http://www.classicdosgames.com/forum/viewtopi … .php?f=6&t=1321

kolano wrote:

Aw, was expecting Christmas Lemmings to be included in this.

I haven't covered the original Lemmings yet though. :B

Christmas is just the Catholic church way of trying to call Saturnalia and Yule for something "Christian". When in fact both festivities are a solstice celebration. And they are both pagan of origin. So to who ever priest, who says "Christmas" is Christian. I roll my fucking eyes. And want to educate them of the truth of those two festivities in a calm , friendly and polite manner. Cause it is bollocks that so many priests (both protestant and catholic for that matter). Says about the solstice fest. I am not pagan, Christian or anything religious. But I still celebrate Yule .

Gemini000: Lovely filler 😀

6000 get

there's also a UT2004 mutator to give santa hats and sacks to everyone too, and of course the Santa in the Serious Sam FE/SE and that cheesy-as-hell-as-if-the-gif-files-suddenly-came-to-life Duke3D Nuclear Winter expansion. And this is all I can think of from a non-TF2 FPS christmas side.

There's also Super Speed: The Christmas Edition. Alas, unless it has been released as freeware (which I doubt), finding a registered copy of Super Speed is probably extremely difficult.

http://i.imgur.com/7WFyQg9.jpg

reminded me of the last ep and our love of old video games. 😊

cdoublejj wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/7WFyQg9.jpg

reminded me of the last ep and our love of old video games. :blush:

When I found out this existed I was somewhat perplexed as it came out virtually THREE YEARS after the PC game made its debut, plus it seemed odd to me that they'd adapt a PC game of all things as you typically want to license stuff that's far more popular like movies and TV shows, with the most recent titles being "Mustang", "The Walking Dead" and "Wizard of Oz".

Part of the reason I haven't played this one yet though is it's not very common and little demand for it. Only 2,500 were made and it's considered to be only an average-playing game and nothing spectacular. (Though you could do a lot worse too.) To that end though, it makes it relatively inexpensive for a more modern yet uncommon pin, typically going for between $2,000 and $2,800. (Considering brand new pins typically go for around $5,000 to $7,000 depending on model, features and popularity.)

Gemini000 wrote:

cdoublejj wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/7WFyQg9.jpg

reminded me of the last ep and our love of old video games. 😊

When I found out this existed I was somewhat perplexed as it came out virtually THREE YEARS after the PC game made its debut, plus it seemed odd to me that they'd adapt a PC game of all things as you typically want to license stuff that's far more popular like movies and TV shows, with the most recent titles being "Mustang", "The Walking Dead" and "Wizard of Oz".

Part of the reason I haven't played this one yet though is it's not very common and little demand for it. Only 2,500 were made and it's considered to be only an average-playing game and nothing spectacular. (Though you could do a lot worse too.) To that end though, it makes it relatively inexpensive for a more modern yet uncommon pin, typically going for between $2,000 and $2,800. (Considering brand new pins typically go for around $5,000 to $7,000 depending on model, features and popularity.)

where there every any good playing (spectacular) that is video game or movie them that is rare or semi rare and are sought after?

cdoublejj wrote:

where there every any good playing (spectacular) that is video game or movie them that is rare or semi rare and are sought after?

Unless you're counting modern "LE" (Limited Edition) machines that have extra features over a standard model and are typically meant for private collectors... then no, not really. Any pin made in small quantities leading to it being rare are often games that weren't expected to do well or were experimental in some way, and most licensed titles don't take too many risks with overall design since they need to be approachable by a wide range of people, IE: fans of the license in question.

In fact, a number of pinball games are notable for exceeding the quality of the licenses they're based on. "The Shadow" for instance is widely regarded to be a fun pinball game with lots to do, including a unique mini-playfield that functions a lot like "Breakout", while the movie that spawned it is typically considered to be somewhat below-average. "Congo" is another movie that's panned by critics but the pinball game based off of it is surprisingly decent and may be the only game that has a super skill shot made by plunging straight to the left outlane! :O

All that said though, VERY few pinball games are videogame themed, with most getting their licenses off of movies and TV shows, though there's even exceptions to that, such as the recent "Mustang" pin I mentioned which is a result of the 50-Year Anniversary of the Ford Mustang line of automobiles, plus there was a basketball-themed pin released in 2009 simply titled "NBA".

