Neut Tower for DOS

Today’s game was made by SpindleyQ starting in 2018 releasing a shareware episode in early 2020. It is an EGA puzzle game that would have fit right into the shareware gaming scene in the late 80’s and early 90’s. The author took on an unique challenge, doing all the development on a 286 machine without using any tools created after 1992.

They used Borldand Turbo C which was a very popular language at the time, and used that to make almost all the tools they used for producing the game. In a way this makes it feel much more like a game from the era, everything you see could have been genuinely made at the time.

The graphics are in EGA, and uses the Borland Graphical Interface (BGI) as an engine for drawing to the screen. Whilst not super fast, the BGI is good enough to make this game run smoothly and animate well. The graphics style is well put together, colourful and animated smoothly.

There is some basic sound support for the Adlib card and the PC speaker, I used the Adlib support and I thought the sound is perfectly reasonable. There isn’t any music and there are some simple sound effects for most events in the game.

The controls are fairly simple, basic movement controls, a key to activate switches, a key to activate your companion, and a key to switch which character you are controlling.

The games starts with Jaye sitting at her desk when an earthquake hits. The building becomes quite damaged and she gets trapped in her office. She then activates Neut, an AI program that she has been working on. Jaye is able to move through the real world and interact with switches and turn on terminals whilst Neut can only travel through the network cabling in the walls and use powered on terminals as teleporters to access and hack security devices. Your goal is simply to escape the damaged building.

Along the way there are snippets of story mixed in with the puzzles, and both are generally done exceptionally well. There are companions to find and help, and terminals to interact. Although there is some mild coarse language, it’s not over the top, and isn’t really all that bad. Keep an eye out for clues, one puzzle I did had clues in the boss screen, not somewhere you’d usually look!

Neut Tower is a compelling and interesting puzzle game. The available shareware episode is a bit short at only 6 levels, but they are very well designed and fun to play. On the authors website it says this is still in development, so there may be more content yet to come and the possibility of some registered episodes. You can download it and support the author on their website.

Bloxinies and Bloxinies II for DOS

One afternoon I had a bit of spare time, whilst looking around the doshaven website for something to play I ran into two simple puzzle games. Bloxinies and it’s sequel Bloxinies II. These were both made by Sebastiaan Jansen (also known as Thandor) in 2013 and 2016 respectively.

The first game is much like Paganitzu in many ways. Your character, Bloxinies has gone through a gate into a puzzle realm. It has to collect all the diamonds in each level before it can move onto the next, eventually to be able to return home. The levels contain hazards similar to those found in Paganitzu.

Technically the game uses CGA graphics and some basic PC speaker sound. The graphics are fairly well drawn for CGA, although there is basically no animation. Whilst it’s basic, the simplicity works with a puzzle game like this.

I found the levels a bit simpler than those in Paganitzu, but still quite challenging. The only thing that was annoying is running out of lives and being sent back to the start of the game. To make progress it’s important to conserve your lives as best you can, so when you return to a point of difficulty you have the best chance of success.

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The second game is a much improved version of the first. Some new features have been added such as a few new enemies, gates and levers, the ability to use bombs, and extra lives. Notably there is multiplayer with a special set of levels. Each person has their own controls on the same keyboard.

There have been some technical improvements as well, mostly in the graphics which now supports VGA. Appropriately there is a significant improvement in the art, there’s more variety in the blocks that make up the walls in addition to the new features, making it more pleasing to look at. The sound system appears to have remained the same, retaining PC speaker sound.

The levels are more complex due to the new features, but at the same time have a shallower learning curve in the sequence. I feel like this is because the designer had more features to explore before increasing the difficulty. This gave me a bit more time playing before I hit any major road blocks, which were more punishing because of the lives system being carried over from the last game. Levels from the first game are included if you wish to play them with the improved graphics.

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The only real complaint I have for both games is the lives system, which I feel doesn’t really belong in a puzzle game. Otherwise I quite enjoyed playing both of them. I didn’t get a chance to dive deeper into the multiplayer aspect of the second game, what with lacking a second player, but it does certainly look interesting. If you’re looking for a download you can find it here on the authors website. He’s included the source code for each game and a means for editing levels if you so desire. I was pleased to see it’s implemented in pascal, mostly because I use it myself for my own DOS projects.

