Gemini000 wrote:

2. I'm not a fan of most time-travel stories.

I guess you're not a fan of Doctor Who then... 😒

switchblade wrote:

Gemini000 wrote:

2. I'm not a fan of most time-travel stories.

I guess you're not a fan of Doctor Who then... :/

I've actually never watched it, but from what I know about it, chances are low that I would enjoy it. :P

BTW: Star Trek isn't exempt from this. My least favourite Star Trek episodes are almost all of the ones dealing with time travel... almost. There's a few I'm OK with such as TOS "All Our Yesterdays" and TNG "Time's Arrow" ;)

Ancient DOS Games Episode 207 - Mega Man X is online!

After what happened with the first two DOS Mega Man games, this one... very much feels like Capcom's last stand with Rozner's little team: Either make it PERFECT, or never make another Mega Man port. The result? ...a weird mix of perfection and horrendousness which I'm well suited to pulling apart given that I've owned the SNES original since it was brand new. ;)

This port is far from perfection in any way. They probably just managed to directly transfer game logic code from SNES. It wasn't for quality, but for time. SNES had such slow CPU, that even very poorly translated assembler code wouldn't be a performance issue for game logic.

Since the game came on CD, why they didn't use a CD-Audio for music? They take the simplest way to implement the most commonly used DOS sound library and assign midi instruments. Many games used mod tracker music already, so it wasn't hard and they could always use GUS.

If I would code such a port, I would stick to SNES resolution. VGA could do easily lower SNES resolution and it would work faster than 320x200. Old Dyna Blaster, which was a Bomber man port did this, and it was a superb port from Turbografx-16 it had even improved sound effects from FM to Sound blaster samples and redone FM music to better fit on OPL2.

I really hate the quality of most DOS ports from early 90's. The were lacking one way or another. Even good ports like Disney's Lion king or Aladdin were just reusing graphics from consoles. Aladdin at least had a great mod soundtrack, way better than Genesis version. Lionking was almost a perfect port from SNES with higher resolution and 16:10 aspect ratio(same sprites sizes as in Genesis or SNES) is the best version to play nowadays, but it still could be improved with more colors. I once checked and the game never uses more than 128 or 160 colors on screen and in the same time there's a lot of dithering in some backgrounds which could be avoided with no performance drop on VGA.

Jazz Jackrabbit is probably the best piece of DOS code in terms of quality, performance and use of PC specific hardware. There's no other side-scroller that has so rich graphics, sounds and run very fast on 386 PCs.

On the other hand DOS games were really well ported to 16-bit consoles with redesigned graphics and audio. There were probably more skilled dev teams working on consoles, and programming games on PC was uncharted territory for a long time.

There was also a little market for SNES ports. You need a fast 486 or even Pentium to play smoothly these games and with that power you could play DOOM, Duke3D, Need for Speed, GTA, Quake etc.

Funnily enough, the DOS port was my first experience playing Mega Man X back then. Same thing with Final Fantasy 7 (PC port instead of PSX version). I didn't try the SNES original, until some time later when I played it at a friend's house. I gotta say, I was quite amazed at the difference in speed, smoothness, and music of the SNES version compared to the DOS port. 😲

That said, as much of a joke the DOS port is, I would say that it's a far more faithful port of Mega Man compared to BOTH of the previous Mega Man DOS ports. Those two aren't even in the same category as Mega Man X on DOS. At least they tried to make an effort here, even if the end results aren't really worth it.

Ancient DOS Games Episode 208 - Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos is online!

This is quite the sizable game but I wasn't able to get very far in it due to the difficulty of some of the puzzles combined with the sheer amount of enemies you're forced to grind your way through to make any sort of progress when you DON'T know what you're doing, as they respawn at an insane rate. If not for that, (and the annoyingly-slow-to-navigate inventory), I probably would've enjoyed this much more than I did, but there's still a lot to like here all the same. :B

Hi Kris,

Enjoyed the episode, keep up the good work!

I was just wondering though; could it be that the very high enemy respawn rate that you mention is somehow related to your max dosbox cycles setting? Did you experiment with the setting, maybe using a fixed 10000 setting for example?

rcblanke wrote:

I was just wondering though; could it be that the very high enemy respawn rate that you mention is somehow related to your max dosbox cycles setting? Did you experiment with the setting, maybe using a fixed 10000 setting for example?

I actually was recording at 30000 fixed cycles. I have to record at fixed cycles under most circumstances to avoid issues and need to use external software if I absolutely must record at max. I couldn't really tell a difference between testing at max and recording at 30000. :P

I wouldn't classify Lands of Lore as a hard RPG, infact it's one of the most approachable ones out there. EOBs are way harder IMHO.
The game also has a great Sound Canvas soundtrack (and a lot others you reviewed) so getting some sort of soundfont player is not a bad idea...

