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Best DOS Games 1980-1990?


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17 hours ago, zzip said:

They were significant upgrades.   They provided not just sound, but joystick ports, midi ports and CD-ROM interfaces.

I always thought it hot-shit there were two upgrades I could do to a plug-in card at the time. Adding in the ASP/CSP chip (it was renamed CSP so as not to legally conflict with Active Server Pages from Microsoft) was an exciting experience even though I had no frakking clue what to do with it. It sounded sophisticated (no pun intended) and futuristic. Maybe even in an artificial intelligence supercomputer kind of way. Well..!

 

And the WaveBlaster daughtercard. They gave immediate ROI. Gave me different sounds in Doom and that was justification enuff.

 

Never encountered this sort of expandability in the 8-bit days except for like with the Apple-Cat II modem. You could get a Bell212 card for 1200 baud full-duplex, a headset/handset, RS-232 port, specialized deaf/baudot firmware, control-by-Applesoft BASIC firmware, an interface to control BSR X-10 modules, cassette tape recorder control for answering machine, and even a touch-tone decoder chip. And a crude software-based clock. All sorts of goodies to save multiple slots.

 

Quote

Before ATAPI was standardized to put CDROMs on the IDE bus,  there were at least 4 different common CD-ROM interfaces -  Mitsumi, Sony, Phillips and SCSI.  My SB16 had 3 CD-ROM connectors for the 3 proprietary interfaces.

Yes the SoundBlaster 16 Multi-CD. I wanted one of those so bad. I don't even know why since I'd only be getting 1 CD-ROM drive. An irrational want 2bshr.

Edited by Keatah
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Ha--

 

I remember how excited I was to learn that win98 knew how to use the SB16/AWE32's IDE controller for more than just ATAPI.  Sure, it was a slow ISA bus IDE, but it was suitable for slapping a large mass storage junk drive on.

 

Having a 5th hard drive in such an old vintage system was a joy.

Edited by wierd_w
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Really? I kinda thought about that but never investigated.

 

But on topic: Does anyone recall Atarisoft on the PC? And how good the stuff was? I had an Apple II back in the day and was usually impressed with the AS conversions. Considering that the II had no sound or graphics chips, the games were respectable.

 

I also think that Atarisoft was rather short lived. Anything that that label published was done and done by 1985.

Edited by Keatah
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Yeah, it totally worked!

 

It only worked *IN* windows-- as soon as you dropped to the command prompt only mode, it was no longer available-- but if you just used it for things like .iso images and the like, for use IN windows, it worked just fine! 

 

Slow-- 16bit ISA and all that-- but speed is not the watchword for a junk drive to house random misc crap.  You had up to 4 IDE hard drives on the other channels, (or 3 with a CD/DVD rom, for CD/DVD booting), and then could saddle 2 more IDE devices on the creative labs IDE controller, that windows would give drive letters for.

 

 

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6 hours ago, Keatah said:

Yes the SoundBlaster 16 Multi-CD. I wanted one of those so bad. I don't even know why since I'd only be getting 1 CD-ROM drive. An irrational want 2bshr.

I went for the model with ASP pre-installed.   I don't remember if I purposely went for multi-CD or it just happened to have it.

My friends and I shopped for parts at weekend computer shows.   We knew we would be getting CD-ROMs in the near future, but we would buy them based on what was available and price.   So we had no idea what interface we'd be getting but at least we knew we'd be covered by the sound card.

 

But it turned out my first CDROM was actually an ATAPI interface.  I believe they were new at the time--  I didn't even know they existed until I got mine.  So I never needed to hook it up to the SB16.

 

5 hours ago, Keatah said:

But on topic: Does anyone recall Atarisoft on the PC? And how good the stuff was? I had an Apple II back in the day and was usually impressed with the AS conversions. Considering that the II had no sound or graphics chips, the games were respectable.

 

I also think that Atarisoft was rather short lived. Anything that that label published was done and done by 1985.

