uhhh...for me text games represent the DOS era.....The DOS "era" will be different for each person depending when they got in on gaming.

DOS era is for me the time of good turn based RPGs...
DOOM was - well, the evil sign of doom - marking the slow end of era of the games I liked and the beginning of the era of mindless 3D shooters and similar...

Mirek

Ha ha, You're right Mirek. 😁

Adventure games for me, but I agree 100% with DOOM being the beginning of the end.

Actually it wasn't until Doom's release that PCs were beginning to become powerful enough for a wider range of games. Doom was one of the first games to show this. It was far quicker, more fluent in movement than Wolfenstein 3D which always felt "stiff" as a lot of older games did.

Adventure games didn't need lots of action on-screen and most were pretty limited in animation which is why they didn't need powerful PCs. But of course, we did get Full Throttle, Broken Sword, The Dig, etc. which we couldn't have gotten otherwise.

I personally think the actual downfall came with Windows 95 - DirectX made it even easier to make 3D games that ran supersmooth. It's then that the PC got overwhelmed with console-like games and typical PC genres started to dwindle. I mean, look at all the dos games and you won't find many 3D console-based games (PSX, etc.).

In my personal opinion (and that of a great deal of journalists too) the golden age of PC gaming was 1991-1995. In that time PC gaming became real gaming platform, and probably had around 75% of all classics in that period. Doom was 1993 (end of) so it's quite in the middle - do unfair to call it "the down-fall". It may have brought lots of gamers to the PC though, and made publishers realise what the PC was capable of.

(hope you guys don't mind me splitting this off - it seemed to be rapidly drifting from the subject of DOSBox icons and towards something else that was equally interesting)

I think that it was actually just a case of a new generation of game developers coming aboard during the mid-to-late 90s that had to come up with ways to take advantage of the new capabilities of the PC offered by faster CPUs, PCI video cards, Windows 9x, etc. Then consoles went 3D and cemented the modern game genres.

red_avatar: There were actually a LOT of DOS-based shooters made towards the end. Bethesda, iD, Raven, 3DRealms, and many smaller companies exploded the shooter genre that was started by iD with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. It just happened that Windows 95 came along around that time and was quickly adopted by everyone, forcing game designers to use DirectX to do what they had been doing previously via direct hardware access and/or VESA drivers.

I think what really changed things was 3dfx and Quake 2, followed by Unreal, then Half-Life. FPSes started to lead the way in showing off new PC technology, and it took longer for other genres to find ways to take advantage of that same technology (not that it needed to in many cases).

First arcade-to-PC conversions, with 4 colours (3+1) and just a beeper

Wolfenstein and DOOM are DOS originals and the first-person 3D shooter is something that gained popularity on DOS machines first. The consoles of the day, Genesis and SNES, didn't really have the power to do anything more advanced than Wolfenstein.

More importantly, they didn't have the proper controllers for first person shooters. Nothing comes close to a keyboard and a mouse for movement. Gameplay on those console first person shooters that don't support such a setup is lesser for it in almost every case.

Finally, multiplayer on PC first person shooters strips console shooters bare. You don't need four TVs and four people in the same room to play multiplayer games or relegate yourself to one quarter of a TV screen. Nor were you limited to four players on a PC.

I would note that modern consoles do not suffer these problems anymore, but in earlier times they did.

Ah but you name FPS and FPS are not 3D console games 😉 Even now FPS is still very much a PC genre and most console games still struggle with the gamepad controls. Golden Eye and Halo are the best known exceptions though. The new Revolution gamepad may do away with the fiddlyness of a gamepad though.

Doubt it. That gamepad looks like a gimmick to me, waving your arms around......I'm not a baby anymore and I try to exert as little energy as possible.....that's why I play PC games and not sports. 😉 . Of course I didn't see the appeal of that Donkey Kong drum thingamajig, DDR or 99% of whatever else people do so whatdoIknow. 😀

I think you are forgetting a fact which the entire world seems to have decided to ignore:

Ultima Underworld preceeded Doom...

Then again, Ultima Underworld was actually good. 😀

Ultima Underworld was actually VERY GOOD. The engine was even better the one used for Doom and it even worked on a 286.

My opinion is that the DOS Era started falling with the rise of 3D Accelerated video cards. DOS games required me to use my imagination. For example, I had to imagine the battles in Dungeon Despair in Ultima IV since the graphics were just pixellated representations. Now every detail is displayed for you in near photo realistic 24 bit graphics with bump maps and reflection maps. You no longer have to imagine anything. Some say that makes a more immersive world, but it seems to me that I felt more involved in the game when I had to imagine it rather than just observing it.

