I was able to find some time to dust off my Tandon machine with Hercules card and do some tinkering. The results are below:

I confirm that Outrun runs on real hardware:

Some copies on the internet are lacking required files for HGC and therefore don't run. Just download largest possible ones and one of them probably will be fine. Sadly, gameplay is a bit sluggish and music is barely okay. The ultimate Outrun experience is enhanced 3D version on Nintendo 3DS, highly recommend that one.

I also confirm that Eye of the Beholder can be emulated with SimCGA 4.2:

It doesn't look great, but it is running. Took me about thirty years to see it emulated on Hercules. What younger me would give away for this...

As a bonus, I finally tried Planet X3:

Turns out it is actually quite pretty and has very nice music on PC Speaker. I'll be sure to play it a bit more when I have some time.

Once again, thank you kindly for your contributions and helping with running these games on Herc.

EDIT: minor spelling and formatting corrections

native hercules is rare, even most games that support Hercules do so via cga-emulation.

Well, seems to me that I've just arrived to the right place! I'm just finishing restoring a 386SX 40Mhz with Winbond Hercules Graphic Card Adapter and a 12'' Black & White Monochrome monitor.

This is my list of all very good Hercules/CGA games to play even up to this day;

Test Drive 1
Accolade's Grand Prix 1
Broderbund Stunts
Prince of Persia 1
Prehistorik 1
F-15 Strike Eagle II
Electro Body
Titus the Fox
Crazy Cars 2
Ultima 6
The Secret of Monkey Island
Maniac Mansion
Zak McKraken
Loom
Indiana Jones Last Cruzade
Arkanoid II - The revenge of DoH
California Games I
California Games II
Karateka
Budokan - The Martial Spirit
Race Drivin'
After Burner II
Batman The Movie
Back to the Future PART 2
Golden Axe
Tetris (Spectrum Holobyte)
Bubble Bobble
Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of Lounge Lizards
Nightmare on Elm's Street
Outrun
Street Rod 1
Street Rod 2
International Soccer Challenge
World Class Leaderboard
Lakers VS Celtic
Low Blow
Battle Chess
The Blues Brothers
World Class Rugby - The Five Nations Edition

Most of them have Hercules & CGA native support while only a very few need emulators such as "UCGA" or "mono.com" to run under CGA emulation. (I've attached all the emulators I was able to grasp from the internet in case anyone need them).

I specially recommend using "mono.com" in option "1" (small size) which has an excellent framerate and all scanlines removed for a greater visual experience.

Cheers!

OldCat wrote on 2021-08-23, 10:59:

I was able to find some time to dust off my Tandon machine with Hercules card and do some tinkering. The results are below:
..
Once again, thank you kindly for your contributions and helping with running these games on Herc.

That is just awesome, thank you sir for putting it to the test.
The only thing missing is a good list, that gets updated from time to time
And maybe a complete package of cga simulators for hercules to boot 😁

Great thread, keep it coming.

I always had problems with the epyx stuff. perhaps they have fancy cga-code in winter/summer/world-games....

Hi, just found an interesting site with an overview of various CGA simulators.:

http://dosdays.co.uk/topics/cga_simulators_for_hercules.php

Not sure if this is new or helpful in any way,
but I found the CRT screenshots to be looking very pretty. ^^

There's a text character, top down, dungeon crawler RPG I play on and off that should work, even on MDA https://beej.us/moria/ note there are separate '88 and '286 up versions and some of the variants not labelled may be 386 up. I think the 286 up need more than 640k

edit: well I know for sure the 88 version works on CGA, played it on my PC4600

Jo22 wrote on 2021-08-24, 11:23:

Hi, just found an interesting site with an overview of various CGA simulators.: […]
Show full quote

Hi, just found an interesting site with an overview of various CGA simulators.:

http://dosdays.co.uk/topics/cga_simulators_for_hercules.php

Not sure if this is new or helpful in any way,
but I found the CRT screenshots to be looking very pretty. ^^

hmmm...afaik karateka is native hercules hires and GrandPrixCurcuit has builtin CGA Emulator for hercules.

