Notes on the (retro) games I play

Video games were a major motivator for me to study computer programming early on. I’ve played a sheer number of them over the 1990s, mainly ‘PC’ and ZX Spectrum 48k titles. I’ve mostly switched to free software multiplayer games, such as Xpilot, Freeciv and Crossfire RPG (as well as more traditional hunt(6), phantasia(6) and sail(6)) when I’ve moved to GNU/Linux in 1999, and a few years later, my interest in gaming waned near-entirely.

Recently, however, I’ve been revisiting that part of my life, which resulted in the notes below.

The notes are organized by title, or a group of similar titles. The following fields are filled in for each.

Availability:

Pointers to where an (offline) copy the game can be obtained from.

Code:

Several bits of information on the game in concise form, namely:

Genre

spelled in full at the start of the entry;

Difficulty:

an attempt to gauge how difficult a person not familiar with the game might find it initially, from D0 (very easy) to D9 (very hard); or D* if the game offers selectable difficulty;

Multiplayer:

if present, M indicates that the game supports multiplayer; a slash, /, is added if players take turns; two slashes if both simultaneous and turn-based multiplayer is supported; the maximum number of players (if there is a particular limit) follows;

Playability:

a subjective measure of how likely I’m to play the game, from P0 (will play once every few years) to P9 (will often spend days playing this game), though it’s somewhat unlikely that a game failing to get the passing grade of P5 will be added to this list;

Savegame:

if present, S indicates that the game supports saving game to be resumed later; the following number, if given, indicates that at most that number of games can be saved.

Compatibility:

The platforms the game was tested (not) to work on.

Resources:

Where to look for more information on the game.

The following platforms were available to test the games listed on, though no attempt at really extensive testing was made. For the most part, the point was to find out the most modest platform the game would run on.

am386

This system features an AMD Am386 CPU running at 40 MHz with 8 MiB RAM, 128 KiB cache, 256 KiB video RAM, and a 128 MB CompactFlash card, with an adapter, serving as an IDE storage device.

The card can be extracted and placed into other systems in this list, so the exact same install of a given game can be tested with other hardware as well. A copy of the card’s image is archived on my primary system, and from there, installed games can be tested with qemu and dosbox just the same.

A SoundBlaster Pro-compatible sound card is installed on this box (with ISA PnP disabled), also providing an additional IDE channel for a (currently not installed) optical drive.

An SMC 8416BT-based Ethernet NIC (supported by PKT8000.COM from the Crynwr collection) is also installed, allowing for the system’s real-time clock to be synchronized over SNTP, using the client from the mTCP package. This is particularly important since the 3.6 V NiMH rechargeable battery originally on the board has failed, and was replaced with a 5.5 V 1 F supercapacitor, which is sufficient to keep CMOS setup settings indefinitely, but which can only drive on-board RTC clock for 12 hours or so.

Of particular note is that the VGA video card is evidently faulty, resulting in visible artifacts in some of the games.

pentium

An Intel Pentium MMX 166-based box, 256 MiB RAM.

A SoundBlaster Pro- and ISA PnP-compatible sound card is installed on this box.

An RTL8139-based Fast Ethernet NIC (supported by RTSPKT.COM from the Crynwr collection) is also installed, allowing for the system’s real-time clock to be synchronized over SNTP.

Due to shortage of (working) DIN5 (AT) keyboards and DIN5 to mini-DIN6 (PS/2) adapters, this system often runs with a 87-key USB keyboard. For some reason, arrow keys work with a noticeable lag, making them unsuitable for action games. Where possible, games were reconfigured to use ijkl instead.

qemu

A high-performance system emulation software, running on an amd64 Debian GNU/Linux system.

dosbox

A somewhat limited PC/DOS platform emulator aimed mainly at running games released for the platform.

spectemu

An ZX Spectrum 48k emulator for X Window System, running on an amd64 NetBSD system.

x128

A freeware emulator of ZX Spectrum 48k and 128k, as well as several related machines, running under FreeDOS on pentium.