Yeah, I played through 🤣 to completion on a real DOS PC a couple of months ago and didn't find it that hard. And don't remember respawns being all that bad. Why don't you pull up a walkthrough to get past the puzzles if it means getting further into the game for the benefit of the review?

And I second keropi's comment on the GM music. It was the highlight of the game for me. I used the DreamBlaster S1.

edit: regarding difficulty, I think I played on Easy, looks like you had it on Normal. I have no shame playing games on Easy, I just want to have fun, not be frustrated.

Interestingly, playing through Baldur's Gate right now and I'm NOT playing on easy. I started on Normal, and so far (about 25 hrs in) it hasn't been too hard to lower it from there.

Totally agree with you on the inventory slots. On a related note, in the beginning, you use herbs for healing, but later on healing spells become much more effective. Combine that with the limited inventory slots and at some point I dropped all my herbs to make room for more valuable items. Near the end of the game, there is a puzzle that REQUIRES an herb to get a key that you need to get to Scotia. I just about abandoned the game rather than try to backtrack to a dropped herb (which I had no idea where I might've left). But luckily, I chose to explore the rest of the level and found a chest with an herb in it, so no backtracking was needed.

For an RPG, it's rather short. I think it took me about 20-25 hours to complete. I found it very entertaining, with a good combination of story, good old MIDI music, combat, and manageable length of gameplay.

clueless1 wrote:

Yeah, I played through LOL to completion on a real DOS PC a couple of months ago and didn't find it that hard. And don't remember respawns being all that bad. Why don't you pull up a walkthrough to get past the puzzles if it means getting further into the game for the benefit of the review?

I DID. THREE OF THEM. o_O;

The only walkthroughs I could find either had broken links or were half-assed, so it made it surprisingly difficult to figure out what I was even supposed to be doing or what I was doing wrong and when I had specific questions about specific things the walkthroughs, being half-assed, didn't have the specific information I needed. :|

I did further testing of the spawn rates using much lower cycles counts and they were still pretty bad; I cleared out a small area of enemies, walked around for a minute, returned and FIVE MORE had spawned in said area. You don't do a lot of backtracking in this game as far as I can tell so that's why I said the game would be enjoyable if you knew what you were doing, since then you wouldn't run into respawned enemies constantly. :P

Just watched the megaman x review... another sound-related grievance. Why are you comparing SNES music with FM synthesis?
I have noticed you never use anything else than FM in your reviews , even when vastly superior options are available. I mean you run your games on DOSBox, you might as well setup a proper environment and then review a couple more aspects for completeness. It's like reviewing games in CGA mode and ignore EGA or VGA when available - this is what you are doing in the sound front.

keropi wrote:

Just watched the megaman x review... another sound-related grievance. Why are you comparing SNES music with FM synthesis?

The proper comparison to SNES music capability to PC is the .MOD music,
but MegaMan X for PC did not offer it, and its look in bad light because earlier games such as certain pinball games did use .mod music and sfx just great.

Megaman X for PC should've use the .MOD music at least, if the refuse to use CD-Audio tracks for the music.
And yes, other games released before that also have use CD-Audio track as its music.

Since there is no MOD playback on the game at all , one should compare to GM because after all the bgm is MIDI. With a good GM device it doesn't sound that bad. Different yes - but not the FM mess. You can't just ignore all the other supported devices and default to the lowest denominator.

Gemini000 wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

Yeah, I played through 🤣 to completion on a real DOS PC a couple of months ago and didn't find it that hard. And don't remember respawns being all that bad. Why don't you pull up a walkthrough to get past the puzzles if it means getting further into the game for the benefit of the review?

I DID. THREE OF THEM. 😮;

The only walkthroughs I could find either had broken links or were half-assed, so it made it surprisingly difficult to figure out what I was even supposed to be doing or what I was doing wrong and when I had specific questions about specific things the walkthroughs, being half-assed, didn't have the specific information I needed. 😐

I think the ones I used were all text-based, old school walkthroughs, but they got the job done for me. Here's the ones I remember using:
https://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/564639-lands-of-l … haos/faqs/50982
http://www.thecomputershow.com/computershow/w … oflore1walk.htm
http://www.the-spoiler.com/RPG/Westwood/lands.of.lore.1/
http://www.angelfire.com/darkside/landsoflore/1detail.html

Gemini000 wrote:

I did further testing of the spawn rates using much lower cycles counts and they were still pretty bad; I cleared out a small area of enemies, walked around for a minute, returned and FIVE MORE had spawned in said area. You don't do a lot of backtracking in this game as far as I can tell so that's why I said the game would be enjoyable if you knew what you were doing, since then you wouldn't run into respawned enemies constantly. 😜

Did you test the spawn rate on EASY skill level? That's what I played on, maybe that's where the disparity lies.

clueless1 wrote:

Did you test the spawn rate on EASY skill level? That's what I played on, maybe that's where the disparity lies.

