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Favorita IBM-Compatible Games

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MaTel

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Hello,

which are your favorite MS-DOS/PC-DOS games since the beginning of IBM-XT till 1990.
In this peroid I owned a C64 and Amiga but I don`t now which games where popular on MS-DOS/PC-DOS.
The later DOS-games are not interest for me.

Are there games like c64: shamus, blue-max, jumpman, world-games...
 
MaTel said:
Hello,

which are your favorite MS-DOS/PC-DOS games since the beginning of IBM-XT till 1990.
In this peroid I owned a C64 and Amiga but I don`t now which games where popular on MS-DOS/PC-DOS.
The later DOS-games are not interest for me.

Are there games like c64: shamus, blue-max, jumpman, world-games...
Click to expand...

Except for Blue-Max, all of those were on PC and played just like the C64 versions but with worse colors and music.

My favorite pre-1990 games are:

Outrun
Stunt Track Racer
Hack
Alley Cat
Spacewar (with a human opponent)
Arctic Fox
Starglider
Rocket Ranger
Defender of the Crown
Wasteland
Karnov
and tons more I can't remember at the moment.
 
Hm, what is "composite" mode on an IBM PC compatible? On the page Darth Kur linked to, a few Bally Midway games are represented both with RGB (CGA) graphics and something called composite, which is a bit more blurry but with a lot more colours. Sorry to break out a technical question in a supposedly non-technical thread, but I have rarely or never seen this before. Perhaps those really are later EGA or even VGA conversions of the 1984 titles?

By the way, almost all the screenshots seem to be CGA. When did EGA become popular, did only the graphical adventure games support it or is there another reason why those sites would only display CGA graphics (most common back then)?

Edit: A hint may be that on one page it says Tandy 1000, so maybe those Bally games had enhanced Tandy / PCjr (?) graphics that in composite mode on a TV will look like that. I saw that Super Zaxxon (and BC's Quest for Tires) also has a such mode, which makes sense as all three of Spy Hunter, Tapper and Super Zaxxon were released for home computers by Sega at the same occassion.

Edit 2: Nope. The Black Cauldron from Sierra has three screen shots: RGB, Composite and Tandy 1000, all slightly different.
 
Last edited:
carlsson said:
Hm, what is "composite" mode on an IBM PC compatible? On the page Darth Kur linked to, a few Bally Midway games are represented both with RGB (CGA) graphics and something called composite, which is a bit more blurry but with a lot more colours. Sorry to break out a technical question in a supposedly non-technical thread, but I have rarely or never seen this before. Perhaps those really are later EGA or even VGA conversions of the 1984 titles?

By the way, almost all the screenshots seem to be CGA. When did EGA become popular, did only the graphical adventure games support it or is there another reason why those sites would only display CGA graphics (most common back then)?

Edit: A hint may be that on one page it says Tandy 1000, so maybe those Bally games had enhanced Tandy / PCjr (?) graphics that in composite mode on a TV will look like that. I saw that Super Zaxxon (and BC's Quest for Tires) also has a such mode, which makes sense as all three of Spy Hunter, Tapper and Super Zaxxon were released for home computers by Sega at the same occassion.

Edit 2: Nope. The Black Cauldron from Sierra has three screen shots: RGB, Composite and Tandy 1000, all slightly different.
Click to expand...

Looks to me like the Composite screen shots are the same as the Tandy 1000 ones, only with the brightness reduced, which to me indicates that it's the same graphic mode displayed on a Composite screen connected to a Tandy 1000.
 
MaTel said:
Hello,

which are your favorite MS-DOS/PC-DOS games since the beginning of IBM-XT till 1990.
In this peroid I owned a C64 and Amiga but I don`t now which games where popular on MS-DOS/PC-DOS.
The later DOS-games are not interest for me.

Are there games like c64: shamus, blue-max, jumpman, world-games...
Click to expand...

My favourite Dos game was Xenon2... How many hours playing it!!! :D
 
Ultima 6
Ultima 7 + Serpent isle
Might and Magic III

where my most played games back then,
i didnt own a IBM computer until late 80's/early 90's, so im not sure if my list counts.
 
Didn't own a PC back then but a Commodore 64 and then I got an Amiga 500
but I kind of catched up lately by building a vintage PC collection just for DOS games :mrgreen:

So my favourites are:

* Wing Commander, use to play it alot on my Amiga 500 when it was released on that machine, and now I can play it with VGA graphics and heard the sound thru a Roland CM32L :cool:

* Hero Quest, also a game I spent hours on my Amiga 500..and now it get's a 2nd chance with more colourful graphics + Roland MT32 sounds

* Wings Of Glory, a later DOS game...the only PC game imho which resembles Wings on the Amiga which is one of my favourites
It needs quite alot of CPU power to run smootly...at least a 75-80mhz 486
 
I've mentioned a few in various threads and agree with the above post but wasn't sure the dates were valid.

For older dos games I played:
Fleet Sweep
SpaceWar
The Black Couldron

I liked Pango, and MoonBugs and a few other simple games as well.

Ooh.. centipede I used to play all the time

Sleuth was good too (basically the game of clue)
 
A lot of my old PC favourites have already been mentioned, but I'll list them again for posterity!

Space War (monochrome, a two-player dueling game, lots of fun)
Ace 2 (very primitive, CGA, multiplayer splitscreen!)
Sopwith (so awesome, especially flying into the sunset)
Mario clone with ASCII graphics
Intra-Galactic Battles (awesome Star Trek game)
Zaxxon clone (CGA)
Centipede clone (CGA)
Islands of Danger! (ASCII hovercraft game)
Striker (helicopter game)
Chopper Commando (another helicopter game)
Corncob 3D (a really trippy game!)
Moraff's (there were a lot of Moraff games)
SimCity, SimAnt, and SimEarth
Tank Wars (aka Bomb)
Scorched Earth
D-Zone (top-down triangle tank deathmatch!)
Wing Commander (I was blown away when I got the sequel and it had actual talking!)
Ultima VI (I missed out on the earlier Ultima games, sadly)

Can you tell I never had a gaming console when I was a kid? :p
 
Oh yes, Scorched Earth. I tried to run the most recent version on my modern PC, but it froze or something. Perhaps I didn't boot it from a clean enough DOS environment. Never mind that everything will happen at 100X the speed unless I'd use a program to slow it down or run in DOSbox, emulating an older PC.
 
Yeah, DOSBox is very good at running these games, and in fact absolutely necessary for me because I only use 64-bit Windows and non-Windows environments such as Linux and MacOS. All of my vintage machines are too old to run them at all! :)

I have Scorched Earth 1.50 working fine if it makes a difference.
 
I've not played too much pre 1990 PC compatible games... I wasn't born before '92 :p . But I've played stuff like Loderunner and the first version of Tetris (the one using ASCII).
 
MaTel said:
Hello,

which are your favorite MS-DOS/PC-DOS games since the beginning of IBM-XT till 1990.
In this peroid I owned a C64 and Amiga but I don`t now which games where popular on MS-DOS/PC-DOS.
The later DOS-games are not interest for me.

Are there games like c64: shamus, blue-max, jumpman, world-games...
Click to expand...

Ah, man... Shamus was one of the first games I ever played on the M24! This was the PC version. You can't technically call it a "DOS version", since it was one of those booter games, that booted from a single disk without DOS being loaded. Memories... :sigh:
 
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