Availability:

• http://classicdosgames.com/game/Descent.html (shareware with source)
• http://gog.com/game/descent (full)

Code:

first-person shooter, D* M P9 S

Compatibility:

pentium

Availability:

http://digger.org/ (GNU GPL remake)

Code:

maze, D7 M//2 P8

Compatibility:

am386, pentium

While the original, like many PC games of the era, will run too fast on anything but the earliest IBM PC-compatible computers, the free remake will run on pretty much any PC/DOS system.

For more authentic experience, pass /C command-line option to DIGGER.EXE to use the original CGA graphics.

Availability:

• http://chocolate-doom.org/ (free software SDL port)
• http://classicdosgames.com/game/Heretic.html (shareware with source)
• http://gog.com/game/heretic_hexen_collection (full)

Code:

first-person shooter, D* M4 P8 S6

Compatibility:

am386, pentium

Resources:

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Heretic

The HTIC_V12.1 and HTIC_V12.2 files contained in the htic_v12.zip shareware distribution can be catenated to obtain the .zip archive that contains the game files. Of those, only HERETIC1.WAD is necessary to play the game under Chocolate Doom.

Like many other first-person shooters based on id Software engines, the original allows the screen to be ‘narrowed’ from full 320 × 200 to reduce resource usage. When so narrowed to around 160 × 100, the game runs acceptably on am386.

Availability:

• http://worldofspectrum.net/item/0003012/ (ZX Spectrum 48k version)
• http://web.archive.org/web/20260514071947/http://andynoble.co.uk/ (freeware PC/DOS remake)

Code:

platform, D7 P7

Compatibility:

am386, pentium, x128

The PC/DOS remake does run on am386, albeit a tad slowly, with sound quality set to very low, 8-bit.

Availability:

• http://donhopkins.com/home/micropolis/ (GNU GPLv3 re-release)
• http://worldofspectrum.net/item/0004509/ (ZX Spectrum 48k version)

Code:

simulation, D4 P9 S

Compatibility:

x128

Availability:

?

Code:

platform, D3 P8

Compatibility:

pentium

A pretty good platformer.

The game will run on am386, but is way too slow to be actually playable there.

Availability:

http://classicdosgames.com/game/Raptor%3A_Call_of_the_Shadows.html (shareware)

Code:

top-down shooter, D* P7 S

Compatibility:

am386

A pretty good top-down shooter, even if at times boring (at least in the shareware version.)

Not unlike Digger above, the game speed is tied to the performance of the machine it runs on. In particular, on pentium, it’s too fast to be playable. Unlike Digger, I’m not aware of any free software remakes that will run under FreeDOS.

Availability:

http://classicdosgames.com/game/SkyRoads.html (shareware)

Code:

racing, D8 P5

Compatibility:

am386

A rather unforgiving single-player racing game.

Availability:

http://classicdosgames.com/game/Tubular_Worlds.html (shareware)

Code:

top-down shooter, D* P8

Compatibility:

(no tests on record)

An exemplary 2D shooter.

The tubworld.exe file contained in the distribution .zip is a self-extracting LHa archive that can be extracted from with lhasa(1).

Availability:

• http://classicdosgames.com/game/Wolfenstein_3D.html (shareware with source)
• http://classicdosgames.com/game/Spear_of_Destiny.html (playable demo)
• http://gog.com/game/wolfenstein_3d_and_spear_of_destiny (full)

Code:

first-person shooter, D* P9 S10 S10

Compatibility:

am386, pentium

Resources:

http://moddingwiki.shikadi.net/wiki/Wolfenstein_3-D

Exemplary early first person shooters; the games that popularized the genre.

Availability:

http://worldofspectrum.net/item/0005890/ (ZX Spectrum 48k version)

Code:

side-scrolling shooter, D7 P8

Compatibility:

x128

Another exemplary 2D shooter.