it starts to get real crazy and insanely fast beeping).

IIRC, it also runs in EGA 16-color mode (never tried it on a Tandy; I should, now that I've got one.) and it supports an Adlib/SB for music, though it does sound kind of squawky like an unfortunate amount of early OPL2 music. Still, cool game; it's interesting to see the scaled-up takes on the graphics of the original.

Besides, the Amiga 500 had way superior graphics (like James Sachs' artwork for Defender of the Crown), PCs were still in the dark ages: but when they caught up, the sudden advancement rendered the Amiga 500 back into obscurity.

Eh, even then it took a while; there weren't many people that really understood how to use the VGA to push pixels, so the Amiga still had an advantage for a while. (I've just been reading Michael Abrash's Black Book on optimization, and I had seriously never even realized the kind of things the VGA can be set up to do, because all most people seemed to do with it was standard mode 13h programming.) And anybody from the Amiga community will gladly talk your ear off about how screwed-up Commodore management was :/

iirc Wolfenstein 3D was a 286+ game that really shines on a 386+. There's a hacked Wolf3d for 808x CPUs or perhaps you could get it to run on a V20/V30, but I'm pretty sure the original wasn't intended for the 8088. Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

Hmm. I know it runs on DSx86, which emulates an 80188, but I suppose it might still use the extended instructions. Interesting.

 

[EverythingIBM]

IIRC, it also runs in EGA 16-color mode (never tried it on a Tandy; I should, now that I've got one.) and it supports an Adlib/SB for music, though it does sound kind of squawky like an unfortunate amount of early OPL2 music. Still, cool game; it's interesting to see the scaled-up takes on the graphics of the original.

Eh, even then it took a while; there weren't many people that really understood how to use the VGA to push pixels, so the Amiga still had an advantage for a while. (I've just been reading Michael Abrash's Black Book on optimization, and I had seriously never even realized the kind of things the VGA can be set up to do, because all most people seemed to do with it was standard mode 13h programming.) And anybody from the Amiga community will gladly talk your ear off about how screwed-up Commodore management was :/

I actually like OPL2/3. I didn't know castlevania for DOS had it, I was only able to get the mono speaker to work... do I need an actual OPL3 ISA card?

VGA is indeed a weird thing. It's a very old technology but it's still used, kind of like AT & PS/2. I guess it's not legacy then since it's still in current use!
But I guess DVI may get the upper hand for high-end stuff, I still see a lot of computers with only VGA ports though.

 

[commodorejohn]

I actually like OPL2/3. I didn't know castlevania for DOS had it, I was only able to get the mono speaker to work... do I need an actual OPL3 ISA card?

Yeah, OPL music is awesome. Anyway, there are some software emulators for it, but good luck getting them to run on an 8088 For the most part, though, you don't need an OPL3 card if you can't find one cheaply; most games only use OPL2.

VGA is indeed a weird thing. It's a very old technology but it's still used, kind of like AT & PS/2. I guess it's not legacy then since it's still in current use!
But I guess DVI may get the upper hand for high-end stuff, I still see a lot of computers with only VGA ports though.

Well, the VGA technology is a lot more than just the monitor port, and even DVI-only cards still keep the legacy-mode hardware around. I suppose it's still around because it's used by so much stuff as an assumed "baseline" video mode (see: Windows in safe mode.)