Jo22 wrote on 2021-08-24, 11:23:

Hi, just found an interesting site with an overview of various CGA simulators.: […]
Show full quote

Hi, just found an interesting site with an overview of various CGA simulators.:

http://dosdays.co.uk/topics/cga_simulators_for_hercules.php

Not sure if this is new or helpful in any way,
but I found the CRT screenshots to be looking very pretty. ^^

The review is actually quite good. Too bad that it doesn't provide download links for the reviewed emulators 'though!

Jo22 wrote on 2021-08-24, 11:23:

Hi, just found an interesting site with an overview of various CGA simulators.: […]
Show full quote

Hi, just found an interesting site with an overview of various CGA simulators.:

http://dosdays.co.uk/topics/cga_simulators_for_hercules.php

Not sure if this is new or helpful in any way,
but I found the CRT screenshots to be looking very pretty. ^^

Well, lets make our own more curated version then 😁

I'm starting of with EMUCGA.BAT, a 5 minute batch script that makes testing a breeze.
Bundled with all emulators found on this site and elsewhere.

• Make sure its accessable in your PATH
• NOTE: Some emulators make the DOS prompt unreadable
  You can parse the executable with eg:
  Copy code to clipboard

  1EMUCGA GAME.EXE
  

  and pick an emulator of choice.

Credits go to various contributors in this thread 😎

solraeck wrote on 2021-08-24, 14:39:

Jo22 wrote on 2021-08-24, 11:23:

Hi, just found an interesting site with an overview of various CGA simulators.: […]
Show full quote

Hi, just found an interesting site with an overview of various CGA simulators.:

http://dosdays.co.uk/topics/cga_simulators_for_hercules.php

Not sure if this is new or helpful in any way,
but I found the CRT screenshots to be looking very pretty. ^^

The review is actually quite good. Too bad that it doesn't provide download links for the reviewed emulators 'though!

Got you covered 😉

Akuma wrote on 2021-08-24, 14:44:

Well, lets make our own more curated version then :D […]
Show full quote

Jo22 wrote on 2021-08-24, 11:23:

Hi, just found an interesting site with an overview of various CGA simulators.: […]
Show full quote

Hi, just found an interesting site with an overview of various CGA simulators.:

http://dosdays.co.uk/topics/cga_simulators_for_hercules.php

Not sure if this is new or helpful in any way,
but I found the CRT screenshots to be looking very pretty. ^^

Well, lets make our own more curated version then 😁

I'm starting of with EMUCGA.BAT, a 5 minute batch script that makes testing a breeze.
Bundled with all emulators found on this site and elsewhere.

• Make sure its accessable in your PATH
• NOTE: Some emulators make the DOS prompt unreadable
  You can parse the executable with eg:
  Copy code to clipboard

  1EMUCGA GAME.EXE
  

  and pick an emulator of choice.

EMUCGA10.PNG
Credits go to various contributors in this thread 😎

This is INSANE!!!! can't believe you went and compiled all these...THANKS BRO!!!

I'm craving for get Bubble Bobble to work on my Hercules 386 and I've tried a couple of emulators so far but no results, except for BBSIMCGA which actually manages to launch but then framerate breaks.

This is the holy CGA grail hhahaha, thanks again!
Will test everything tonight and upload pics.

solraeck wrote on 2021-08-24, 15:35:

This is INSANE!!!! can't believe you went and compiled all these...THANKS BRO!!!

Credits go to all constributors in this thread, I just packed and cleaned up what I could .
If anyone feels left out, please PM me. I'll add your contribution to the post to make you feel better 😁

Does anyone have Magic Key?

Mentioned here:
Magic key and hercules emulation
Magic Key won't work on emulated hercules card
Re: Looking for Magic Key Program(SimCGA like)

I found some more emulators and are adding them, but I'm waiting on Magic Key 😁
But it already looks like I'm runnnig out of screen space.

Hello!

It the first time I write here, in Vogons. I, also, been collecting CGA emulators for the Hercules monochrome card over the years. I don't have my XT machine with the Hecules card sny more but I use the CGA emulators with the the 86box PC emulator.