I tested out all the Atarisoft games a few months back.   The quality is hit or miss.   I found Dig Dug, Gremlins and Ms. Pac Man to be the best of the lot.   I believe they farmed out those ports to independant contractors and so quality was a crapshoot.

 

They might have all been acceptable quality back in the day since the target was a 4.77mhz system with CGA graphics.   In those days people were just happy to be able to play an arcade game at home and would look past a lot of imperfections.  (See all the people who insist 2600 Pac Man was 'fine').   But some of the AS games didn't age as well as others.

 

I think the AtariSoft initiative was one of the casualties when Jack took over the company in late 84.   I believe they had only just started late 83 or early 84 so it was definitely short-lived.

Edited by zzip
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5 hours ago, zzip said:

I tested out all the Atarisoft games a few months back.   The quality is hit or miss.   I found Dig Dug, Gremlins and Ms. Pac Man to be the best of the lot.   I believe they farmed out those ports to independant contractors and so quality was a crapshoot.

I just tried out the majority of Atarisoft on PC and was rather disappointed. The machine was so much more capable. See Paku Paku, which will also run on 4.77MHz and CGA. Impressively colorful too.

 

Quote

They might have all been acceptable quality back in the day since the target was a 4.77mhz system with CGA graphics.   In those days people were just happy to be able to play an arcade game at home and would look past a lot of imperfections.  (See all the people who insist 2600 Pac Man was 'fine').   But some of the AS games didn't age as well as others.

To us youngsters it was confusing. Why wasn't a more powerful machine better? Software with a "just good enough" attitude was discouraging and turned many of us away from any given platform.

 

I was mostly impressed with Atarisoft on Apple. We knew the Apple II was very rudimentary compared to the Atari 400/800 and C=64. A 1MHz weakling. But AS managed a few good titles. Good enuff we had our own separate "disk box" for them. Or at least a section of disks demarcated away from the run of the mill material.

 

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On 7/24/2021 at 2:17 AM, Keatah said:

To us youngsters it was confusing. Why wasn't a more powerful machine better? Software with a "just good enough" attitude was discouraging and turned many of us away from any given platform.

 

I was mostly impressed with Atarisoft on Apple. We knew the Apple II was very rudimentary compared to the Atari 400/800 and C=64. A 1MHz weakling. But AS managed a few good titles. Good enuff we had our own separate "disk box" for them. Or at least a section of disks demarcated away from the run of the mill material.

Atari never had the stringent quality control of Nintendo, that said their ports got it right more often than not.   Still they managed to royally screw it up when it mattered most, like 2600 Pac-Man.

 

When Coleco, Mattel and Atari started cross-publishing, even as kids we had the attitude that they'll probably screw up the ports on purpose because they want to sell their own machines.   But the quality of many of the Atarisoft ports impress me.  Some are even better than the ports to Atari machines.

 

On 7/24/2021 at 2:17 AM, Keatah said:

I just tried out the majority of Atarisoft on PC and was rather disappointed. The machine was so much more capable. See Paku Paku, which will also run on 4.77MHz and CGA. Impressively colorful too.

The trade-off with Paku Paku is it's using a very low-res (and undocumented) mode.    I'm not sure I tried the official Atarisoft PacMan for PC, because the PacMan I tried is a little too weird for an official port..  with candy canes bonuses and what not.   I thought the MS Pacman was pretty good, it only suffers from the 4 color typical CGA palette.

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On 7/7/2021 at 12:27 AM, Zap! said:

I think 1989's "Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail" is massively underrated. IMO, it rivals the very best of the Sierra games.

 

 

 

Yes!!! Absolutely, 100% agree. I loved this game. When my daughter was 5... (in the early 2010s) I sat her down and we played this from beginning to end on a laptop. I never really did that with any other game, but I had a little bit of time one weekend, so we played it. That apparently really stuck out to her, and she talks about it every now and then, which is kind of funny. It was a great game though... I loved all the Sierra games.

