sparcie

Year: 2012

  • Turbo for DOS

    Turbo was created by Doug Ross back in 1987 and is a CGA game written for early IBM PCs. It is much like many old school arcade games such Outrun and Pole position. It is a driving game on a perfectly straight road, where you have to dodge traffic going…

  • Snooker and 8 Ball for DOS

    Shareware in the early to mid 90’s was often written by single people as a way of getting their software out there and sold. Stephen Haigh wrote two such bits of software, an 8 Ball simulation (most often played in pubs) and a snooker simulation. As children we got the…

  • Java Data Structure Performance

    Recently I was browsing Stack Overflow looking at questions asked about Java. One theme that kept on recurring is that of the performance of various data structures within the Java API, in particular the Vector and ArrayList classes were frequently compared. So I decided that i would have a go…

  • Alley Cat for DOS

    Alley Cat is another CGA game written for the original IBM PC. It was created by Synapse software apparently started by one employee and finished by Bill Williams. It was originally a game for the 8-bit Atari computers around at the time, released in 1983. Bill Williams then ported it…

  • Bouncing Babies for DOS

    Bouncing Babies is a CGA game written in 1984 for the original IBM PC by Dave Baskin. The game is basically a clone of an old school game and watch game called Fire made in 1980. There is a building on the left hand side of the screen which is…

  • Wood Fruit for DOS

    One of the first shareware games we got from a magazine was wood fruit which is a fruit machine simulator for the IBM PC. It was made by Stephen Wood the year of which is lost to the mists of time as I couldn’t find any information about the game…

  • Freeciv on FreeBSD

    Quite some time ago I worked at a radio telescope for 3 months as part of my work experience for my engineering degree. During that time I had an incredibly old machine as my work station, it was an original Pentium running at 77 Mhz. Because it was so old…

  • Colonization for DOS

    Colonization was released by microprose in 1994 and is a turn based strategy game very much like Civilization. My older brother bought it for my younger brother some years later (in 1997 I think) for Christmas and we used to play it on a Cyrix 166Mhz machine with windows 95…

  • Seek and Destroy for DOS

    Seek and Destroy was released by Safari Software in 1995 and is a 360 degree shooter where you pilot either an Apache helicopter or an Abrams tank. I didn’t see this game until after DOS was no longer used on most computers in 1999 when a university friend of mine…

  • Dwarf Fortress

    Dwarf Fortress is under development by Bay 12 Games, which is made up of the two brothers Zach and Tarn Adams. They started development of the game back in 2002, and are still developing the game today. Despite it’s state of development it is very playable and very fun! There…