MS-DOS games

Back when my folks got the first family computer (Windows 3.1 Packard Bell :P) it came with a whole reel of DOS games on CD.

Ah, Megarace... the game sucked but it had heart.

edited 9th Sep '11 11:32:31 AM by Ratix

Besides some of the already mentioned games, I also played the Master Of Orion and the Master Of Magic, plus other games I can't remember right now.

And here is a modified DOSBox for the Roland MT-32 supported games. You will need the MT-32 control ROMS, though.

Speaking of sound: While MT-32 does sounds godly, I didn't have the Roland hardware back then but I clearly remember the midi music still sounding better than what you can hear in vanilla Dosbox. Must have been Soundblaster 16 and/or AWE32.

edited 9th Sep '11 11:54:23 AM by Shinr

Rogue and The Incredible Machine. <3

Oh, when I was kid, I played at lot of MS-DOS games! Duke Nukem (you know, the pink-wearing dude who watched Oprah?) was one of them. Commander Keen is another one. The Incredible Machine, Conquests Of The Longbow, XCOM and many more!

It's sad how a number of people curl their lips and act like DOS games are for losers! Well, maybe some of them were not that great, but a number of them have charm, style and gameplay that modern games can't even aspire to! Also, a number of franchises started as DOS games (looking at you, Tomb Raider!). Really, today's gamers seriously need to get a sense of gratitude!

At least with DOS Box and Steam, you can play most of these old-time games again! If you are curious, Wikipedia has an index of MS-DOS games. It doesn't have every single game listed (like Kung Fu Louie, Plague Of The Moon, Last Half Of Darkness, Night VGA AKA The Endless Night, and others), but it has lot of games that I bet you didn't even know existed!

edited 7th Apr '12 11:25:29 AM by TiggersAreGreat

I remember one of my old computers having a DOS mode, but we never had that many DOS games (well, I never had that many, since my dad and my older brothers played Doom and Duke Nukem 3 D). The only one I remember was that rail-shooter and the game Hi-Octane (which I only ever ran on an XP computer years after DOS died out, with the Compatibility Mode and it ran way too fast).

edited 7th Apr '12 12:36:58 PM by RocketDude

Oh boy... let's see here...

• Oregon Trail (duh)
• Colonization
• Dr Brain (only the first one, sadly)
• DOOM, naturally
• Duke Nukem 3 D (see above)
• TIE Fighter

Particularly the last one

I never really had much experience with DOS as a kid, the most I did was try to install Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed SE and giving up after two days... in hindsight, it should've been obvious that a DOS-mode game would not install in Windows 98's environment without rebooting to DOS. Nowadays though, thanks to the magic of DOS Box, I can enjoy older games with ease!

Let's see... I have:

• The Ultimate Doom (technically Windows 95 version, but included anyway since the WAD file works just dandy with DOS executables)
• Quake + expansions (though the Quake disc is one of the infamous "Episode 1 Shareware" discs that got recalled thanks to it containing all of id's catalog up to that point in rather-easily-broken encrypted form)
• GTA: Director's Cut (includes both a DOS and Windows version in the same installation directory, and, in fact, requires you to install it in Windows, then copy it to your virtual C: directory to work in DOS Box)
• Destruction Derby 2 (I played the shit out of the Play Station port when I was little; also of note is the fact that, like GTA above, it will install in Windows 95 through XP as well as DOS, however, the fact that it refuses to install in Vista and above leads me to believe that the whole thing, executables and all, is actually 16-bit and thus may have been made with DOS in mind)

Man, now I'm in the mood to hunt down more older games...

edited 7th Apr '12 6:02:04 PM by DemonSharkKisame

I don't know if anyone already knew this or not, but Daggerfall has been available for free download from the official site for a few years now. You'll just need a DOS emulator.

Arena is too and when their tenth anniversaries come, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim will probably do the same.

Of course the last three obviously are not DOS.

Ahh, DOS. I grew up on DOS and early Windows. My dad would install a DOS game, then write down the path command on a sticky label and put it on the CD case for me. I learned to read quickly because of that, starting with pattern recognition and then actual reading later on.

The games:

• Jazz Jackrabbit
• Jill of the Jungle
• Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure
• Mega Race
• One where you chose an animal and had to make it from one end of the game to another while avoiding predators. It played something like taps if you lost.
• Oregon Trail

Even now I have a few DOS games. The first Ringworld game's on my comp but I don't play it since the save feature's broken for me. And I run DOS Box.

Oh, and those Seria point and click adventures like Freddy Pharcas, Frontier Pharmacist.

edited 7th Apr '12 5:40:34 PM by Journeyman

In addition to a lot of what's been mentioned already, I spent way too many hours playing Scorched Earth, even if by the later rounds I could generally afford to use nukes almost exclusively aside from a few regular rounds to find the range. And the quips, death or otherwise, were always worth at least a grin.

Had to share this. Once upon a time there was a game called Block-Man. It was basically Sokoban crossed with a platformer. That is, you arranged crates into stairs and platforms to get from one end of the screen to the other. After each level you increase in rank, with each represented by a different fictional character and occupation. You can see the table here◊. Note that the fifth smartest rank is "Spock."