It's possible, plus the more people are trying to call me out on the spawn rates the more it's coming to light that a lot of people were playing it on easy. :o

keropi wrote:

Just watched the megaman x review... another sound-related grievance. Why are you comparing SNES music with FM synthesis?
I have noticed you never use anything else than FM in your reviews , even when vastly superior options are available. I mean you run your games on DOSBox, you might as well setup a proper environment and then review a couple more aspects for completeness. It's like reviewing games in CGA mode and ignore EGA or VGA when available - this is what you are doing in the sound front.

Only a tiny fraction of game players back then would've had more advanced sound options for music, which is part of the reason why I stick with the FM Synth, since I COULD engage a wavetable solution, but then not only do I not personally know if it's playing back the way it should sound, but I've also nixed the nostalgia factor for 99% of the viewers.

That said, I DID test the wavetable sound of Mega Man X prior to playing through it and... umm... NO. It sounds WORSE than the FM synth. Some people might claim it sounds better because the individual instruments sound closer to how they should, but that's why I feel it's worse because it highlights the imperfections in the music just that much more... also the volume levels of each instrument are even further out of whack with wavetable than with FM synth. :P

Gemini000 wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

Did you test the spawn rate on EASY skill level? That's what I played on, maybe that's where the disparity lies.

It's possible, plus the more people are trying to call me out on the spawn rates the more it's coming to light that a lot of people were playing it on easy. 😮

This kind of reminds me of Mega Man 2 for the NES, which had a "Normal" and a "Difficult" Mode. When I first owned it, I played it on the "Normal" mode and was able to beat it eventually in my youth. I never thought to try it on the Difficult Mode. Then I played Mega Man and Mega Man 3 (for the NES) and noticed the spike in difficulty (there being no difficulty selections). Still, it did not occur to me then that the "Difficult" mode was the canonical difficulty mode.

Gemini000 wrote:

Only a tiny fraction of game players back then would've had more advanced sound options for music, which is part of the reason why I stick with the FM Synth, since I COULD engage a wavetable solution, but then not only do I not personally know if it's playing back the way it should sound, but I've also nixed the nostalgia factor for 99% of the viewers.

99% (yeah I can exaggerate too) of the old viewers you are mentioning also had monochrome displays back then, why stop on SB sound and not go all the way? Do the reviews with an amber shader!

"Today in Ancient DOS Games we'll be looking at Zeliard, it supports several graphics modes from MDA to MCGA 64 colors and various sound devices from speaker to Roland MT-32. So we'll be looking on the MDA/Speaker version of the game. Where do I begin? Well it is just wrong. Only 2 colors and basic sound"

People that watch these videos don't just want to remember but also learn about the true potential of a game, even though back then they were oblivious to aspects like sound, midi etc. That's why people now go crazy over the fastest ISA vga or the best soundcard with best OPL filtering and best midi device so you can hear and see the developer's vision in whole.
So OK, GM sound in megaman X sucks, what about Lands of Lore? It sucked too? I wonder, if you were to review doom/dn3d or even rott, you'd do them in FM without even a mention about the great soundtracks they offer like you did with Lands?

You really give me the impression that when it comes to sound you wanna stick to "period correct" hardware but when you criticize aspects like gameplay/mechanics/story/controls you seem to forget you are reviewing a 90s piece of software built with 90s tools/experience and compare said aspects with a 201x mentality - resulting in everything being broken and bad.

Gemini000 wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

Did you test the spawn rate on EASY skill level? That's what I played on, maybe that's where the disparity lies.

It's possible, plus the more people are trying to call me out on the spawn rates the more it's coming to light that a lot of people were playing it on easy. 😮

Coming to light implies it's some secret that people are ashamed to admit. I have no qualms about playing on Easy skill levels and I've been vocal on these boards about it. Phil has mentioned that he does the same. Here's how I look at it: when I was a kid, I had nothing else to do but play games. I took it as a badge of honor to play on at least the "normal" setting. Now I'm an adult with a career and limited playing time. I want to enjoy what limited time I have with minimal frustration. If that means knocking it down to Easy, I'm all for it. So who is your target audience? Are they mostly kids and young adults with lots of time and youthful reflexes who barely remember these games? Or adults who played DOS games in their youth and now want to watch reviews of their favorite games as well as some that they never had a chance to play?