Silly Knight for DOS

Today I’m looking at a small home brew game named Silly Knight made by Petr “AfBu” Kratina in 2017. It was made for a DOS game creation competition hosted at high-voltage.cz. It uses a special CGA text mode for drawing at 160×100 resolution with 16 colours by using code developed by Jason M. Knight originally for Paku Paku. The story and game are fairly simple: you’re a silly knight trying to make your way to the throne to become king, killing anything that gets in your way.

Whilst the graphics are blocky due to the low resolution they are quite well drawn and animated. The animations in particular are quite impressive as they move quite fluidly despite the large pixels. Sound support is PC speaker with some bleeps and bloops for player actions like jumping and picking up power ups. I’d say it would probably work on 286 class machines quite well, and perhaps be playable on 8Mhz 808x systems, but wouldn’t perform well on a 4.77Mhz machine.

The game controls are fairly simple, left and right for basic movement, space for attack and up to jump. The knight is fairly easy to control and goes where you expect him to. I’ve heard some people are critical of using up for jump, but I didn’t have any problem with it on this particular game.

Now what do those boots do?

The level design is good in much the same way the graphics are. It is limited by the technicalities of the game engine, but designed very well given those limitations. Basically there are a number of screens which you travel between by using doors. Each screen has some obstacles to overcome, such as bad guys or pitfalls. Generally the bad guys can be overcome with patience and your sword, but in sections that are more difficult you’ll probably die multiple times. Death just sends you back to the last check point with no other penalty, the check points are fairly common so you usually don’t have to travel far to try again.

One issue I did have was working out what the boots power-up gave me. It enables double jumping, which is necessary to escape where you pick them up. I looked up someones play-through on youtube to find out how to escape that area. I did feel pretty silly for not working it out on my own, but some kind of documentation or notification of what it was in game would have helped.

Other than me being a bit silly with the power-up, the only real criticism I have is the game is a bit short, I easily completed it in around half an hour. Granted it would need more features such as more bad guys if it were to be larger, and being short isn’t really necessarily a bad thing. It’s just I liked it enough I wanted to play more. This is totally worth a download, whilst I couldn’t find an official website for it, you can find it at the doshaven home brew website.

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QB Debugger Heroes for DOS

I wasn’t sure whether I should include today’s game as a home brew as it’s creator, Gemini (Kris Asick), has produced commercial games. From the file date it was made sometime in November 2017. He made it using QBasic during a live stream, which is certainly interesting, unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a recording to watch now.

QB Debugger Heroes is a fairly simple Robotron 2084 clone using text mode for graphics and lacking any sound effects. This is relatively common for games implemented using gwbasic or Qbasic languages as it makes development much faster, and whilst there are graphics commands they don’t generally perform well so aren’t suited for action games. Although it is technically possible. Whilst it’s just textmode style graphics, they are nice to look at and includes some basic animation that looks quite nice.

The game controls requires the numpad on your keyboard, so you won’t be playing on a laptop. It works kinda like the twin stick design of the arcade game, with two clusters of keys, one for movement and the other for directing your fire. However unlike a real joystick each keypress changes your movement and gun fire, but you continue moving and firing in that direction until you press a key to change it. This is partly because of limitations within Qbasic when reading input from the keyboard.

For best results I suggest using a modern machine with Dosbox to run it, as you’ll be able to adjust the speed as needed. 30,000 cycles was suggested and is about right for a faster more challenging play experience. If you’re playing on real hardware you’ll need a Pentium era machine to get a decent challenge. Older 286 and 386 machines will work, but it runs slower and will be significantly easier.

The game play has the main elements of Robotron, but is simplified and has some elements removed. Like the arcade game, enemies spawn in continuously (in short bursts) and you finish a wave when your destroy a set number of them. However it appears there are fewer enemy types and there aren’t any humans to rescue. This was to be expected as it was developed in a relatively small time frame, and additions such as those would have degraded the game speed. Difficulty ramps up with each wave mostly just by number of enemies present.

Obviously QB Debugger Heroes isn’t anything special as far as Robotron clones go, but it is a good example of what can be done fairly quickly with a language like QBasic. Gemini has managed to create a reasonably faithful Robotron clone that is polished in 6 hours, which in my book is pretty darn impressive. You can find a download for it on his website.

