MrFlibble wrote on 2022-07-11, 21:54:

I've worked through the archived pages of the DIV Arena website, which is unfortunately not preserved in its entirety, and identified remakes with working downloads.

a reminder that in the ever shifting sands of the internet a great many things are being lost forever

great lists, thanks

List of remakes/conversions with specified target platforms and links, from remakes.org:
http://www.remakes.org/website/list/flat-index.html

Super Mario Bros 3 by Id Software - but there's no way to download it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YWD6Y9FUuw

Here's a site with some nice DOS remakes/conversions:
https://www.firebell.org/projects.html

Apparently, the team originally formed to participate in a gamedev competition run by Enix Corporation.

Many DOS games by Georg Rottensteiner are actually remakes/clones of Commodore 64 games. For example, I did not realise that his game HitBlock is not only similar to Crillion, but actually a very close recreation thereof in terms of gameplay elements, although the levels seem to be different.

As I dug deeper into this I realised that the forum post format no longer suffices to properly document the remakes, so I switched to spreadsheets. I also combined my findings with non-DOS remakes and clones which I found earlier, so the list is pretty big (but still far away from exhaustive):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hl_ou … dit?usp=sharing

You can sort the list by any column by adding temporary filters (because I'm sharing this in view mode). By default it's sorted by platform so all DOS remakes are in one place.

After some pondering I decided not to use any labels, such as "conversion", "remake" or "clone", but rely on descriptive parameters, some of which are also inaccurate ("recreation" is really vague), but at least they do not force any particular game to be shoved into one single definition.

Note that there are probably some inaccuracies here and there. I took and extra mile to specify license type for both remake engine and game data, following the example from Libregamewiki, but in some cases it's not easy determine the game data license.

I'll be happy to get any feedback and/or criticisms you guys might offer.

Here are two PC remakes that don't seem to be on your spreadsheet:

• "Supercars 3" remake of Super Cars / Super Cars II
• Bagman

MrFlibble wrote on 2023-01-01, 12:30:

As I dug deeper into this I realised that the forum post format no longer suffices to properly document the remakes, so I switch […]
Show full quote

As I dug deeper into this I realised that the forum post format no longer suffices to properly document the remakes, so I switched to spreadsheets. I also combined my findings with non-DOS remakes and clones which I found earlier, so the list is pretty big (but still far away from exhaustive):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hl_ou … dit?usp=sharing

You can sort the list by any column by adding temporary filters (because I'm sharing this in view mode). By default it's sorted by platform so all DOS remakes are in one place.

After some pondering I decided not to use any labels, such as "conversion", "remake" or "clone", but rely on descriptive parameters, some of which are also inaccurate ("recreation" is really vague), but at least they do not force any particular game to be shoved into one single definition.

Note that there are probably some inaccuracies here and there. I took and extra mile to specify license type for both remake engine and game data, following the example from Libregamewiki, but in some cases it's not easy determine the game data license.

I'll be happy to get any feedback and/or criticisms you guys might offer.

I think I have said this before, but what you are doing is fantastic 😀 the same goes with your threads about either Open Source games, remakes , almost lost and or forgotten games 😀

janih wrote on 2023-01-02, 10:54:

Here are two PC remakes that don't seem to be on your spreadsheet: […]
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Here are two PC remakes that don't seem to be on your spreadsheet:

• "Supercars 3" remake of Super Cars / Super Cars II
• Bagman

Added, thanks!

WolverineDK wrote on 2023-01-02, 23:13:

I think I have said this before, but what you are doing is fantastic 😀 the same goes with your threads about either Open Source games, remakes , almost lost and or forgotten games 😀

Thank you for the kind words!!!

I just stumbled upon a different conversion of M.U.L.E., for German developers: mule386.zip

I was kind of able to play but the controls are a bit wonky. The graphics are pretty polished though. The readme states that this is a beta and they intended to make a shareware release out of it. But I've used Hallfiry's catalogue and only found the same version, unpacked, on one German coverdisk.

MrFlibble wrote on 2022-05-11, 17:48:

I suppose there are a lot more games of this kind out there, any suggestions? (I'm not talking about the obvious stuff like those hundreds of Tetris clones)

Actually, I changed my mind. I'd be quite interested to learn about any Tetris variants that try to imitate the style of the original 1986 game. For now, I can only name NYET, Teetris, and, to some extent, Ptakovina.

I wonder if anyone ever attempted to make an open source clone of the 1986 Tetris with textmode graphics and generally similar look & feel in the same vein as Rogue Clone recreates Rogue and Zmiy recreates Nibbles?

Yesterday I found two DOS games available for free from their respective developers' pages:
Beneath Apple Manor by Don Worth
Empire of the Over-Mind by Gary Bedrosian

However, neither game appears to have been developed for DOS, but the pages above and the downloads themselves contain very little information about how these DOS versions came about.

Don Worth's page simply says: "You can download my first game for the Apple II - Beneath Apple Manor - this version runs on a PC.", while the included readme contains a reference to Home of the Underdogs:

Beneath Apple Manor (PC version) Keyboard Command Summary Home of the Underdogs http://www.the-underdogs.org/ […]
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Beneath Apple Manor (PC version)
Keyboard Command Summary
Home of the Underdogs
http://www.the-underdogs.org/

The date stamps on files are from 2003.

Empire of the Over-Mind has date stamps from 1986, and a readme from 2000 mentions that

Empire of the Over-Mind is a game in the adventure game tradition. It was originally written for 8-bit microcomputers like the […]
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Empire of the Over-Mind is a game in the adventure game
tradition. It was originally written for 8-bit microcomputers like
the Apple II and the Radio Shack TRS-80. The version you have now was
expanded and ported to the IBM-PC in the days before Windows and hard
drives.