I would have to agree, Ultima Underworld is a very good game and probably one of the first to come to mind when I think of DOS gaming, along with System Shock. Both had a much better engine than Doom with features such as look up/down which you didn't see in iD games until Quake.

Most platforms (console, DOS, Windows 9x, XP, etc.) have their classics. I don't think an OS necessarily contributed to the downfall of gaming in general. It's certainly focused too much on eye candy of the last few years which is unfortunate but there are still some good titles released.

DOS games of note - Commander Keen IV+, Jazz Jack Rabbit 1, Day of the Tentacle amost others and Doom - of course, just for giving an almighty kick up the ass to everyone else though Duke3D was better. About the only genre/style of game that I don't look fondly back on is racing. In general these dated very very fast and look and play rather badly now 😀

Ultima Underworld was great. System Shock actually used an enhanced version of the UW engine.
It's not really true to say it was technically better than Doom. They were very different engines. Ultima Underworld was tile-based, so there was a lot less flexibility with the maps.
You could sort of look up and down in Hexen. It didn't do it right, due to limitations in the texture drawing, but UW didn't do it right either. The textures got all distorted. Duke3D fakes it too, but arguably better than UW, and Hexen.

Anyway, that's a little off-topic.

3D games appeared because PCs got powerful enough to do them, and loads of them were made for DOS before windows-gaming took hold. I got into PC gaming around that time, and it was probably 50/50 2D and 3D games I played. Even if we were still using DOS nowadays, I'd expect the timeline of PC gaming to have progressed pretty much the same...and as for 3D accelerated games, the first 3DFX games were DOS-based weren't they?

I don't think that there were many DOS only 3dfx games. (Voodoo 1 was released in 1996)

I believe that almost all early 3dfx games had both DOS and Windows versions.

List of 3DFX DOS games:
http://www.mobygames.com/attribute/sheet/attr … et,0/p,2/so,0d/

Most are both DOS and Windows.

Not really much point in pointing out DOS only 3dfx games since 3D acceleration never did play much of a part in DOS gaming. (There were a few exceptions here and there)

Of course 3DFX came out with their card around the same time as Windows 95 so that pretty much was the death knell for DOS. Finally a useable GUI for PC's (although not very stable......) and a 3D Accelerator for faster games.....

Just look at the handheld market. They've been 2D for years.....now they introduce 3D and things have started to go downhill as far as gaming quality is concerned. This is simply because for portability and ease of use as 2D is a far better format for that kind of situation.

It seems like 3D FPS view will always be "dumbed down" compared to 2D. It's the same as in Real Life. If your were sitting in your room looking through your eyes with full 3D view of objects then you'd have to interact in a 3D space, if the same scene was rendered in 2D then that same information would be formated for a 2D space, and enhanced for better gameplay experience to make up for not being more 3D.

For me the "greatest game ever made for DOS" is Megarace II. I first played it on some 33MHz 4.86. Who created that game did an awesome work, especially the Tibet track is nice. (I think i first played this game more than 10 years before)

I also liked Duke Nukem 3D, but in general i do not like such games. I just loved to tamper with it's level editor and to see what can i achieve (8 years before on a P200).

Lion King was also nice... Maybe this is just for me as i like almost anything relating to animals... But the animations were good - although later when i had seen the SNES version of that game, it appeared that the PC version was not so good compared to it.

I could also like Transport Tycoon, as i like all those building games, although since they humilinated me on the TTDPatch board i do not play it at all. Although not because of just that, the game became routine for me, so it was no longer interesting (I even got bored of SimCity 3000 :p ).

Sometimes i had seen some more recent 3D games, but i never felt that "i have to try out". They could not interest me. Partially maybe that is why i am still completely satisfied with my Pentium 233MHz. (Maybe only one: Black & White, but even that rather for the AI than the graphic).

As much as I love Doom (my fav FPS of all time) nothing says 'DOS!' like a good sierra online adventure game. The pixel art just makes me cringe with nostalgia! 😁 I haven't played them as often as I used to....and just now I tested QFG3 and god damn......I need to go back some day. 😊

Also my fav game of all time.....Ultima VII, is also a product of the Dos era. Now there is a game that should be played by everyone. Forget the mindless NPCs of morrowind, Ultima VII had features that have yet to be matched (although Oblivion may try to top it)