After two months of working on this, I finally worked up the courage to post it here.

I’m building MMModern, an open-source (GPL) reimplementation of the World of Xeen engine. Clouds of Xeen can now be played from start to finish, from a new game in Vertigo all the way to Lord Xeen and the original ending. Darkside of Xeen isn’t playable yet; only its intro works for now.

My first goal is to make it look, play and behave as close to the original DOS game as possible. Later I’d like to add optional quality-of-life features like controller support, interface improvements and extra rendering options, always off by default. I also plan to bring it to other platforms like Linux and the Steam Deck, and maybe Android.

It doesn’t include any game data: you need your own copy of the game, and the GOG version works perfectly. For now it only runs on Windows 10/11 (64-bit). It’s still in 0.x, so saves from one version may not load in the next.

It isn’t a port of ScummVM’s Xeen engine. It reuses some ScummVM code, but wherever ScummVM differs from the DOS original, MMModern follows DOS, and those differences are documented in the repo.

I only tested the late part of the campaign using prepared saves, so I’d really appreciate any feedback. Bug reports are very welcome on GitHub.

A note on AI: the whole project was built with Claude and Codex. I did my best and tested everything I could as thoroughly as possible, but I understand if that’s something you’d rather not support.

GitHub and downloads: https://github.com/carbiecarbie/MMModern/releases

My all time favorite Airplane game growing up. Created in 1991 by LucasFilm games. The game featured a German and American campaign system along with numerous planes and skirmish style missions. Was an absolute blast. The soundtrack and sounds of the game stick with me to this day.

Fun fact: The engine, 3D mechanics, and mission builder logic Holland perfected in SWOTL were used directly as the foundation to create the legendary Star Wars: X-Wing (1993) and TIE Fighter games.

This is a interesting 1993 DOS title, I cant think of another game quite like it. Stronghold is an offically licensed Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Real-Time Fantasy Kingdom Simulator. Its a little harder for me to recomend than M.A.X Mechcanized Assault and Exploration was yesterday as this game may not be for everyone due to the fact that you don't control your units directly.

If i had to give a comparison i would say the gameplay is similar to Fallout Shelter in that you put units to training so that they can gain levels but you don't really directly control your units.

You play in real time, slowly building and expanding your territory outward while defending your walls & attacking enimies as you share your world with various monster bases as well as a evil wizard that serves as the main protagonist.

At the start of the game you roll a party of fighters, thieves, and wizards, just like any other D&D game but now each party member can build their own stronghold and produce more units of their class and race (meaning a human fighter in your party can now recruit more human fighters, an elven wizard more wizard elves and so on .)

To this day It's definitely still a unique title, worth checking out.

NOTE: To get into the game you will also need to find the instruction manual online that came with the game because it has one of those old school copy protections where it will ask you what is the first word on page 23? If you absolutely can't find it let me know.

The GOG version does come with the Manuel if you purchase it on the GOG website.

I wanted to STRONGLY recommend M.A.X. Mechanized Assult & Exploration.

It's a 30 year old DOS game (has a windows .exe github mod) but to this day there still isn't a strategy game that can quite do what this game does.

Over 50 land, sea, and air vehicles, each can be upgraded. Any unit can have tbeir armor, weapons, speed, cost, upgraded allowing for unlimited different strategies with each new game.

To win you have to build colony buildings to reach a determined score. Each turn that a colony building is active you get a point but if that colony building gets distroyed you lose all the points it accumulated.

Avoid M.A.X 2, the sequel was never completed. And I've never actually played the campaign, I play custom games or "hot seat games". Meaning you and up to three other players take turns on a single PC or pass around a android phone with M.A.X on it (using magicDosBox).

Available on Steam, GOG, and Epic. And there is a mod available that fixes most of the bugs

Edit: Beginner tips: search google for the M.A.X port to fix various bugs

1. if anyone reads this and tries out a custom game, unlike Starcraft/C&C you have unlimited building resources but they aren't above ground. Use your "surveyor" unit to find underground materials and then build a mine and power plant over it with your constructor unit. Remember buildings must be connected to share power/materials. Use your engineer to build connectors. Buy at least 2 surveyors before the game start as you want to find​ a 2nd material deposit ASAP to get your war machine going. The more materials you mine, the more you will produce.
2. if you start a custom game with a lot of starting credits, the computer will "zerg rush" you with scouts. The more starting credits you choose, the larger the scouting attack will be. So buy multiple engineers (3 or 4) when planning your start, and fill them with materials so that you can rush building jobs in fewer turns. And purchase a tank and mobile missle launcher during the planning purchase menu phase. Mines are cheap and will take out any un-upgraded units so buying a minelayer at the start wouldn't hurt.
3. You can use your starting credits to upgrade your units as well. Upgrading hit points and armor once on your scouts will allow them to take a long range missle hit (if the computer doesnt upgrade their missles) and survive... barely. This will allow your scouts to explore without being blown away.
4. Once in the game quickly use your engineers build a radar, gun turrets, and artillery, put out a line of mines and prepare for the enemy scouts to attack. Remember you can't shoot at what you can't see, radar is important. Scout units can help until you can get your radar up as they have a long scan range. The missile launchers have long attack range but their scan range is much smaller then their attack range, so you need a radar up for the incoming attack.
5. Get your land/sea defenses up first but Don't neglect your anti aircraft. While you can't purchase aircraft or sea-craft before the start of the game like you can with various land units, the computer can attack you from the sky within around 25 turns.

