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Best Hercules games for a 5150?

austinramsay

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Mar 30, 2020
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Location
Yuma, AZ
Hey guys,

Awaiting delivery of my Hercules card for my 5150 and would like to find some of the best/most popular games that will be playable on the not so powerful beast. I have 256K of RAM as of right now but plan on finding an expansion card for it so minimum RAM can be 512K. I found a list of Hercules supported games but really would like to know from others with experience if anything plays well on the 4.77mhz 8088.

Thanks!
Austin
 
HGC cards can emulate CGA, just without color obviously. Any CGA game designed for an 8088 will probably run fine.
 
Awaiting delivery of my Hercules card for my 5150 and would like to find some of the best/most popular games that will be playable on the not so powerful beast.

The best games for Hercules take advantage of its entire 720x350 resolution, such as Microsoft Flight Simulator 3. But that's going to be sluggish on a 4.77 MHz 8088. A few others take partial advantage of that resolution to render fonts nicer; all of the DOS-based AGI games (Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.) will do that.

Past that, here are a few lists you can look at to see if anything is appealing:

https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/pc-booter/tic,2/ti,4/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1985/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1986/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1987/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1988/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1989/

And maybe https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1990/ but you should check the Tech Specs of the game to ensure it doesn't require a 286 or higher.

Finally, you can run SIMCGA to simulate CGA on your Hercules, and thereby run any CGA graphics software -- however, there is a big speed penalty in doing this, so it would only be fun for non-action games like Adventures or Strategy. It's always faster to run games that have native Hercules support. EDIT: You can run UniCGA with the "-f" option for full speed, but there will be blank lines on the display.
 
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Guerrilla War ! , Victory Road , Ikary Warriors , Narco Police , Game Over I and II , Livingstone Supongo 2, i play it all , all Booter Games.
 
There is a Hercules version of spacewar that I played a lot. I also played chess but I don’t recall what exactly it was, and I wasn’t very good so it might not have been either. I also think I had family feud, jeopardy, and wheel of fortune, but some of those might have been after I got a 10mhz 8088 clone with a hard drive not the original 4.77mhz with just floppies.
 
The best games for Hercules take advantage of its entire 720x350 resolution, such as Microsoft Flight Simulator 3. But that's going to be sluggish on a 4.77 MHz 8088. A few others take partial advantage of that resolution to render fonts nicer; all of the DOS-based AGI games (Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.) will do that.

Past that, here are a few lists you can look at to see if anything is appealing:

https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/pc-booter/tic,2/ti,4/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1985/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1986/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1987/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1988/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1989/

And maybe https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,4/1990/ but you should check the Tech Specs of the game to ensure it doesn't require a 286 or higher.

Finally, you can run SIMCGA to simulate CGA on your Hercules, and thereby run any CGA graphics software -- however, there is a big speed penalty in doing this, so it would only be fun for non-action games like Adventures or Strategy. It's always faster to run games that have native Hercules support. EDIT: You can run UniCGA with the "-f" option for full speed, but there will be blank lines on the display.

Some CGA-Only titles do not work, like EPYX stuff (SummerGames, WinterGames, WorldGames) I can't fugure out why they do not work.
 
...Finally, you can run SIMCGA to simulate CGA on your Hercules, and thereby run any CGA graphics software...
 
...Finally, you can run SIMCGA to simulate CGA on your Hercules, and thereby run any CGA graphics software...

The SIMCGA documentation isn't quite so promising. Note the number of specific patches included to get some CGA programs to work and there are likely to be other CGA programs that would need patching as well.

WHAT WILL AND WON'T WORK?-

Because SIMCGA is a software product, there are certain hardware
limitations on its use. Programs which access the Color Graphics
Adapter hardware registers directly generally will not operate in
a satisfactory manner - the hardware just isn't there to interact
with! In general, try running the program - you won't clobber your
disks if it doesn't work.
 
...Finally, you can run SIMCGA to simulate CGA on your Hercules, and thereby run any CGA graphics software...
I don't know where you read that, but unfortunately that statement is incorrect. Not everything works or works properly with SIMCGA.

It is actually quite impressive that it runs as much stuff as it does.
 
a) I don't know where you read that, but unfortunately that statement is incorrect. Not everything works or works properly with SIMCGA.
b) It is actually quite impressive that it runs as much stuff as it does.

a) post 8
b) yes it is.
 
As the author of post #5, I'll clarify that that SimCGA works with just about every program you *need* it to work with. If you're playing some game that has incredibly fast action that SimCGA can't keep up with, you're likely running said game on a system too slow to properly support that game natively anyway. And if you're running a game that has CGA-only hardware tweaking, that game won't work properly even on VGA so you'd be limited to CGA anyway.

With utmost respect to Chuck, if you want an alternate way to try simulating CGA that doesn't require any copying -- and thus no speed loss -- try UniCGA by Tommy Frandsen. It has a mode that changes the 6845 registers to get a 640-wide mode and locates it in b800 so that no copying is required. Every other line is blank, due to the nature of how this works, but there's no copying involved. I've made a copy of it available here: ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/misc/Software/Utils/UNICGA.LZH
 
@T, that was my first approach about 35 years ago, but the display, quite honestly, with alternate blank lines is terrible to view. I wanted something that would display a fullly-filled out screen. It's not rocket science.
 
UniCGA also has a mode where it uses the 640-wide display but then also fills in the lines via REP MOVSW on a user-defined schedule. The filled-in display only covers roughly 75% of the screen though. The only way to fill the screen out completely is a full 1.5x copy as you implemented.
 
I'd recommend checking out an obscure game called Korean Dungeon Boy. It has very nice Hercules full-res graphics, and the CGA mode looks so much worse. The game is also fairly good and I'm pretty sure would be playable on a 5150 despite it being a game from 1991.
 
Prince of persia natively supports Hercules cards without CGA emulation. It's a little slow but it is playable.
 
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