Ancient DOS Games Episode 134 - Really Old Edutainment is online! :)

Because of how low I'm running on edutainment software, I decided to start this month off by looking through my 2000 Games shareware CD to see if there was anything interesting as far as edutainment is concerned. Managed to find a few things, actually. ;)

Treasure Hunt Math happens to be in the collection too, but I'll probably do a full video on that game at some point... Not this year though; already have the rest of edutainment month planned and there's gonna be three regular episodes this month instead of two! (This month's filler will be moved to next month.)

Lovely episode. Creative Captions, well quite frankly I did not think of TIM first, I thought of Storm P (Robert Storm Petersen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_P ). And why is that ? Well because he is the Danish "father" of the machines you call Rube Goldberg machines. But yeah it does resemble at a simple level TIM.

WolverineDK wrote:

Lovely episode. Creative Captions, well quite frankly I did not think of TIM first, I thought of Storm P (Robert Storm Petersen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_P ). And why is that ? Well because he is the Danish "father" of the machines you call Rube Goldberg machines. But yeah it does resemble at a simple level TIM.

That's understandable, though I knew what The Incredible Machine was back when it was new and I only learned about Rube Goldberg when I started watching videos related to modded Minecraft early last year... and I had no idea who Robert Storm Petersen was until just now. :B

Gemini000 wrote:

WolverineDK wrote:

Lovely episode. Creative Captions, well quite frankly I did not think of TIM first, I thought of Storm P (Robert Storm Petersen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_P ). And why is that ? Well because he is the Danish "father" of the machines you call Rube Goldberg machines. But yeah it does resemble at a simple level TIM.

That's understandable, though I knew what The Incredible Machine was back when it was new and I only learned about Rube Goldberg when I started watching videos related to modded Minecraft early last year... and I had no idea who Robert Storm Petersen was until just now. :B

Well, I am not saying Storm P, was the originator of the machines. But I am saying, he is the guy whom the machines are named after here 😀 Cause I also looked up Rube Goldberg, and it looks like Storm P was one year older than Rube. But he died in 1946. Instead of Rube whom died in 1970. But then again, if you check out the Rube Goldberg Machine wiki article. There you will see similar expressions. Such as Storm P maskiner (which means Storm P Machines). But it would be interesting who came up with the first of those "machines". When it comes to names. Since I know machines, of different kinds of functionality has been made/invented before they were named as such 😀

The word was EQUIPTMENT? really, Mr. Soleau? I suspect the whole point was a diabolical plot to sink the poor guy.

Enjoyed this episode... rare/lesser-known stuff + CGA era = instant thumbs-up from me. :)

I actually didn't notice that misspelled 't' until after the final render since I was just trying to show the sinking sequence and wasn't trying to complete the word, so it was too late to make a joke about it. ^_^

Also, the first Ancient DOS Games Q&A video for the month of April, 2014 is online! (Though the HD render is taking its sweet time to become available... I really should start uploading things hours in advance so all the conversions can properly go through and then make them public at the appropriate time...)

In any case, only three questions for this first Q&A video... If these Q&A videos turn out to be a bust I can always come up with something else for the $4 reward level on my Patreon page, but I'm hoping now that it's a little more obvious how these videos will work that there'll be more questions for them in the coming months! :)

Oh yeah, "PixelDeva" happens to be Mom. ;D

The Q&A was interesting. Didn't know the request list was so long.

Regarding the edutainment episode, I wonder if any of the games would look interesting in composite CGA mode?

Ancient DOS Games Episode 135 - The Oregon Trail: Classic Edition is online!

I tried to get hold of the very original DOS version from 1990 but without success, so here we have the Classic Edition from 1996 instead... though TBH, I thought the word "Classic" implied it would play exactly like the original, though from what I've gathered, it TECHNICALLY does... just with more professions and the ability to get twice as much food per hunting trip... and altered mini-games to be more mouse-friendly. :P

Episode 136 though is likely going to be a very fun one... :3

Interesting party name members! 😉

Did Nicolas Cage sell you an ox?

I had an original DOS VGA version of Oregon Trail on 5.25" floppies when I was a kid, but I have no idea what happened to it. My mom probably has it packratted away somewhere; hopefully I'll still have my PIII-550 full of floppy drives to image it when it turns up.

I seem to remember that the hunting section was more like Commando / Ikari Warriors 2D top-down 8-way shooter style, but I could be conflating it with the excellent Organ Trail: http://store.steampowered.com/app/233740/

Oddly enough, it was this version of Oregon Trail that I played at my elementary school growing up. Never really had the chance to play the Apple II original until quite some time later.

Needless to say, the DOS Deluxe Version is definitely more easier than the Apple II original. Also, I don't think I would've been able to stand the terrible loud sound of the Apple II version after a certain amount of time.

HunterZ wrote:

I had an original DOS VGA version of Oregon Trail on 5.25" floppies when I was a kid, but I have no idea what happened to it. My mom probably has it packratted away somewhere; hopefully I'll still have my PIII-550 full of floppy drives to image it when it turns up.