Anyone know what platform / version of Flashback: The Quest for Identity is it where you hear the Morphs scream when they are shot? I found a video clip of it on Youtube, but I don't know what platform it for:

Flashback - MORPH PLANET

Platforms I've checked:

3DO

Amiga

PC/MS-DOS

Genesis/Megadrive

Sega-CD

SNES

So I tried searching google again. This time after giving google that list above it suggested:

"The version you are looking for is the Philips CD-i port. The Morph aliens utilize a placeholder human sound file. When shot and killed, the alien assets unexpectedly trigger a piercing, blood-curdling high-pitched scream from a woman that completely clashes with the sci-fi setting. "

Before going any further down the rabbit hole, I figured I'd reach out and ask the sub. Thanks.

Firing up Descent again reminded me how wild it was back then: full 6 degrees of freedom in 1995, flying through mine tunnels with no real 'floor', robots coming from every direction. I remember spending more time lost staring at the automap than actually shooting things, and the escape sequence after blowing the reactor was pure panic every time.

Fun fact: it started as a Parallax Software project and used a portal-based engine that could run true 3D on a 486, a year before Quake.

Did you play with keyboard, mouse, or did someone actually own a proper joystick for it? And which did you prefer, Descent or Descent II?

The Great Escape is an action-adventure video game which shares a title and similar plot to the film The Great Escape. It was developed by Denton Designs, which went on to produce the similarly acclaimed Where Time Stood Still. The Great Escape was published by Ocean Software in 1986 for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS. Trevor Inns programmed the Commodore 64 version.

I’m enjoying collecting all the old games I couldn’t get when I was a kid. Most recent edition is Falcon 3.0 Gold, released in 1994. It includes Falcon 3.0 (1991) plus all the expansions and literature, as well as ’The Art of the Kill’, a book on dogfighting that also includes an hour of video instruction.

The game dates from an era where gamers weren’t allergic to reading more than a paragraph in the manual. The main manual for this one clocks in just shy of 350 pages, and that doesn’t count any of the expansion manuals or support literature.

This game is a beast to get running. It requires a *minimum* of 604k of free conventional memory. Took some creative autoexec/config editing to get my computer to relinquish enough conventional memory to run it. The advanced flight model also requires a math co-processor to use. Falcon was one of only a handful of games of the era that made use of an FPU. Falcon 3.0 was also the very first game to use a 3D camera that locked on and tracked your target -what we call a ’padlock’ view in flight sims. It predated every other game that used a locking/tracking camera.

Like many real-mode games from the early 90‘s it’s pretty sensitive to CPU timings which means DOSBox isn’t a great solution. It works great in 86Box though if one doesn’t have real hardware to play it on.

Serious question .. Still seeing AI slop posted here like every other hour ..

Min. HW 486/66MHz, 8MB RAM, 320x200 (or 320x240) x 8 bit screen size. Graphics & coding made by me, not AI generated. 

Google "Dustwar" if you want to follow it.

I will answer to all questions.

When I choose the enhanced mode, the textures look OK, but the HUD and weapons look 'pixelated' like the original VGA version. How do I change them to look like the original SVGA appearance? u/Nemo2278

With some games like the VGA Sierra titles it's a simple matter of adding a glshader entry to dosbox.conf, but with for example Albion that has no effect at all. I assume the resolution, screen mode or some other setting is incompatible but I've no idea where to look or if this can even be worked around in most cases.

Solved: This is because eXoDOS is a multi-emulator launcher, so each game has a preset for which emulator to use, and in many cases that points to older versions of DOSBox which do not support the filters. I think the majority of these are arbitrary, and just represent whichever version was current at the time each game was added, but changing it always has the potential to break things.

So to fix the problem, first find the game's title in eXoDOS/eXo/util/dosbox.txt and change its emulator to, eg, dosbox-staging-081-2 then add [render] glshader=crt-auto-arcade-sharp to its dosbox.conf file.