 

 

On 7/7/2021 at 10:53 AM, zzip said:

Even AdLib was a music card and not so great for sound effects.  Soundblaster a year or so later was when PC games started coming into their own.

 

I don't really like 80's PC games that much.  Even the best PC games toward the end of the decade were usually done better on Amiga or ST-  even if it's only due to sound.

 

I LOOOVED PC games. I've had pretty much every Soundcard known to man kind. My favorite though... hands down, is my Roland SCC-1. I have it in a Pentium 2 that I have running Windows 98 SE... so I can run all the modern DOS games in it. For music... there was NOTHING... I mean NOTHING better than the Roland SCC-1. It's MT32 emulation is better than the MT32 itself.

 

I had a Gravis Ultrasound, and then an ACE also... (wish I kept them, I sold them at a garage sale for like $10 each)... but other than Star Control 2... they never sounded very good.

 

 

On 7/14/2021 at 3:52 PM, Keatah said:

Leading Edge, AT&T, Packard Bell, Northsomething or other, and more. They had it all. It was a Costco/CompUSA affair that had those machines stacked 10-high. With more on pallets as far as the eye could see. Come to think of it it was like the Indiana Jones warehouse. All that power and I hadn't a fucking clue what I would do with 1/10,000th of it. Either way, the colorful text screens were to die for.

 

Heheh... Northgate. I only know because my grandparents had one back in the day... it had an amber monochrome monitor. We had a Leading Edge D3/SX ... 16Mhz 386 SX... was pretty cool.

 

 

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9 minutes ago, 82-T/A said:

I had a Gravis Ultrasound, and then an ACE also... (wish I kept them, I sold them at a garage sale for like $10 each)... but other than Star Control 2... they never sounded very good

I still have my ACE.   Seems to be worth a lot now!

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6 minutes ago, zzip said:

I still have my ACE.   Seems to be worth a lot now!

 

They are going for like $400+ on eBay. Some people are selling like... the crappy 16-bit GUS systems w/ 1mb ram for thousands... I think I asked about this before, but I forgot... there must be some kind of "scene" with these... for making music or something. I have no idea why someone would want a GUS over say, a Roland or something... or even a simply Yamaha MIDI daughter board on a Sound Blaster 16.

 

 

EDIT: I guess I take that back... the Roland SCC-1 card (the one I have) is being listed for $800-1000 on eBay...

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/324672898035

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/164980960332

 

I don't know honestly though, why anyone would spend that money on it. I paid $35 from mine back in 1996. If I'm not mistaken, DOSBOX can emulate MT32 and MPU-401 based sounds, right?

 

Edited by 82-T/A
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2 minutes ago, 82-T/A said:

 

They are going for like $400+ on eBay. Some people are selling like... the crappy 16-bit GUS systems w/ 1mb ram for thousands... I think I asked about this before, but I forgot... there must be some kind of "scene" with these... for making music or something. I have no idea why someone would want a GUS over say, a Roland or something... or even a simply Yamaha MIDI daughter board on a Sound Blaster 16.

They were popular in the demoscene-  I believe Gravis provided demo coders free cards or something

 

Why so much today?  IDK.  There is a coolness factor to them, they have the sleek red PCBs when everything else was green.   But on the other hand Dosbox and Timidity emulate the functionality pretty well and use the same sound patches I believe-  Plus you need an ISA bus use them so they aren't terribly convenient.   The card sounded good, but I'm sure a Roland would better.   Maybe it's just due to rarity and it was notable? 

 

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Starflight... in my opinion, one of the best games ever produced for DOS back in the day. Came out in 1986. What made it so spectacular was the game's plant math / algorithms. There were 100s of planets you could visit... most of the landscapes were randomly generated, but at the same time, some had pre-made continents...

