I can't believe I missed this before now! Thanks Gemini000 for doing this show. I watched all of the episodes over the past 2 days as background noise while working from home due to inclement weather, and I enjoyed a lot of the things that were mentioned or covered.
Since I watched them all at once, I have a pile of comments. Apologies for the rambling result:
Thexder / Firehawk:
- Thexder is one of the early PC games I acquired a boxed copy of. I still have its box along with Firehawk's.
- I really liked your analysis of the EGA dithering, which finally convinced me that the Tandy version of Thexder is superior for all intents and purposes (something I was unsure of after having played Firehawk due to its clearly superior EGA mode).
- I do think people place too high an emphasis on the Tandy music in Thexder, however, as it seems to have only one song (not including the credits) that is repeated over and over and over throughout the entire game, and I'm pretty sure the sound is otherwise identical on Tandy versus PC speaker.
- I was always baffled by Firehawk's 16-color MCGA mode, as even the installer claims it should have 64 (or was it 256?) colors. Your explanation makes sense and was something I'd never have thought of since I wasn't aware of the history of MCGA (thanks for covering that as well in your Firehawk and video adapter filler episodes!).
- Your blurring technique has me thinking that it might be worth trying to make a special DOSBox scaler that can do the blurring in-game...
Dark Forces:
- Your point about the majority of weapons being dangerous to the player is an interesting one that hadn't occurred to me before. It's worth mentioning that even most of the supposedly "safe" weapons can hurt you at various points, as the game has some walls that will ricochet your shots.
- You missed a great opportunity to poke fun at Lucasarts for making Dark Forces, then Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, then Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. What was up with that?
Xargon:
- You mentioned it was similar to Jill of the Jungle, which is something I noticed back in the day. Did both games use the same engine?
- I also noticed that the music sounds a lot like Solar Winds, so I guess it might have the same composer.
Dungeon Explorer (appeared in filler episode #2):
- I'm pretty sure that the only version of this floating around the internet is the one that I uploaded to HOTU around 10 years ago from my vast collection of shareware 😀
- I've never seen an abandonware copy of the registered version (if it even exists) which is kind of a shame.
Timed intervals:
- Has anyone found ANY games where timed=true in DOSBox is needed or better than timed=false? I had to set timed=false when getting X-Wing to run recently, and both another VOGONS poster and Gemini000 have since mentioned needing to do the same for many other games.
Arctic Adventure:
- Does this use the same engine as Monuments of Mars? I noticed the latter didn't get a mention.
DOOM:
- It's nice that you mentioned source ports, but I was hoping that you were going to actually mention some specific ones like you did for Descent. I've been out of touch with that scene for a few years now, so it would be nice to know what the current state of the source ports is.
MIDI:
- I feel that it's kind of a shame/cop-out that you are settling for SB/Adlib music in most of your game reviews, although I do appreciate how you've mentioned that varying personal preferences are okay. To the extent that it is practical, it might be nice to see a sound hardware filler episode discussing common DOS sound hardware including PC speaker, Tandy, Game Blaster, Disney Sound Source, Adlib and/or Sound Blaster, GUS, MT-32/LAPC-I/CM-32/CM-64, SC-55/SCC-1 and maybe even some of the Covox devices that many games seem to support. It's worth mentioning that DOSBox emulates many of these as well.
Starflight:
I know you don't take requests, but you really need to review Starflight if you can get a hold of it! I count it as one of the best games ever made, alongside Deus Ex 1 and Fallout 1 & 2. It uses code wheel protection so it should run for you in DOSBox. It would also be a great opportunity to compare CGA composite graphics with EGA, which sadly only got a passing reference in your video adapter filler episode.
Text games:
- Might be nice to see reviews of some of the ASCII graphics games like Castle Adventure, Kroz and ZZT.
One Must Fall 2097 / sampling rates:
- It's worth mentioning that OMF2097 is one of those games mentioned in one of your reviews that lets you choose an audio sampling rate (something you probably didn't think to mention because it's probably not relevant when using GUS with OMF2097 as your review suggested doing). I believe that this option was included because the Sound Blaster (unlike the GUS) could not mix multiple digitized sounds in hardware, so it took an amount of CPU horsepower proportional to the sampling rate to do the mixing in software. Some games such as DOOM (one of the first I'm aware of to allow mixing) allow you to instead choose how many sounds can be mixed together at once, while most older games just live with a one-sound-at-a-time limit.