I had Block-Man!!! Never beat it without cheating though...

Commander Keen was the first game I remember playing. I had probably half of the old Apogee DOS games at one point...

Along with all these other games, I recommend Shariki. It's an old Russian puzzle game that inspired Bejeweled.

I am currently playing the shit out of Tyrian. I could really get into shoot em ups if more of them were like this.

Genewars

I wrote the TV Tropes page for it! ^^

I still have the CD for it and everything. Was called the worst game Westwood Studios ever made, but I still enjoy it.

I remember Megarace. It came with our computer, along with Dragon Lore, which was apparently more acclaimed then I'd realized. We had so many issues with the discs failing to read (I think they showed up slightly scratched, and the hardware wasn't great at error-correction) that we pretty much gave up. FX Fighter was another one that I played for hours on end. And I remember rebooting MS-DOS into Safe Mode so that we'd have enough memory to run the Doom demo disc.

Megarace was fun. I always did my damnedest to kill the enemies before the race ended.

While I'll confess that I sometimes struggle to remember which old games were played on DOS and which on Windows 3.1, I do have quite a few pleasant memories from those days. Jill of the Jungle, Worms, Quest for Glory 3 and others come to mind. ^_^

This seems somewhat relevant: I recently learned that the Internet Archive keeps three relevant collections in its software archive:

1) Classic PC Games
2) A Historical Software Collection
3) The Shareware CD Archive

The first contains... well... classic PC games. Quite a few, by the looks of the list. They note that their archive comprises primarily freeware, shareware and demos. For example, they have the freeware Adventure!, the shareware version of Xargon, and the shareware version of Jill of the Jungle.

The second contains "selected historically important software packages from the Internet Archive's software archives". (I haven't yet had a good look through it, I don't believe.)

The third is apparently an archive of IS Os of shareware C Ds, such as one gets with gaming magazines, including, I believe, discs going back to the days of DOS.

There seem to be a number of other collections available — including, oddly, what seems to be another coverdisc collection.

Finally, and less-relevantly, they also have the Console Living Room, which I believe offers emulated versions of games from old consoles such as the Atari 2600 of the Coleco Vision.

edited 7th Feb '14 4:13:50 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

It came late in the MS-DOS era, but I have fond memories of keeping my sense of direction while struggling with the controls in Descent II.

Tyrian was also one of my favorites, and I was hyped when I learned it had been open-sourced and ported to everything with a C compiler. The sheer variety of weapons and number of stages puts most other shoot-em-ups to shame even still.

edited 8th Feb '14 1:00:35 AM by Arutema

Let's see...

The first small batch, received on floppy disks from a friend had these:

1) Asteroids — great fun, especially back then. 2) Lines — who didn't have them? 3) Corner — a GAMOS game based on a super old board game, but slightly better. 4) The Incredible Machine — only the first one. I sucked at it, but the freeform mode was the best thing ever. 5) Micemen — I still think that was freaking awesome. 6) And one other game I can't remember now.

I also received some game just called DARK.EXE, which was a Win 3.1 platformer where you played as a wizard who could make blocks... it didn't run on DOS and later on I had a much more powerful Windows 95 computer, so it ran fast as hell and was pretty much unplayable...

Later on, from various sources (including a "150 best games" CD that was a birthday gift) I played A LOT of various games, like Duke Nukem 3D (got stuck on the third map) and Heretic (didn't know what "strafing" was, so I kept getting killed), the first Jazz Jackrabbit, Cool Spot, the second Legend of Kyrandia, the DOS Dizzy games (only beat "Prince of the Yolkfolk", only with a walkthrough and only years after), but THE game I remember the most from my childhood is absolutely and definitely Supaplex, aka the only Boulderdash clone with level design worth talking about. I eventually managed to beat all 111 levels, but that only happened later...

Jill of the Jungle was awesome. I only beat the Castle chapter, the one with the Prince. I got my ass kicked by demons in the Hell level pretty thoroughly, and I forget what the third stage was.

It was fun turning into a frog and jumping around the water areas in that castle.

The episode with the prince was actually the final one. The first episode didn't really have much of a theme besides "run around and kill monsters".

There's three of them, right? That themeless one, Hell, and the Castle.

To you Jazz Jackrabbit players, which was your favorite boss of the first series? Mine was the Kung Fu Rabbit on the starship level. Once you got the pattern down, he was easy to beat.

Yeah, that's correct. The last episode was also the only one with an overhead world map.

My favorite Jazz boss was either the kung-fu rabbit or the giant lizard in episode 4. Also that game had the most kickass music and I want to listen to it now.

Incidentally, anyone who has a passing interest in old PC games and isn't following Lazy Game Reviews should check him out. He does some pretty nice reviews of such software (and some '90s Windows games and games for popular-in-Europe computers like the Commodore Amiga, too, which is admittedly outside this topic's scope, but mostly DOS games).

Don't have much else to add to this topic, other than how I'd like to check MURI out at some point, when I have more dough. Looks and plays like an old EGA Apogee platformer.