I seem to remember that the hunting section was more like Commando / Ikari Warriors 2D top-down 8-way shooter style, but I could be conflating it with the excellent Organ Trail: http://store.steampowered.com/app/233740/

Looks like your memories were right. The 1990 DOS version definitely had that hunting section which seems to be directly ported over from the Apple II original.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/oregon-trail/screenshots

I remember playing Apple II Oregon Trail in school.
I first watched the show's Wacky Wheels review and really enjoyed it! These seem really well recorded produced for what it is and are very informative. The graphics mode icons are a nice touch; I noticed the CGA-composite icon for Space Quest. I wish I had time to play Crusader: No Remorse myself. I don't know how I didn't know about this show until now.

SquallStrife wrote:

Interesting party name members! ;)

Yup. I actually linked to everyone's YouTube channels too in the Additional Information section. ;)

SKARDAVNELNATE wrote:

Did Nicolas Cage sell you an ox?

Possibly... :B

HunterZ wrote:

I had an original DOS VGA version of Oregon Trail on 5.25" floppies when I was a kid, but I have no idea what happened to it. My mom probably has it packratted away somewhere; hopefully I'll still have my PIII-550 full of floppy drives to image it when it turns up.

Actually, I recently had the experience of trying to get the data from several 3 1/2" disks onto my Windows 8 system... The annoying solution would've been to go through the trouble of setting up my Windows 98 desktop system in its entirety and copying the files to a USB drive. However, with less effort, I actually managed to get my P100 Windows 98 laptop communicating via an ethernet cable directly to my Windows 8 system and just pulled the files straight from the laptop's disk drive! :D

Auzner wrote:

I don't know how I didn't know about this show until now.

I have terrible marketing skills. ^_^;

Gemini000 wrote:

Actually, I recently had the experience of trying to get the data from several 3 1/2" disks onto my Windows 8 system... The annoying solution would've been to go through the trouble of setting up my Windows 98 desktop system in its entirety and copying the files to a USB drive. However, with less effort, I actually managed to get my P100 Windows 98 laptop communicating via an ethernet cable directly to my Windows 8 system and just pulled the files straight from the laptop's disk drive! 😁

I went through and imaged all my retail game/software 5.25" and 3.5" floppies a couple years ago using my PIII-550. I think I used Linux for most of it, as it has useful things like dd and dd-rescue. I also used FreeDOS and Win98 a bit, but I think that was mostly to verify that some of my copy-protected disks were OK since some of them weren't ripping any better than they would have back in the day (guess I need one of those special controller cards that can read any disk).

I still need to go through my non-retail floppies full of shareware and personal goodies and see what I can get off of them. It's likely that some of them will have degraded (although my retail ones did fine), especially since I used some goofy stuff like FM80 (FormatMaster?) to squeeze 800KB of data onto floppies that were meant to hold only 360KB. Still, there are probably some great archaeological finds waiting, like obscure shareware and such that I amassed during my BBS days in the early '90s.

While the famous Apple II 1985 version of the Oregon Trail is the epitome of the game, its really quite challenging to get to Oregon with more than one character left alive. Misfortune always seems to hit your characters in a certain order, and if you don't rest for days after a serious mishap, that character will die, if not then and there then later on. Eventually, the weight of illness leads to lots of resting and becomes a serious drag on the food supply. Eventually (depending on the character you started with) you will have to hunt often using the clunky interface.

We had the 1985 Apple II version at school, and my family also had a copy of an earlier Apple II version at home. (I remember it had a late 70s copyright date.) That earlier version also had graphics in places, but they were much simpler. The hunting sequence featured a deer running from left to right across the screen (sometimes varying in speed) and shooting it was entirely a matter of timing. On a rare occasion you would be attacked by bandits, and you would have to defend your wagon train in a manner similar to hunting. There was also a graphical map screen during travel. As a whole, it was easier than the '85 version, and I could usually complete the journey without too much trouble. Although, the last time I played it (about 20 years ago) I perished 1 day from Oregon City. 😵

Gemini000 wrote:

SquallStrife wrote:

Interesting party name members! 😉

Yup. I actually linked to everyone's YouTube channels too in the Additional Information section. 😉

*looks*

Ah, so you did! Thanks for that! 😁

I didn't see it, because this time I watched the video through the Pateron site, because I got the email before I saw it on here.

Can't wait to see the "bonus" episode!

Ancient DOS Games Episode 136 - Googol Bonus Disk is online!

...so yeah, this thing actually exists! :D

Funnily enough, it's not as good as I remember it being, though I still find it more fun to play the games in this thing than in the freeware Googol Math Games package. There's other programs from Paul Dawson on the disk too but I honestly don't know much about them so I'll have to give them a look at some point and see what they're all about. :B

Need a better clue. I can think of several DOS games that had at least 4 CDs.