Here is a link with a 3.5 720kb floppy image with different CGA emulators.

Explanation:

1. Interestigly, I found diferent versions of SIMCGA 4.2 with different sizes and serial numbers, some have an .EXE extension instead of .COM.
an example is SIMCGA3.EXE it report ver "4.0" when executed, but it the only version that works with "Superman" DOS game of 1989.
SIMCGA versions 1.0 to 4.1 were distributed freely back in the day. But the version "4.2" was a commercial software, and it is not a single versions
rather several "4.2" versions were launched with different sizes and S/N.

2. I also have different versions of "MONO.COM". On is in the root directory of the floppy image and others in "monos" folder.
The "MONO.COM" inside the "monos" directory has 975 bytes and works with the game Qix.
MONO2.COM is the seems to be the same as BBSIMCGA.

3. Additionally there are other less known emulators like MODEMGA, CRAZY, MG, MGA, COLOR (two different versions), HERCGA, an CGA version of Stphen Jones launched on jan 15 1987, and some strange CGA emulators written in Polish and Hungarian:

4.And also MagicKey 3

I removed the disk image with Simcga because, I received an a-mail asking to remove it. However , as far I know only SIMCGA 4.2 was commercial and I found very strange that copyright still applies to a software that is not in active use anymore.

However the other emulators have no copyright notice

Here is a copy of the floppy image without SIMCGA 4.2. The SIMCGA included in this disk are the freeware versions 2.0, 4.0 and 4.1.
The other CGA emulators have no copyright notice.

Ok!. I also removed Magic Key now. I did know this one had copyright.

Uploaded again with SIMCGA 4.2 and Magic Key removed.

Also I find strange that a software with more than 30 years still have the Copyright in effect.
For example some sites have Win 1.0 for download. Only PC emulators can run it nowadays and I think nobody would pay for it.

Magic Key has a very clear copyright notice. Unless you have proof that any of the software is not under copyright, or you have permission from the copyright holder, then it may not be distributed here. FYI, copyright lasts for a long time, and in fact no computer software is old enough to have its copyright lapse.

null

Fun fact:

I was looking for FYI copyright and found the following:
The song “Happy Birthday to You” is protected under copyright since 1935 and it will protected until 2030.

https://www.hohschools.org/cms/lib/NY01913703 … ightHBstory.pdf

So MagicKey and SIMCGA 4.2 may be used around 2080 or so. All of us will be dead at that point.

Another Fact:

Other software, like ROM BIOS, and memory utilities uploaded here in Vogons, may have in fact copyright and also must be removed, because none of them have an express permission of the authors.

Fenix77 wrote on 2021-08-30, 00:16:

Fun fact:

I was looking for FYI copyright and found the following:
The song “Happy Birthday to You” is protected under copyright since 1935 and it will protected until 2030.

I'm with you, I know what you mean. Don't let it get you down. We're living in a silly world.
If software archaeologists cared for incidental things like this,
there would be nothing left for future generations.
That being said, let's stay law-abiding here on Vogons, at least. 😀

Speaking of authorship, there's also the other side of the coin:
From what I remember, some shareware authors, looking back, even did regret
not to have had included a dead line into their registration forms.
Apparently, they were annoyed when continously asked for registration
about 15 or more years after they released their programs.

"Happy Birtday" might be much older, also.
There is evidence that it is an old folk good, like so many other things are.
If that's true, the copyright claim might be unjustified.
Alas, the music scene is afraid of this and heavily uses its lawyers, as always.

To give you another example, aside from the silliness of the recent Adobe 1 (DOS) thing:
Coca Cola claims the rights to the look of Santa Claus,
yet there a German christmas cards from the 19th century that shows a man that looks quite the same.
He's been described as Weihnachtsmann (Man of Christmas) and also still resembles St. Nikolaus (Saint Nicholas) a bit.
Long story short, he's real and not an invention of Coca Cola. I guess in our hearts we all can agree on that part.

Edit: Formatting fixed, small edits.
Edit: I believe Firmware might be more like Freeware, as it's never sold and free to download.