 

Starflight (PC/DOS) 1986, Binary Systems, Electronic Arts - YouTube

 

 

Edited by 82-T/A
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FWIW: I seem to remember many of the publications of the day were biased in favor of soundcards other than SoundBlaster. That made us feel "downtrodden" and "low-end" for having gotten stuck with an SB16. The likes of Gravis Ultrasound, Roland SoundCanvas, MT32, or real external MIDI devices (using their own custom interface cards, naturally), were always always always at the top of the heap and considered "real soundcards". We were made to believe anything and everything was "better" than SoundBlasters. Always complaining about the SNR or some quality issue with the electronics & DAC and cheap-ass OPL3 FM Synthesis. Nothing SB ever rising beyond mediocre.

 

The depressing stances continued with the WaveBlaster daughtercard. Critique now focused on the quality of the samples. It felt never ending. Always kept us n00bs looking further than we could afford. And as that extended into the dotcom era, for a while, I hated the whole PC gig. I don't think even Audigy got positive praise until its second iteration or later.

 

In the end though I stayed with the SoundBlaster brand. All the terminology surrounding PC sound and MIDI was overwhelming at the time and SB seemed to have it covered. Sufficient for my tastes. Sufficient sound quality over shitbox RadioShack speakers make for apartments. And things "SB" were seemingly compatible with everything. And sold everywhere. Drivers, tools, utilities, soundfonts, and documentation. All in abundance.

 

IDK. I was slaphappy to have an SB16, and it seemed it integrate flawlessly. Still love the FM sound. And upgrading to the WB add-on gave us another choice in how our games sounded. And it all just worked.

 

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53 minutes ago, Keatah said:

FWIW: I seem to remember many of the publications of the day were biased in favor of soundcards other than SoundBlaster. That made us feel "downtrodden" and "low-end" for having gotten stuck with an SB16. The likes of Gravis Ultrasound, Roland SoundCanvas, MT32, or real external MIDI devices (using their own custom interface cards, naturally), were always always always at the top of the heap and considered "real soundcards". We were made to believe anything and everything was "better" than SoundBlasters. Always complaining about the SNR or some quality issue with the electronics & DAC and cheap-ass OPL3 FM Synthesis. Nothing SB ever rising beyond mediocre.

 

The depressing stances continued with the WaveBlaster daughtercard. Critique now focused on the quality of the samples. It felt never ending. Always kept us n00bs looking further than we could afford. And as that extended into the dotcom era, for a while, I hated the whole PC gig. I don't think even Audigy got positive praise until its second iteration or later.

 

In the end though I stayed with the SoundBlaster brand. All the terminology surrounding PC sound and MIDI was overwhelming at the time and SB seemed to have it covered. Sufficient for my tastes. Sufficient sound quality over shitbox RadioShack speakers make for apartments. And things "SB" were seemingly compatible with everything. And sold everywhere. Drivers, tools, utilities, soundfonts, and documentation. All in abundance.

 

IDK. I was slaphappy to have an SB16, and it seemed it integrate flawlessly. Still love the FM sound. And upgrading to the WB add-on gave us another choice in how our games sounded. And it all just worked.

 

To be clear though, you're just talking about the music capability, right? Because Sound Blaster was always considered the defacto standard (and also the company that offered the highest quality) for digital audio. But yeah, the OPL2 and OPL3 were basically just Adlib compatible junk. Compared to like the Amiga, Atari ST, or even the Commodore 64, haha... it wasn't great. 

 

I always held the Sound Blaster in high regard. My favorite is a Sound Blaster 16 w/ ASP chip installed. I have one, but for the life of me cannot remember if it has an IDE controller, the Matsushita / Toshiba controller, or SCSI on it. I know they offered it with several, and you could even get one that had all those connectors on it.

 

At one point, I had that card, with the Gravis Ultrasound ACE installed on the SB-16 in the Daughter-board slot, and then my Roland SCC-1. Getting them all to work together took effort, but it worked...