This seems to suggest that the port is official, but MobyGames for example does not have it documented. This forum post calls the DOS version the "Deluxe" version of the game.

I'd appreciate more info on both titles.

Does anyone know where to get the original DOS version(s) of King's Quest 1 VGA? I've only been able to track down, via the Wayback Machine, v3.0 which claims to be DOS-compatible but in fact it's already built off the Windows version of AGS:
http://www.agdinteractive.com/KQ1.php

Earlier releases were uploaded on some FTP site and of course that was not preserved by the Wayback Machine.

https://github.com/nextvolume/RSDKv5-Decompil … es/tag/20221026
Port of 2017 game Sonic Mania to MS-DOS and Windows 9x made via a community reverse-engineering of the game
You need a file (Data.rsdk0 from a retail copy of the game in order for it to function properly.

Ideally your computer should have at least a 300Mhz Pentium II, and 32MB of RAM. There are no real video card requirements as th […]
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Ideally your computer should have at least a 300Mhz Pentium II, and 32MB of RAM.
There are no real video card requirements as this port will fall back to using the 8-bit VGA 320x200 mode if it can't set a VESA mode.
If you want to use the 320x240 Mode-X video mode, add useVGAMode=2 under video settings in Settings.ini

Color will feel a bit reduced when using VGA modes, but completely playable.

The game will lag during special stages on weaker hardware but runs fine anywhere else

it would be interesting to see if any web games (html5, flash or way back to applets) were ever ported, converted or remade for DOS. Some of those games seem suited to it (esp older web games from pre 2010)

MrFlibble wrote on 2023-01-01, 12:30:

As I dug deeper into this I realised that the forum post format no longer suffices to properly document the remakes, so I switched to spreadsheets. I also combined my findings with non-DOS remakes and clones which I found earlier, so the list is pretty big (but still far away from exhaustive):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hl_ou … dit?usp=sharing

Google sent me a notification today that this file "contains content that may violate Google Drive's Malware and Similar Malicious Content policy". Apparently it did not like some of the links I listed. It does not tell me to remove the file, so I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with this. As always, you click on any links at your won risk, although I tried to make sure they are all legit, or were legit at the time of writing (some old game sites get false positives from MalwareBytes).

Anyway, I've attached a more recent WIP version of the list to this post.

MrFlibble wrote on 2023-05-25, 13:00:

Google sent me a notification today that this file "contains content that may violate Google Drive's Malware and Similar Malicious Content policy". Apparently it did not like some of the links I listed. It does not tell me to remove the file, so I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with this.

Considering the state of Google these days, I'm not surprised you're getting that kind of a warning, but no instructions on what to do about it.

I'm not even sure *how* you would report false-positive matching, it's always a pain to even download MS-DOS demoscene productions when the browser thinks it's trying to "keep me safe".

DracoNihil wrote on 2023-05-31, 21:42:

I'm not even sure *how* you would report false-positive matching, it's always a pain to even download MS-DOS demoscene productions when the browser thinks it's trying to "keep me safe".

Oh, they offered me to send the file for a "review"... somewhere. I figured that I don't want to go through what I think is nearly 1,000 links in that spreadsheet to try finding what might have offended them, and that the supposed reviewers would not enjoy this either, so submitting this for review would likely generate more trouble than it's worth. So I just deleted that file altogether (I think it's still viewable before it gets purged from the Recycle Bin).

MrFlibble wrote on 2023-03-26, 19:15:

Does anyone know where to get the original DOS version(s) of King's Quest 1 VGA? I've only been able to track down, via the Wayback Machine, v3.0 which claims to be DOS-compatible but in fact it's already built off the Windows version of AGS:
http://www.agdinteractive.com/KQ1.php

Earlier releases were uploaded on some FTP site and of course that was not preserved by the Wayback Machine.

I figured this out. There are no DOS versions per se, but starting with release 2.13, Adventure Game Studio included an option to run games compiled for Windows under DOS using the provided DOS binary (ACDOS.EXE) and specifying the game's Windows executable as the game data file. A user in another forum helped me to find a preset version 2.0 of King's Quest I VGA with ACDOS.EXE from AGS v2.21. This one works fine in DOSBox (as far as I've tested).

I tried to do the same with KQ1VGA v3.0 (which I found via the Wayback Machine, linked above), especially since this was discussed here, and grabbed AGS v2.62 (the latest to have DOS support) from Chris Jones' archive at archive.org. The game loads up and runs in DOSBox this way, but there are a few quirks that suggest that not everything is up to spec, namely:

• the intro does not play properly as Graham goes into the opposite direction from the castle and just stands by the lake
• the speech is abruptly cut off before completing, I only tested this with the quit game line, but suspect that other dialogue might be affected as well
• if you go to the right from the starting screen, Graham gets stuck and refuses to go anywhere else

I've not been able to test this outside DOSBox, so I cannot tell if this is caused by the version of ACDOS or by some incompatibility with DOSBox. I tried different settings and CWSDPMI versions (and even HDPMI32), but with no effect. I also tried earlier versions of AGS, but v2.61 refused to work, and so did v2.56d, repirting various errors, even though this one is the closest to the dates on the KQ1VGA v3.0 files.

MrFlibble wrote on 2023-01-28, 14:13:

I wonder if anyone ever attempted to make an open source clone of the 1986 Tetris with textmode graphics and generally similar look & feel in the same vein as Rogue Clone recreates Rogue and Zmiy recreates Nibbles?

I think this one qualifies, more or less: Vitetris.