Ancient DOS Games Episode 296 - Depth Dwellers is online!
(Please note this is a mature-rated episode.)

So... THIS game...

I think it's safe to say EVERYONE who grew up playing DOS games in the 90s is at least somewhat familiar with this title, as it was freaking EVERYWHERE, at least, the shareware version was, and while there's technically nothing super-wrong with it... man is it BORING. This is perhaps the most underwhelming first person shooter ever made, despite having some decent, indie-made tech driving it.

I'd be even more surprised if anyone actually has the $200 "TriSight" glasses that were made specifically for use with this game. :P

Gemini000 wrote on 2022-02-12, 06:57:

I think it's safe to say EVERYONE who grew up playing DOS games in the 90s is at least somewhat familiar with this title, as it was freaking EVERYWHERE, at least, the shareware version was, and while there's technically nothing super-wrong with it... man is it BORING. This is perhaps the most underwhelming first person shooter ever made, despite having some decent, indie-made tech driving it.

Just took a look at this episode and I really can't remember this game and I played a lot of games in the 90s. So it probably was indeed really boring and I forgot about it. 😀

Nice channel btw. 👍

Interesting, I had never heard of Depth Dwellers! I was as rabid a DOS gamer as there was back then. But granted, I was a young adult at the time, not a kid. Maybe my being 25 had given me enough bad game wisdom that I ignored it without any effort.

I like the conclusion you drew for the size of the data file. Awesome. 🤣.

Ancient DOS Games Episode 297 - Beneath a Steel Sky is online!

From what little I knew about this game going in, I kinda expected something with a bit of a serious tone to it...

...what I DIDN'T expect was for the serious tone it had to be counterbalanced with equally SILLY tones! o_O

Yeah, really not sure how to feel about this one. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't exactly enjoy it either. I at least go over the important details and key features over the course of the video, while cleverly dodging a couple things which would've pushed this into the 18+ range because British humour has some very different boundaries! :B

Ancient DOS Games Filler #90 - Tails Adventure is online!

I kinda wanted to kick back with a favourite of mine given that the past couple weeks have been kinda crazy for me, world events notwithstanding as there's a LOT of stupid going on right now... >_>;

Tails Adventure seemed like a good pick as it's my favourite Game Gear game, involves one of my all-time favourite animated characters (next to Fluttershy from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Ralsei from Deltarune), and also serves as the lead in for telling the story of how I came to very much not trust using rubbing alcohol to clean game carts, as my copy of Tails Adventure was cleaned by someone who... didn't quite understand why they call it RUBBING alcohol... >:|

...also getting dangerously close to Episode 300! ;)

Gemini000 wrote on 2022-03-12, 00:17:

Ancient DOS Games Filler #90 - Tails Adventure is online! […]
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Ancient DOS Games Filler #90 - Tails Adventure is online!

I kinda wanted to kick back with a favourite of mine given that the past couple weeks have been kinda crazy for me, world events notwithstanding as there's a LOT of stupid going on right now... >_>;

Tails Adventure seemed like a good pick as it's my favourite Game Gear game, involves one of my all-time favourite animated characters (next to Fluttershy from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Ralsei from Deltarune), and also serves as the lead in for telling the story of how I came to very much not trust using rubbing alcohol to clean game carts, as my copy of Tails Adventure was cleaned by someone who... didn't quite understand why they call it RUBBING alcohol... >:|

...also getting dangerously close to Episode 300! 😉

As an owner of the Steam version of Sonic Adventure DX, I'm curious whether the fact SEGA permits the conversion mod under the stipulation you covered on the filler episode means that, by proxy, anyone who owns the Steam version of Sonic Adventure DX also has the licenses to the emulated Game Gear games?

Expack3 wrote on 2022-03-14, 15:25:

As an owner of the Steam version of Sonic Adventure DX, I'm curious whether the fact SEGA permits the conversion mod under the stipulation you covered on the filler episode means that, by proxy, anyone who owns the Steam version of Sonic Adventure DX also has the licenses to the emulated Game Gear games?

Yeah... I was considering that when I was writing the script but found no definitive information one way or another so just left it ambiguous. I think it might be more accurate to say Sega isn't "overly concerned" about that aspect of it. I mean let's face it, NINTEEN YEARS AGO they put all 12 of the Game Gear titles into DX Director's Cut for free with questionable emulation quality, though the ability to play two-player when applicable if I'm remembering right. Sega's generally been way more lenient on this sort of stuff compared to Nintendo, not that they've never done C&Ds and such, but definitely not nearly to the extent Nintendo has. :P

Ancient DOS Games Episode 298 - Chex Quest is online!

Given that Chex has been one of my favourite cereals for virtually two decades you'd think I'd've played this thing before now, but nope! This was my first time diving into this game and I was a bit surprised to see that, despite technically being an "advergame", it's done tastefully whereby the Chex branding is more-so used as set-dressing as opposed to being the coveted goal of the experience. This game technically doesn't make me WANT to eat Chex cereal!