Yeah, unlike videogames where being licensed often means being inferior, in the world of pinball, almost everything sold to arcades in the past decade and a half has been licensed and there's very few pinball machines that play so badly that absolutely no one would want one. In fact, most licensed pins are extremely decent, with original actors lending their vocal talents and likenesses. The Addams Family is widely regarded to be one of the best pins ever made and despite having over 20,000 units made (which is virtually quintuple the typical run!) and being a very common machine, they still sell for between $5,000 to $6,000 each despite being 22 years old! :O

Season 4 of Ancient DOS Games has begun! :D

And to kick things off is Episode 151 - Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure

First thing to note about the new season is everything's been bumped up to 720p HD! However, just like with YouTube, the HD doesn't activate by default from most sources, although if you watch the show from my website, I've intentionally defined the embedded player to default to HD when available, so watching from my website will give you HD by default, but you'll only get SD everywhere else unless you press the "HD" button. :P

The other thing too is that the increased echo is a result of having all of my stuff packed up and some furniture sold off. Dad and I are going to be moving into a smaller place soon and unlike when I moved out of my house and had to literally pack everything I owned (and then some) in just two weeks, this time around 70% of my stuff was already packed still from my last move, so I only took a week and got everything else ready to go save for a few things so I can continue doing my webshow and such. Thus unlike last time, this time around there should be minimal interruptions, if any, once the move happens. Only catch is this time around the date is still up in the air though it will probably be before this month is over.

Otherwise, don't have much to ramble on about, so I hope everyone enjoys the new Season 4 format and that 2015 becomes the greatest year for the show yet! :D

Nice episode Gemini000. Looks really good in HD! 😀

I remember Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure as one of the first games I played with Adlib music back in 1993, when my uncle got his Media Vision multimedia kit. It was nice to hear something other than the PC Speaker for a change 😁 . It did seem kinda odd to have The Simpsons' character names in the high score list (someone at Apogee was probably a big fan at the time).

The erratic behavior of the jump key is very annoying; you have no idea how many times I fell to my death just trying to get through the levels 😒 . It's still a fun game though, worth trying at least once.

This is a very good start for ADG Season 4. Keep it up!

I remember playing all of the DOS shareware platformers when they were new, as I was on the BBS scene in the '90s. I've got so little patience for platformers now, though, that I'm content just watching these videos on them instead of actually playing them.

I remember being turned off by the Cosmo character and therefore not liking the game as much as most of Apogee's others. The tile-level scrolling probably didn't help either, as it would have been a step backwards by that time.

I know. It made less sense on why Apogee's 92/93 platformers were choppy, and especially since they already had smooth scrolling in Crystal Caves/Secret Agent

Also that loading screen looks slightly obscene....

Todd Replogle was offered to use the smooth scrolling Commander Keen engine for Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, but instead he created his own engine because id Software's engine couldn't do parallex scrolling. At least, that's why he created his own engine for Duke Nukem II.

Ah, yes. I remember this one.

My dad had bought a Multimedia CD-ROM Bundle from Creative Labs (a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 and a cheap 2X CD-ROM drive) for our 386 back in those days. It came with a CD that had all of Apogee's shareware titles and two demos of Full Throttle and Dark Forces from Lucasarts.

I came across Cosmo on that CD, and decided to try it out. Played it, beat the shareware episode, then deleted it afterwards. I'm sure it was a nice game (I haven't played it since), but it didn't really have much lasting appeal. That said, I was a child back then and I would've been entertained by just about anything that I've experienced from that multimedia bundle (including Full Throttle and Dark Forces, even though they ran as slow as molasses on my 386 😀).

But I can remember that this was one of the first shareware titles from Apogee that didn't do it for me. This was also compounded by the fact that I had shareware versions of Wolf 3D, Rise of the Triad, Raptor, Hocus Pocus, Commander Keen and a bunch of other titles for me to try out. Even Crystal Caves looked more interesting than this, despite having only PC Speaker support for sounds.

Calvero wrote:

Todd Replogle was offered to use the smooth scrolling Commander Keen engine for Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, but instead he created his own engine because id Software's engine couldn't do parallex scrolling.

Parallax scrolling on DOS hardware was very hard since GPUs back then lacked any form of hardware acceleration. They were just able to display the content of their build in memory. CGA, EGA and VGA were created for work not for games. Their main goal was to produce high resolution (at the time) still images with every pixel colored independently. Consoles and arcade machines created their screen from sprites and tiles and had a features like hardware scrolling with multiple layers that lead to parallax scrolling. On the other hand NES had limited number of different tiles on the screen and there wasn't possible to draw a full screen picture or even use more than 4 colors in a 8x4 (or something like that) block.

On PC CPU had to redraw all the content of the video RAM every frame and programmer had to overcome very low ISA bandwidth. John Carmack discovered a way to do some kind of hardware scrolling on EGA that allowed smooth scrolling we all remember from Commander Keen and other Apogee games. This method didn't work with parallax scrolling though. The only way to do it was to limit game engine to per tile scrolling that allowed to update only tiles that changed every frame. It saved a lot of bandwidth back then and at inconvenience of lower frame rates it allowed for a parallax scrolling on EGA.

VGA was major improvement. It had a ton of undocumented features that allowed for various tricks. It also had some limited hardware acceleration like true hardware scrolling, but still it was very inferior in terms of fast 2D graphics to SNES hardware. On the other hand faster CPUs and more bandwidth on ISA16 and VL-BUS allowed a 486 PC to do almost everything SNES was capable of. Excluding some tricky transparency tricks that on PC required at least 16-bit color modes and there's almost no DOS games working in more than 256 colors.

