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;

Compatibility:

the platforms the game was tested (not) to work on;

Difficulty:

an attempt to gauge how difficult a person not familiar with the game might find it initially;

Free software:

pointers to faithful free software implementations of the game, where available;

Playability:

a subjective measure of how likely I’m to play the game; the scale is from 1 to 5 (though it’s somewhat unlikely that a game failing to get the passing grade of 3 will be added to this list);

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, 256 KiB video RAM, and a 128 MB CompactFlash card used 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 CS4235-based, SoundBlaster Pro- and ISA PnP-compatible, sound card is installed on this box.

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 133-based box.

k6

An AMD K6 500-based box.

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.

Availability:

http://classicdosgames.com/game/Heretic.html (shareware), http://gog.com/game/heretic_hexen_collection (full)

Compatibility:

(no tests on record)

Difficulty:

selectable

Free software:

http://chocolate-doom.org/

Playability:

4 of 5

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 concatenated to give the .zip archive that contains the game files. Of those, only HERETIC1.WAD is necessary to play the game under Chocolate Doom.

Availability:

http://classicdosgames.com/game/Hexen%3A_Beyond_Heretic.html (shareware demo), http://gog.com/game/heretic_hexen_collection (full)

Compatibility:

(no tests on record)

Difficulty:

selectable

Free software:

http://chocolate-doom.org/

Playability:

5 of 5

Resources:

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Hexen

Of the game files, only HEXEN.WAD is necessary to play the game under Chocolate Doom.

Availability:

?

Compatibility:

pentium

Difficulty:

easy

Playability:

4 of 5

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)

Compatibility:

am386

Difficulty:

selectable

Playability:

4 of 5

A pretty good top-down shooter, even if at times boring.

Availability:

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

Compatibility:

am386, dosbox

Difficulty:

selectable

Playability:

5 of 5

Availability:

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

Compatibility:

am386

Difficulty:

hard

Playability:

3 of 5

A rather unforgiving single-player racing game.

Availability:

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

Compatibility:

(no tests on record)

Difficulty:

selectable

Playability:

5 of 5

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), http://classicdosgames.com/game/Spear_of_Destiny.html (shareware demo), http://gog.com/game/wolfenstein_3d_and_spear_of_destiny (full)

Compatibility:

am386

Difficulty:

selectable

Playability:

5 of 5

Resources:

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

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