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Shaw’s Nightmare 2 for DOS

Today I’m taking at look at a sequel to the homebrew game Shaw’s nightmare, simply called Shaw’s Nightmare II it was released by Michael Muniko in 2016. There is much in common between the two games, such as being made using the Build engine and being heavily inspired by Doom, Doom 2 specifically in the case of the sequel.

Firstly there are a few things I didn’t notice when playing the first game that apply equally to both. They support VESA graphics with resolutions higher than the standard 320×200 VGA, today I’ve used 640×400, although you can go as high as 1024×768. The sprites look a little better with higher resolutions because the scaling doesn’t cut out as much detail. Also items in the game are rendered using a voxel engine that is part of the build engine.

Running at a higher resolution seemed to required more processing power, it worked reasonably well under dosbox with 60-100k cycles. Later I found turning the cycles up to maximum helped with another issue.

Artistically nothing much has changed in the sequel, although there are some new enemies and a new weapon which fit in well with the pre-existing art style. The main improvement comes from the level design, which has better enemy placement and level layout, creating less issues with sprites clipping and blocking your view. There are a couple of levels which are clearly inspired by some found in Doom II.

The basic sound effects are much the same as the first game, however there seems to be some improved music. It’s no symphony, and the quality varies by song, but it’s generally better than the first game.

The controls still suffer from input lag, and a little bit of sluggishness in the movement of the player. I tried using the mouse in combination with the keyboard, but found difficulty with mouse sensitivity. The demo in the game suggests it’s possible to get something more functional, perhaps requiring more processing power to reduce input lag. I tried setting dosbox to maximum cycles and it helped, but didn’t eliminate the problem.

Shaws Nightmare 2 is an incremental but significant improvement over the first. The control lag is still an issue, but it’s more playable. After getting used to the control issues I did start to have some fun. If you want to give it a try you can find it on the authors website here.

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Dungeons of Noudar 3D for DOS

Today I’m looking at another homebrew game, Dungeons of Noudar 3d made by Daniel Montiero. It’s a simple dungeon crawler game with a similar visual design to something like Eye of the Beholder. After playing with it a while I think it’s in need of some polish, but is really quite impressive from a technical standpoint.

Hardware support is VGA only for the graphics. The main 3d landscape is rendered in a large window and it features fairly detailed geometry. Compared to the basic 3d dungeons that many RPGs had, it offers quite a bit more visual detail. Whilst it doesn’t render fast enough to be comparable to any FPS games, it works quite well for this style of game, which typically doesn’t update the screen as often. The sprite artwork is nice at a distance, but when enemies or items are up close it can be very blocky.

Hardware support for basic sound is included for PC speaker, Adlib and the OPL2LPT. I tried both the PC speaker and Adlib whilst playing using Dosbox. I found that the sounds varied in pitch and length a little, perhaps because of the emulation, it usually coincided with a delayed screen update. The sound effects are fairly basic, and although they sound fine you don’t miss anything by having them turned off. Unfortunately you can only select the sound support with a command line parameter.

The game play consists of some basic puzzles and some bad guys to fight, both within relatively small levels. Puzzles basically involve finding ropes to cut that open doors. Generally this just requires you to explore the level. Enemies roam the levels, the first ones you encounter don’t seem to be very active, but after a few levels they will chase and attack you. Later enemies require you to use specific weapons in order to damage them. If you encounter them without the weapon required you’re generally boned. Luckily you will find the right weapons if you explore the levels thoroughly.

There are some issues which make it more difficult to enjoy. I got stuck on the 3rd level, the prison, and even though I had cut all the ropes I couldn’t find where I had to go next. In a few other instances I reached the level end without having the chance to fully explore the level and find all the items. I think some kind of visual indication on the exit door/location would help greatly, both so you know when you’ve found it and so you don’t accidentally finish a level before you’re done exploring.

I think it could also use the capability to save and load a game in progress, or continue from a check point after death. Not having these features really limited how far I could progress as I’d have to start from scratch each time I started to play. I’d have liked to get further into it, as it was getting more interesting at the point I got up to.