 

 

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47 minutes ago, Keatah said:

FWIW: I seem to remember many of the publications of the day were biased in favor of soundcards other than SoundBlaster. That made us feel "downtrodden" and "low-end" for having gotten stuck with an SB16. The likes of Gravis Ultrasound, Roland SoundCanvas, MT32, or real external MIDI devices (using their own custom interface cards, naturally), were always always always at the top of the heap and considered "real soundcards". We were made to believe anything and everything was "better" than SoundBlasters. Always complaining about the SNR or some quality issue with the electronics & DAC and cheap-ass OPL3 FM Synthesis. Nothing SB ever rising beyond mediocre.

There were plenty of low-end no-name soundcards that were below SB16 in quality.   Trust me, I installed quite a few for cheap friends ?

 

SB16 was just common,  and critics hate "common",  they are always looking for something better.    But as you said Creative was the gold standard.  Virtually everything was compatible with SB16 or at least OPL3/Adlib.   Plenty of DOS games didn't have support for the more exotic cards.   One thing I liked about the GUS ACE was that it was a companion card that coexisted with another card.   I still had an SB16 in my rig for anything that didn't have GUS compatibility.

56 minutes ago, Keatah said:

In the end though I stayed with the SoundBlaster brand. All the terminology surrounding PC sound and MIDI was overwhelming at the time and SB seemed to have it covered. Sufficient for my tastes. Sufficient sound quality over shitbox RadioShack speakers make for apartments. And things "SB" were seemingly compatible with everything. And sold everywhere. Drivers, tools, utilities, soundfonts, and documentation. All in abundance.

Gravis bit the dust, and my next card was an AWE64 followed by Soundblaster Live for the PCI era.   They didn't sound bad to me!   I liked the sound of Wavetable MIDI over OPL3, and those cards had that.   But it wasn't long before games moved to MP3 music and it no longer mattered what kind of MIDI sound your soundcard had.

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12 hours ago, 82-T/A said:

To be clear though, you're just talking about the music capability, right?

I was talking more or less about the entire card, and whatever it output. For the record I was always ok and satisfied with SB sound quality.

 

Quote

Because Sound Blaster was always considered the defacto standard (and also the company that offered the highest quality) for digital audio.

At first I had a PAS. But heard or found out somehow that there could potentially possibly be compatibility problems in a few select games. I never experienced that, but I only had it for a week or so before getting into SB16.

 

I don't think I was a descerning-enough audiophile to really tell or care about the difference. The base SB16 was lightyears ahead of anything I'd heard before. 8/16 bit rigs included.

 

Quote

But yeah, the OPL2 and OPL3 were basically just Adlib compatible junk. Compared to like the Amiga, Atari ST, or even the Commodore 64, haha... it wasn't great. 

I always viewed PC audio (digital playback and OPL3) as several steps above anything from the 8 and 16 bit computers.

 

Quote

I always held the Sound Blaster in high regard. My favorite is a Sound Blaster 16 w/ ASP chip installed. I have one, but for the life of me cannot remember if it has an IDE controller, the Matsushita / Toshiba controller, or SCSI on it. I know they offered it with several, and you could even get one that had all those connectors on it.

Mine has the Panasonic controller/connector. The CT1740 is/was the most popular among almost everyone I talked with back in the day.

 

Quote

At one point, I had that card, with the Gravis Ultrasound ACE installed on the SB-16 in the Daughter-board slot, and then my Roland SCC-1. Getting them all to work together took effort, but it worked...

My old P-III has an AWE64Gold and the first SB-Live! card. Been thinking about removing the Live! since I don't go beyond 2.1 audio for gaming. Tend to find it distracting. Always so much tweaking and playing with options to get surround-anything working just right. And I'm not big on PCI audio either. After ISA might as well just do soft-sound on the CPU. IDK. Maybe during the rebuild, recase, and spiff-up.

