Joey_sw wrote:

Gemini000 wrote:

Ancient DOS Games Filler #54 - Slime Rancher is online!

Jim Sterling also sings positively about that Slime Rancher game and thats a good sign.

I've had Slime Rancher from the Humble Bundle store since the Jim Sterling video. It has it's own download there in 32 and 64 bits plus includes a Steam key. If you're thinking of getting it on Steam get it from Humble Bundle instead.

Ancient DOS Games Episode 191 - Master of Magic is online!

Amazingly, I found myself actually succeeding at this game once I got the hang of its quirks! (On easy skill mind you, but even easy skill murders me in most strategy games, so... yeah...)

Also, in case anyone here missed it, my new weekly series "Shovelware Diggers" has begun! Basically, Patreon supporters at a specific pledge level or higher are able to select folders from a shovelware archive I have access to and then we see what's in them! This first week got off to an... interesting start, to put it one way. Should be interesting to see what else gets dug up! ;)

I have the entire directory structure of the archive posted on my website here, for those curious to see just how many folders there are to potentially root through: http://www.pixelships.com/sdig/directories.html

My favourite thing about master of magic is just how many overpowered strategies there are... its very easy to cheese the game, at least against the computer which doesn't really know how to counter them.

BTW, not sure if you realised or not, but the easiest way to play in Myrror is to make a custom wizard with the Myrran attribute and choose a Myrran race. Otherwise to get normal units on to Myrorr you have to capture a tower, send units onto the tower tile and press the 'plane' button.

Is Master of Magic based at all on Magic: The Gathering? The types of magic that are available are extremely similar to the 5 colors of mana in MtG.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Is Master of Magic based at all on Magic: The Gathering? The types of magic that are available are extremely similar to the 5 colors of mana in MtG.

Very possibly, although not officially for sure. :P

Update on Slime Rancher, it's now available on GOG.

I know it's a bit late to be asking this, but why the SoundBlaster recommendation for Little Big Adventure?

Expack3 wrote:

I know it's a bit late to be asking this, but why the SoundBlaster recommendation for Little Big Adventure?

Easiest to set up given a very small difference in music quality between it and any of the other modes supported for music. Generally speaking, I provide recommendations based on running the game in DOSBox, as not everyone has the potential to legally set up MT-32 emulation, plus on top of that, MIDI quality can be hit-or-miss, if it even works at all, on a modern system.

That said, I'm very much considering a new approach for Season 5, where each video/audio mode has a quality indicator next to it stating whether it looks/sounds Good, OK, or Poor, and then I can just let those stats speak for themselves without having to recommend any specifically.

I think Kris' sound card recommendations are based on how easy they are to set up and how well they work in DOSBox. There are a bunch of games he's reviewed where he recommends the FM music option that on a real DOS machine sound much better with General MIDI/MT-32. Thus I can only conclude that his recommendations are to DOSBox users. Also, when he comments that the MIDI sounds bad/off/glitchy, I'm guessing he's using onboard audio on his system and its implementation of GM is poor.

Gemini000 wrote:

That said, I'm very much considering a new approach for Season 5, where each video/audio mode has a quality indicator next to it stating whether it looks/sounds Good, OK, or Poor, and then I can just let those stats speak for themselves without having to recommend any specifically.

You could just say (assuming game supports GM) "This game supports GM. In DOSBox, I had the most success with Sound Blaster. If you're playing on a real DOS machine and have a GM device, you'll obviously want to take advantage of it." Or something to that effect. 😀

Gemini000 wrote:

Expack3 wrote:

I know it's a bit late to be asking this, but why the SoundBlaster recommendation for Little Big Adventure?

Easiest to set up given a very small difference in music quality between it and any of the other modes supported for music. Generally speaking, I provide recommendations based on running the game in DOSBox, as not everyone has the potential to legally set up MT-32 emulation, plus on top of that, MIDI quality can be hit-or-miss, if it even works at all, on a modern system.

That said, I'm very much considering a new approach for Season 5, where each video/audio mode has a quality indicator next to it stating whether it looks/sounds Good, OK, or Poor, and then I can just let those stats speak for themselves without having to recommend any specifically.

