Hmmmm. Does MSDOS keep a log of errors? I don’t remember anything like that, but…
Maybe you should try a different DOS version?
How does it work with the 8GB drive, do you just partition it, or is 7.11 cool with bigger things?
7.10 is good with the bigger things.
I think it’s not the DOS version. I think it might be the dock. I can update some software (BIOS?) directly on the Thinkpad; I’ll try that and running off the dock first. If not, I’ll try playing it off a CD after booting from a 6.22 floppy, no hard drive involved.
The 8GB isn’t installed yet!
EDIT: Updated the BIOS, disabled some things where I thought might cause IRQ / DMA conflicts, and still… nothing. Even booted clean from a 6.22 floppy, then swapped in a Solar Winds floppy, and nothing.
The interesting thing is that, when Solar Winds freezes, it continues to play whatever the last music track was playing actually was. Once the track ends, nothing happens. It just sits there. Very odd. I have some other ideas, like the video controller being bad, but I’m starting to wonder if it’s some weird 486 thing where games written for 486 don’t play nice with Pentiums MMX.
EDIT 2: Turns out all I needed was a program called CPUCACHE.COM, which lets me turn off the CPU Cache successfully (unlike ICE/ICD, which did not work).
Pulling this thread from the deep so I can read it later and say I want to play a dos with the new controller friendly-dos core of retroarch and am looking for suggestions.
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Skyroads!
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i really like
Deja Vu (MacVenture)
Loom
Day of the Tentacle
The Labyrinth of Time
Journeyman Project is cool:
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gabriel knight 2 is the best sierra game, don’t miss that one. there’s a lot of other sierra games I like but it’s hard to know how tolerable some of them would be to someone just coming into them in 2021. I would make sure to have pdfs of manuals and hint books on hand for these if you try them but my favorites are conquests of the longbow, quest for glory 3 and 4, king’s quest 6, gabriel knight 1. I don’t recommend voice acting turned on if they have that option (not counting gk2)
the last express has got rotoscoped 1914 international espionage and intrigue on the orient express in free roaming slightly sped up real time if that sounds appealing. discworld noir. sanitarium.
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If you like the look of Dark Eye, try The Neverhood, an absolutely gorgeous game with fairly bad puzzles.
If what appeals is the weirdness, there is probably no game weirder than Drowned God, an extremely 90s, X-Files influenced bizarre game of conspiracy theories stacked into gibberish
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And made by a completely terrible, awful human being
I’d support the recommendation especially of Quest for Glory 4
One thing to keep in mind about this genre is although the ones people will recommend don’t suffer as much from this, don’t be too afraid of looking at walkthoughs/hints. It would ruin the game to set a rule for yourself not to ever look anything up. In those days, videogame stores had a whole shelf for hintbooks/strategy-guides next to the game boxes, and game manuals had 1-900 hotlines for hints, so sometimes when a puzzle is really intractable from what’s in the game, that’s sorta intended.
For Quest for Glory 4, again I recommended it partly because the vast majority of the puzzles are pretty intuitive or have multiple solutions, but in particular, when you reach the point where you feel like you’ve explored the whole map and there’s no obvious way to progress any of the subplots further, then look up online how to obtain the Good Humor Bar.
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I found this interesting. Where Mega Man for DOS came from.
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I played Star Control 2 on a dos machine without any notion of what it would be like except that I had played Star Control 1 before. One of the most sublime gaming experiences of my life.
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God I played some of these. we used to get them out of the Cleveland Public Library and copy them because psh copy protection wasn’t real.
This is how i played Star Control as well, which I recall involved some paper wheel thing as the copy protection, which we just recreated using a copier and some scissors. This might have been some other game, but i definitely remember making that wheel.
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Breaking DOS copy protection was a kid favorite. When my dad found the table for codes in the EXE file for Chuck Yeager’s Flight School, that was pure paydirt.
Oh hey, this video mentions the Ninja Gaiden DOS port as well, another classic of the library piracy years.
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This is really fascinating! I think playing Mega Man on PC was one of the first cases where I learned a game could be not good, based on how different it was from a game I liked that it was supposedly supposed to be like. I love that it was basically a fangame–it makes a beautiful sort of sense.
I’m really impressed that this dude basically put together the Mega Man X port which was also very important to me as a kid who didn’t have a Super Nintendo. It’s definitely a different thing mechanically from the SNES version, but it’s solid.
Always a bit mystified at how Capcom was so stingy with sharing their code with their collaborators tho.
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Here’s a little snippet of someone playing Wing Commander that reminds me how good that series was,
https://clips.twitch.tv/ClearPopularApeGingerPower-uyCAyZ7faJk1CjaJ
I remember a copy protection in a Roman Empire themed strategy game (I think it was called Centurion) where the manual had a map of the Roman empire at its largest extent and ask questions based on that. I would restart the game over and over until it asked “what is the capital of Italia?” and type “Rome”
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I’m gonna get into speed running the Leisure Suit Larry 1 copy protection quiz.
Shit this is already difficult
c is the right answer and I think that’s fucked, Al
Gonna write an alt history novel about how the assassination of Charles Nelson Reilly ended the Cold War
what’s topping mean
Damn, Al Lowe is canceled. Can’t believe it.
Somehow only 3 of these questions mention Spiro Agnew.
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