 

12 hours ago, zzip said:

There were plenty of low-end no-name soundcards that were below SB16 in quality.   Trust me, I installed quite a few for cheap friends ?

I don't doubt it. Have some in ma'pile'o'parts. And several other assorted SB cards. I even recently picked up another ISA AWE32 (CT3900) and another WaveBlaster II (CT1900) for super cheap. Just in case..

 

Quote

SB16 was just common,  and critics hate "common",  they are always looking for something better.

Didn't really see things that way till after reading too much of MaximumPC. It was always a chase to try to aspire to what they were doing. And it didn't work well on trailer-park funds. If only publications showed us(me) new ways and tricks of doing things rather than making us feel inferior about our already purchased choices and denouncing what we had as outmoded. IDK maybe I read the wrong stuff.

 

I swear though, those $10,000 Dream Machines. Outperformed 10x over, today, by something babies drool & teeth on - modern smartphone.

Edited by Keatah
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4 hours ago, Keatah said:

I always viewed PC audio (digital playback and OPL3) as several steps above anything from the 8 and 16 bit computers.

While OPL3 is technically more advanced than the typical chips found in 8 and 16 bit computers, in that it can mimic the waveforms of real instruments and play many notes simultaneously.   I don't think it always sounds better than the old chips.   I think the old chips were designed for sound effects first, and music was a bonus.   OPL3 is designed for music and is terrible for sound effects.   That isn't a problem when you have a soundblaster with digital audio.  But for awhile the ADLIB was the PC gold standard, and games written for that sound like a joke when they try to do sound effects.

 

I also never particularly liked the way music sounded through OPL3.  It was so tinny-sounding.   It's why I was so excited by wavetable, I guess.

 

4 hours ago, Keatah said:

My old P-III has an AWE64Gold and the first SB-Live! card. Been thinking about removing the Live! since I don't go beyond 2.1 audio for gaming. Tend to find it distracting. Always so much tweaking and playing with options to get surround-anything working just right

This is my complaint about the SBLive as well.   Too many controls, too much tinkering to get it to sound right.   At the same volume level, one application might be too quiet and another might blow your speakers out.

 

4 hours ago, Keatah said:

Didn't really see things that way till after reading too much of MaximumPC. It was always a chase to try to aspire to what they were doing. And it didn't work well on trailer-park funds. If only publications showed us(me) new ways and tricks of doing things rather than making us feel inferior about our already purchased choices and denouncing what we had as outmoded. IDK maybe I read the wrong stuff.

This has always been a pet-peeve of mine.   Machines go from "speed demons" to "worthless old junk" in what?  Six months according to the press?   Like when the Atari ST came out, it was the most advanced home computer in the US market, but a few months later, the Amiga came out and suddenly everyone is dumping on the ST like it's a piece of garbage instead of the second best home machine on the market.   It's that attitude of "if it isn't the best, it's garbage" that I can't stand.    I just go with what makes me happy rather than what someone else tries to tell me I should be using.

 

 

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On 7/30/2021 at 4:56 AM, Keatah said:

I always viewed PC audio (digital playback and OPL3) as several steps above anything from the 8 and 16 bit computers.

 

This game, Sentinel Worlds - Future Magic : Part 1 (spoiler, there was never a part 2) always left an impact on me. The game supported EGA, but no graphics card of any kind. It was a pretty revolutionary game that was a lot like Starflight, but could be fast paced, but also played at your leisure... which I loved. I REALLY like/liked this game growing up. 

 

I don't remember where I read it, but they had to write an engine to produce the music on the PC speaker... the programmer, Karl Buiter, wrote a whole thing about how he had to do it overnight or something... but for the life of me I cannot remember where that was, I don't think it was in the user manuals... anyway... here's the game. The music is impressive considering it's all from the PC speaker...

 

Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic (PC/DOS) 1988, Electronic Arts - YouTube

 

 

 

 

And then on the Tandy:

 

Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic w/ Tandy Sound Enabled. - YouTube

 

 

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