...but then technically does because I haven't actually had any in months now and it reminded me that I actually like the stuff when I do feel like having cereal... DELICIOUS IRONY. :B

Ancient DOS Games Filler #91 - No More NES Slowdown/Flickering! is online!

So for the ADG Mod video I had originally planned to bring out today I'm making a brand new game using a particular DOS gamedev tool, but said game is only about halfway done as I write this, thus I need more time to get it done and thus have a decent Mod video to demonstrate its development process. When I realized I needed more time I decided to put a quick filler video together instead, thus the planned Mod video is now set to debut two Saturdays from now! :B

In any case, this filler video helps to demonstrate one of the reasons why I tend to prefer emulating old games instead of playing them on real hardware and that's being able to play a game on your own terms in the way you want to! Emulation is often a great tool for revitalizing an old game by giving it a new feel in some way, often seen with romhacks but even simpler changes can make a game feel surprisingly fresh. This time around, I'm demonstrating what happens when you use the Mesen NES emulator to exceed the limitations of the NES and doing side-by-side comparisons of how this affects various games! :D

Ancient DOS Games Mod 10 - Making a MegaZeux Game is online!

Yep... that's why it took four weeks to make this video, as I was also making an ENTIRE GAME in MegaZeux! :O

I honestly thought I could do it in two weeks as it only took two DAYS to get the main mechanics in place that I wanted to use, but... well... level design takes awhile... in fact, it was taking me three days to make two levels and I was aiming for 15 levels in total, so... yeah, needed an extra couple weeks to pull that off! :P

My original plan was for today's Mod video to be about the development process and going through it each step of the way, but when the level design started taking up 95% of the dev time I realized I would need to approach things differently for this video to be interesting, so I instead decided to make an overview of the process while completely going over the core mechanics, including how they work, and why I do things the way I'm doing them, even though it often seems like there should be better solutions! :B

The game itself is indeed available for download too! I've only tested it in the old DOS 2.51 version of MegaZeux so I have no idea if it's fully compatible with modern MegaZeux releases, but I'm told it SHOULD be. In any case, the game itself can be found on the MegaZeux Games page of my website: http://www.pixelships.com/megazeux.html

Ancient DOS Games Episode 299 - Helious & Helious II is online!

When I started playing through this game again for this video, I re-read through the entirety of Sean's story about how this game came to be, which I hadn't done in ages, fully expecting to have to make fun of the whole alien-encounter thing and then use that as a segway into Episode 300, where I was going to cover a whole bunch of the Tommy's Toys games.

...however, two things went wrong. Firstly, when I started thinking about my own dreaming skills and the things Sean was describing, an alternate reasoning occurred to me which might have better explained what Sean went through and was even MORE interesting than the alien-encounter angle Sean tells, so I realized it was better to go that route with the video instead, but also... the Tommy's Toys website doesn't exist anymore and none of the downloads were archived, so... actually acquiring the ENTIRE collection of them would be borderline impossible.

As such, because I'm having to rethink my 300th episode this late in the game, I decided to do a relatively simple Pro video next and I might even follow that up with another Pro/Mod/Filler while trying to figure out what to do for Episode 300 which would be worthy of the milestone. :B

Ancient DOS Games Pro 22 - Mana Investigation - Magic Carpet is online!

I actually had to record THREE separate sets of footage for this one as I continually ran into stumbling blocks every step of the way, as Magic Carpet is actually doing more under the hood than I realized, prompting me to collect all new data every time I noticed something screwy was going on. >_<

Even now, I'm not 100% certain on the results, but it's about as close as I can get them without hacking the executable itself, and given how big the mana values tend to get in this game, it's probably not all that important that the numbers be super-accurate, but still, if anyone finds more accurate numbers I can update the PDF I made with the results on it! (The PDF is linked in the video description over on YouTube.)

Ancient DOS Games Episode 300 - Tomb Raider is online!

So, my original plans for Episode 300 were to do mass coverage of most/all of the Tommy's Toys games, but unfortunately, the website for them didn't manage to survive to this point and the archived copies don't have any intact downloads, so... that wasn't gonna work out very well. :P

But, I had been sent Tomb Raider quite awhile back and nearly forgot I had it, as I originally thought it was a Windows game and thus wrote it off, but I had a nagging feeling that because of when it was released I might want to double-check that and sure enough, it IS indeed a DOS game! :D

Also, I'd never played the original Tomb Raider before... or really, ANY Tomb Raider games, with the sole exception of the Wii port of Tomb Raider Anniversary, which is the REMAKE of the original game! So that kinda put me in an interesting spot as it allowed me to assess how good the original is by comparison and see what improvements really came into play.