OK, been meaning to post about this for awhile. Drakkhen haunts me. First played it as a rental when I was maybe 12, and I can't forget how pervasive the general sense of "wrongness" is throughout the game.

Language issues (the game was translated from French to Japanese to English) make the already cryptic plot seem borderline nonsensical. Normally, this wouldn't be too remarkable for a game of that era, but the story's opacity causes the Drakkhen's many surreal, unsettling eccentricities to land that much harder. There are a lot of things I could talk about, but I want to focus on the aspect that haunts me the most.

I'm referring, of course, to the constellations.

Imagine walking at night (the game has a beautiful day/night cycle with wonderfully atmospheric music to boot) when suddenly the stars themselves begin to shake and writhe while panic-inducing scare chords play. The dialog box pops up at the bottom of the screen and just as quickly vanishes. You hear an inexplicable popping noise. And then a big, terrifying monster swoops down out of the sky and fires lasers at your party. A weird droning effects plays as it flies around attacking you. All of its hits either miss entirely or one-shot kill you. There is no rime or reason.

This kind of thing would scare the bejesus out of anyone the first time it happens, but it's stayed with me for 30 years for a bunch of reasons.

1, look at them! They're demonic looking. Far more unsettling than anything else I've seen on the SNES (though admittedly Drakkhen was originally an Amiga game).

2, there's no motivation, no context. The game never explains the damn things. They're just another part of this hostile alien world that wants to kill you at every turn.

3, they are alien-looking yet they resemble familiar things--bats, crows, snakes--just enough to be uncanny.

4, there's something sadistic about the way they look. The bat-thing with BLOODY BLADES for wings. The snake with the deep-set eyes. The crow that looks like it's wearing a phantom of the opera mask.

5, nobody ever mentions these things in the game world. There is an exceedingly brief allusion to them in the short story that came packaged with the Amiga manual, but it reveals nothing. What the hell are they? What's their relationship to the Drakkhen and the residents of this island? Why are they attacking you? The monsters are living constellations. There's gotta be lore there, right? Nope. And I've scoured the internet looking for insights and found almost nothing.

This last point gets at the whole problem of the game itself. Everywhere you go, you get the sense that there is a logic and order to the world of Drakkhen. Characters and found texts allude to individuals and events. Peasants give you cryptic hints. There's much political intrigue among the Drakkhen princes and princesses. There's gotta be context for the constellation monsters and the hellhounds that pop up when you bump into a gravestone and the giant shadow humanoid that crawls out of a hole in the ground in the icy regions and the dancing female silhouette that moans "I love you" in different pitches as it attacks. But YOU the player DO NOT HAVE ACCESS to this context. The information is withheld.

This violates the unspoken contract between developer and gamer. The world of the video game is supposed to exist for the player to explore, understand, and master...but in this case it doesn't. Drakkhen doesn't care about your feelings. Even if you manage to beat the game, the feeling remains that this world is NOT FOR YOU.

What do other people think? What was your experience of Drakkhen and its horrors? Did you have any theories about where this crazy stuff comes from?

I love both titles. They both offer a different experience and atmosphere.

I still play these games from time to time.

Has anyone work been done to preserve 1993 Amazon Trail?

The Amazon Trail is known for being significantly more difficult than its predecessors in the franchise, such as The Oregon Trail. It was released in 1993 for MS-DOS, 1994 for Windows 3.x and 1996 for Windows and Macintosh. Amazon Trail II was released as a sequel to this game and Amazon Trail 3rd Edition was a re-release of that sequel with performance enhancements and new additions.

It's a 1998 RPG... Has anyone played this or knows the name?

Some say this is one of the hardest video games. I never played it in 1994 or in the nineties.

I installed the game from my original floppies (contained in the box from the photo). I spent a few days training the game. A lot of deaths and many trial and errors. The hardest aspect would be the jumping in my opinion, not the combat.

I had to train every level until I was confident enough and knew I could beat it. It was important to find and get hidden bonuses in order to boost your stats. With these factors combined it was manageable.

Thanks to the mods for letting me share my Warlords collection and give my own game a little plug!

I spent countless hours playing Warlords 1 with friends on the same PC. There was 1 rule: no watching each other’s turns! It was such funto get back to the screen and discover what your opponent had done, way more fun and surprising than playing against the AI.

Warlords made such an impression on me that in 2018, I set about recreating the magic with my own game: Waronomy. I’m a solo developer, and it’s a turn-based fantasy strategy game very much like W1, but with online multiplayer. There’s also an offline campaign, AI opponents (procedural like W1 not LLMs) and random maps.

You might spot it on my screen in the desk photo ;)

I’ve recently released a free Steam demo, which includes the campaign and online 1v1:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4457140/WARONOMY/

Please do check it out if you’re on Steam!