I can only speak for myself, but I played through most of the game (nearly to the final confrontation with FunFrock) with the Ultrasound when I figured out someone had already gotten a properly-working Gravis Ultrasound folder (top of Preparing to Install, Part One); enabling Ultrasound support then only took a couple of additional steps - very simple for me to explain to another once they've gotten the game folder mounted via a config file. The result was at points, the game switched between MIDI and CD audio, and the two sounded nearly identical, almost as though the set of waveforms used by the Ultrasound were used to compose the CD audio on another MIDI device. However, I can see where someone else might conclude there's little difference between FM and MIDI in this game - there aren't a lot of places in the game where that happens, and for the most part, the FM and the MIDI do tend to sound alike.

I can provide some reference track #'s from the CD so you can see what I mean: #2 (MIDI/FM version played in the new game cinematic if I'm not mistaken), #3, #5, and #7.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Is Master of Magic based at all on Magic: The Gathering? The types of magic that are available are extremely similar to the 5 colors of mana in MtG.

Yeah its very probable that the magic realm classification was inspiried from it,
other later games also adopt similar scheme such as Heores of Might & Magic 4 which departure from their previously 4-elements classification on Heroes M&M 3 which evidents in its Heroes' skills/abilities and supporting magical artifacts.

Back to Master of Magic,
I still unable to complete the Arcane Magic only challenge (aka no spell books challenge),
while in this challenge Spell of Mastery appear earlier on research page, every thing else are more difficult.
No beneficial units/cities/global enchantment,
can't create artifacts with spell charges nor with any imbued magical properties,
can't have better fantastic units, can't damges enemies with magic...

on DosBox i experiences slowness when dismissing the in-game sub-screen, the fadeout animation are so slow but sometimes (inconsitently) its being moderatly faster,
i didn't remember something like that happening when i play the game on my Pentium 100. I'm using "cycles=max" on dosbox's config.

Ancient DOS Games Episode 192 - Quake is online! (Please note that this is a mature-rated episode.)

So, something I noticed while watching a handful of Quake-related videos, given Quake's 20th Anniversary, is that a lot of them were missing some intriguing technical details, things which were very apparent to me back when I first played this game. Normally, I avoid doing the kinds of things everyone else is doing because I don't want to get lost amongst the crowd, but this time, given my own insights, I felt it was worth giving it a shot and making a Quake video while everyone else was too. :)

Also, this is probably my longest episode of ADG in awhile, so to counterbalance that, next week will be one of my shorter ones. ;)

Great episode, though I should point out that running Quake in DosBox is probably one of the simplest options if you want to get the full vintage experience on modern systems. Modern versions of Windows have poor CD Audio support, and most Quake source ports don't replicate all the graphical effects you see in Quake's DOS software renderer, particularly the lighting.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Great episode, though I should point out that running Quake in DosBox is probably one of the simplest options if you want to get the full vintage experience on modern systems. Modern versions of Windows have poor CD Audio support, and most Quake source ports don't replicate all the graphical effects you see in Quake's DOS software renderer, particularly the lighting.

I had no trouble running WinQuake with CD audio and everything on Win10. :B

You're lucky. WinQuake has known issues from Win7 all the way down to WinNT4 (which it was developed for 🤣).

Another problem with Winquake is that it's quite restricted in regards to the resolutions you can choose for it. It makes sense that it doesn't support the weird tweaked VGA modes DOS Quake does, but even still.

It does when you pass -allow360.

Ancient DOS Games Episode 193 - Tetris (1987) is online!

OK, so... I know it may seem kinda dumb to do a video about a game virtually everyone on the face of the planet knows about, but I'm hoping my particular style may help to illuminate some of the more interesting technical details about this much earlier version, plus I was able to sneak in some other factoids too which might be obvious to some but neat, unknown details to others. :)

Plus, so few people REALLY talk about Tetris anymore because it's so widely known, but I don't feel that should stop me, especially since I've had these disks since they were brand new and thus I've wanted to talk about 'em for awhile now! (Man though, that "white" disk sure has yellowed over the years... seriously, it was BRIGHT white when we first got it!)

As programming goes, i hardly seen what seem to be clever visual effect of Tengen/Atari-Games Tetris.
For example, in that version of Tetris,
if you clear a line using Square piece, you'll end up seeing a beveled 1x2 (or is it 2x1?) rectangle piece from the remain of that square piece, instead of two 1x1 blocks.

Most more modern Tetris hardly shows something like that anymore.