"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructiona...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:inimg1$t0m$1...@digitalmars.com... > Nick Sabalausky wrote: >> And along the NES/SNES lines, I've always been a huge sucker for >> DOS VGA/EGA gaming. > > Another great thing was all you could do with the text mode, like > Walter's Empire DOS version. >
I admit I've never actually played any version of Empire. But then I've never really been particularly into resource-management strategies (I *think* that's what Empire is...something similar to Civilazation, right?) > That oem character set with the 80x25 cell display, 16 color > palette.. and, of course, the blink bit could go incredibly far > in making a nice little game board. > Yea. Kroz and ZZT were great. And I made a few little text-mode games in QBASIC a lifetime ago (And posted them on AOL, way back at AOL v1.x :) Pre-web, heh). Still have those QBASIC games around here somewhere. The characters for the extended-ASCII range and control codes were really useful (the walls, the two "face" characters, etc). I totally forgot about the blink bit! >> You'd probably need DOSBox for all of them these days. > > DOS programs are one reason why I was so reluctant to get into the > 64 bit bandwagon. I eventually caved in a few months ago when > my old motherboard gave up the magic smoke, but I really didn't > want to lose native 16 bit ability! > > DOSBox does the job, but I've always found it hard to use compared > to the "real" thing. I had no idea the 64-bit chips couldn't do 16-bit! I'm actually not real concerned about that though. I've found that a *lot* of the old DOS stuff I like is entirely broken on my modern(-ish) 32-bit XP system (and a lot of it never played well with Windows in the first place), so I usually have to use either DOXBox or my old 486 anyway. Not that DOSBox is perfect yet, unfortunately, but it seems to actually have much better compatibility than trying to run things "natively".