...suffice to say, I was not prepared for just how rough the original can be... :O

Ancient DOS Games Filler #92 - What's Next for Season 7 is online, marking the final video for Season 6 of the series!

Yeah... I never really expected Season 6 to just... keep going like that. I think the main thing was that Season 6 was just sort of "comfortable" in terms of how my assets for it worked and how the information was portrayed with Game Stats and such, so Season 7 is probably not going to have any HUGE changes on that front.

There's more to the video though, as I go into what to expect for Shovelware Diggers, how things are going in terms of gamedev stuff, and also a few secondary things to the content I produce, including Patreon support and some YouTube stuff. :B

Youtube engagement - I find it strange that watching the video doesn't mean anything.

Subscribing - I don't have an account on Youtube. Therefore I can't subscribe or do any of the things you mentioned as engagement.
Whenever someone on Youtube says a certain number aren't subscribed, I take that as the percentage of viewers who don't have a Youtube account.
I figure Youtube pushes creators to push subscribing on their viewers because more accounts means more data is collected.

Notifications - I rely on none of the things you mentioned. I have pixelships bookmarked and I check there once a week to see if there's a new ADG episode.

I don’t have any online accounts so I’m not allowed to like anything.

Quite unfortunate the ends YouTube goes to to demonetize views and content, over the years they have continued to change their algorithms to pay less and less.

The thing you mentioned about Godot and shaders is something I've been experiencing while playing Cruelty Squad. Which is weird and stupid because you'd think Mesa's own shader cache mechanism would circumvent this problem, as it compiles the shaders and saves the compiled result to your local filesystem. GZDoom has the same problem too.

Mesa's shader compiler also takes excessive amounts of time to build anything ontop of this, which annoys me even more that the supposed "cache" isn't apparently doing much to help.

Anyways, I always keep a eye on this forum thread when you have a new video ready. I'm kinda tired of what YouTube has become as a website and already miss how things were in 2005-2007. (I still miss how I styled my own channel page)

SKARDAVNELNATE wrote on 2022-06-18, 22:31:

Notifications - I rely on none of the things you mentioned. I have pixelships bookmarked and I check there once a week to see if there's a new ADG episode.

That works. I also have an RSS feed on my website if that's an option you'd prefer! :B

rmay635703 wrote on 2022-06-19, 00:13:

I don’t have any online accounts so I’m not allowed to like anything.

Quite unfortunate the ends YouTube goes to to demonetize views and content, over the years they have continued to change their algorithms to pay less and less.

Oh, if you're super-popular you're going to be making tons of cash from ad rev regardless. It's mostly the under 1M subs crowd who suffer from these changes, which make up the vast majority of us. :P

Though I think the thing that's very telling is when you escape anything "tech", including gaming, and see where the sub counts go for non-tech stuff... Suddenly channels with 10M+ subs are actually not unheard of. :o

DracoNihil wrote on 2022-06-19, 00:26:

The thing you mentioned about Godot and shaders is something I've been experiencing while playing Cruelty Squad. Which is weird and stupid because you'd think Mesa's own shader cache mechanism would circumvent this problem, as it compiles the shaders and saves the compiled result to your local filesystem. GZDoom has the same problem too.

Mesa's shader compiler also takes excessive amounts of time to build anything ontop of this, which annoys me even more that the supposed "cache" isn't apparently doing much to help.

Anyways, I always keep a eye on this forum thread when you have a new video ready. I'm kinda tired of what YouTube has become as a website and already miss how things were in 2005-2007. (I still miss how I styled my own channel page)

Shader caching has always been tricky with game engines because the engines are optimized to a huge extent to be able to make them easy to use, but those optimizations come at a cost of shader caching not being the most reliable thing, even when storage of cached shaders is enabled within the GPU drivers. Part of the reason my shader caching tricks aren't working in Godot 3.4 is because they rely on caching the shaders in a separate scene visible through an ultra-tiny viewport. Despite having to compile each shader to render that viewport at all, the engine can't tell that the same shader in the main scene has already been compiled in a different scene, and thus a second copy of it gets compiled, thus two copies of the same shader end up cached at the same time.

That said, I'm not 100% convinced it's entirely shader related; it could be something else attributed to the objects which are causing lag spikes is the problem; maybe pre-loading the meshes isn't working or whatever. One thing's for sure, this should be a lot easier to figure out once 3.5 is out of beta and ready to roll! :B

rmay635703 wrote on 2022-06-19, 00:13:

I don’t have any online accounts so I’m not allowed to like anything.

I remember being able to enjoy things without having to register first.

Gemini000 wrote on 2022-06-19, 01:46:

One thing's for sure, this should be a lot easier to figure out once 3.5 is out of beta and ready to roll! :B

I'm very much excited for this because I think Godot is hopefully going to use Vulkan and the Vulkan driver for Intel Graphics on Linux has gotten a lot of surprising bug fixes when Mesa 22.1.1 released.