This PC weakness became his great asset. Ability to color every pixel independently and fast CPU were key factors for raycast engines used in Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and others. It was actually very hard to port these games to consoles. Since they had GPUs targeted for 2D tile graphics and usually very slow CPU. Sega genesis was an exception with M68k CPU that could do things SNES needed a cartridge with custom chip.

DOS games were aiming for best possible use of single screen with ability to place as much information as possible like strategy games or point&Click adventures that could display beautiful backgrounds with very few animations. Console games were all about speed, 60 FPS, and arcade action back then.

ishadow wrote:

Calvero wrote:

Todd Replogle was offered to use the smooth scrolling Commander Keen engine for Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, but instead he created his own engine because id Software's engine couldn't do parallex scrolling.

Parallax scrolling on DOS hardware was very hard since GPUs back then lacked any form of hardware acceleration. They were just able to display the content of their build in memory. CGA, EGA and VGA were created for work not for games. Their main goal was to produce high resolution (at the time) still images with every pixel colored independently. Consoles and arcade machines created their screen from sprites and tiles and had a features like hardware scrolling with multiple layers that lead to parallax scrolling. On the other hand NES had limited number of different tiles on the screen and there wasn't possible to draw a full screen picture or even use more than 4 colors in a 8x4 (or something like that) block.

On PC CPU had to redraw all the content of the video RAM every frame and programmer had to overcome very low ISA bandwidth. John Carmack discovered a way to do some kind of hardware scrolling on EGA that allowed smooth scrolling we all remember from Commander Keen and other Apogee games. This method didn't work with parallax scrolling though. The only way to do it was to limit game engine to per tile scrolling that allowed to update only tiles that changed every frame. It saved a lot of bandwidth back then and at inconvenience of lower frame rates it allowed for a parallax scrolling on EGA.

EGA and VGA both supported single-pixel scrolling and page flipping (double buffering), which is why smooth scrolling was possible in Commander Keen. The main improvement with VGA is that there was that you had a lot more off-screen draw space to work with. You're right about parallax, though.

BTW, I wrote a game for the original GameBoy in C around a dozen years ago in college, and it worked similarly to Dangerous Dave / Commander Keen for scrolling: You would paint new columns of tiles in the off-screen part of video memory and then scroll the view window over to reveal them. The difference was that the GameBoy had hardware support for tile and sprite layers, so it was able to do at least as well as EGA (except in 4 color instead of 16, and with lower resolution) on much less powerful hardware.

VGA was major improvement. It had a ton of undocumented features that allowed for various tricks. It also had some limited hardware acceleration like true hardware scrolling, but still it was very inferior in terms of fast 2D graphics to SNES hardware. On the other hand faster CPUs and more bandwidth on ISA16 and VL-BUS allowed a 486 PC to do almost everything SNES was capable of. Excluding some tricky transparency tricks that on PC required at least 16-bit color modes and there's almost no DOS games working in more than 256 colors.

The *only* thing the SNES had going for it graphically was hardware-level support for various tile and scaling effects. That was just one use case, though, which limited what it could do. It's true though that parallax was a bit tough on a 486 due to having to redraw the entire scene, and scaling/rotation effects were similarly tough due to computational demands (which was rectified with the Pentium). I did write an Asteroids clone in C++ using Allegro that scaled the asteroid sprites and rotated the player sprite and ran fine on my 486 though.

There's also the whole world of non-texture-mapped 3D games, which really only existed on computers because consoles never supported non-tile graphics very well until hardware-accelerated texture mapped 3D graphics took over. The only exception I can think of is StarFox, which required custom hardware on the cartridge.

DOS games were aiming for best possible use of single screen with ability to place as much information as possible like strategy games or point&Click adventures that could display beautiful backgrounds with very few animations. Console games were all about speed, 60 FPS, and arcade action back then.

You're drastically under-selling DOS games, unless you're talking more about EGA. But EGA was competing against the 8-bit consoles, while VGA stacked up against 16-bit, and again EGA only lost out in tile-based scrollers due to not having much hardware support for it.

At any rate, I would argue that the biggest advantage of PCs over 8- and 16-bit consoles was actually a combination of CPU, RAM, storage, and input. PC games could be a lot more complex and deep because of these things, while consoles excelled at simple arcade/action gameplay. RPGs were so noteworthy on consoles because they pushed the envelope on world creation and character development, but these things had already been happening on PC for half a decade.

I just checked out 3D Realms website, and they posted an article from their vault: 1994 Game Design Tips from Tom Hall. Check it out here: https://3drealms.com/news/3d-realms-vault-199 … om-hall-part-1/

I can't help but think that when you read some of the tips they had for game design, at least a few of Apogee's games have ignored those design tips (in a manner of speaking). Still an interesting piece of trivia, though.

Kris, are you having the same problem as Clint where your Patreon comments won't appear?

SquallStrife wrote:

Kris, are you having the same problem as Clint where your Patreon comments won't appear?

*replies to a Patreon comment you made*

...nope. Still not suffering from that problem. I think the problem is specific to Clint's account for whatever reason, possibly some glitch on Patreon's side of things, but I'm just guessing.