Issues aside Dungeons of Noudar 3d whilst a bit slow to start is an enjoyable experience. The 3d renderer is fairly impressive in it’s capability, even if it’s not fast and the basic game mechanics do work and play quite well. It’s not a deep experience by any means, but it you enjoy dungeon crawlers this might be worth a download. You can get it from his website here.

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Numjump for DOS

Today’s game is another homebrew made by Daniel Remar in 2017. It’s quite interesting as I’d describe it as a turn-based puzzle platform game, an odd combination indeed. He wrote it using QBasic and has included the source code along with some binaries compiled for 16bit MS-DOS as well as 64bit windows (using QB64 as the compiler).

In technical terms the game is fairly basic, it’s essentially using a 40×25 text mode with 16 colours and the PC speaker for sound. Whilst simple, it’s very effective, and the game is quite nice to look at for a text mode game. Sound is quite sparse, with few effects at all, but they are appropriate and don’t become annoying the way some games can become. Looking at the code, this could be ported to anything with a decent Basic interpreter and a 40 column display mode.

What makes the game odd and interesting is the mechanics of it. Your character only really has two goals, collect gold and reach the exit. In order to do this you need to jump around a small level avoiding obstacles that trap or kill you. The player moves one step at a time. The jump mechanic is a bit hard to describe. You have a maximum jump power, which is the number of steps you can travel vertically. For each step vertically you take you can take a step horizontally left or right. Once out of steps you must fall to the ground. You can fall at any time in the process by pressing the down arrow.

It’s a bit tricky at first, but once you get the hang of moving around it works quite well.

The level design works well with these mechanics to make for a challenging but not punishing experience. If you do happen to fall foul of a trap, the level is simply reset without any further penalty. The traps are fairly basic, there are spikes, Laser barriers that can be toggled, and some moving obstacles where timing is critical. Some areas can be inaccessible until you’ve increased your jump power, and others require a bit of thought to find your way in, but in general the puzzles are solvable in a reasonably short period without being easy.

Numjump is fairly short, you can finish it within an hour, but the length feels just about right. You get just enough of each type of hazard and puzzle to feel satisfied, but not so much as to become repetitive. If you’ve finished the game, you can go looking for all the secret dots, or make an attempt at collecting all the gold for the reward of a secret level, one for each achievement. It’s fun and well designed, so I’d say it’s definitely worth a go. I downloaded it from the Dos Haven site here, the official site there is linked to the authors twitter account.

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MagiDuck for DOS

I was browsing the web recently when I stumbled across DOS Haven, A site devoted to home brew games made for MS-DOS machines. This is a welcome and quite unusual find as there isn’t much of a home brew scene for these machines as opposed to other platforms like the C64 or MSX which have a larger and thriving home brew community.

Though not featured on DOS Haven I found today’s game from a news item there. MagiDuck is an action platform game made for the IBM PC. It was made by Toni Svenstrîm with the latest beta release in 2016. It has especially low system requirements, only needing an 8088 @ 4.77 Mhz, CGA and 256K of RAM which covers pretty much almost any MS-DOS machine except those with MDA displays or small amounts of memory. The low system requirements come about partly because of the graphics mode used, which is a hacked text mode that allows for 80×50 with 16 colours similar but not the same as that used in Paku Paku.

Although the graphics are quite blocky due to the low resolution, the artwork is of quite high quality. Magiduck, the enemies and the levels are all colourful and cute. On the technical side the game animates quite smoothly on even minimal hardware and even manages vertical scrolling. Because early PCs didn’t have sound cards only PC speaker is supported, and the sound is fairly good for that device.

The game controls and responds quite well in a way that most PC platform games do. Although the key layout is a little different, z and x are used for jump and fire, it works just as well as the usual control and alt key layout. Magi jumps and moves as you’d expect, jumping around is fairly straight forward, which is good because the levels are quite vertical. Each level is basically a tower, you start at the bottom and work your way up to a star which represents the end.

I quite like the level design, like the sprites they are colourful and fun. There is some challenge, but not so hard as to be painfully difficult. Whilst they are quite narrow (a limitation of the engine is seems) there are a number of paths of varying difficulty through each level. You can spend time collecting treasure and keys from all the paths for extra points, or speed run the game for a time bonus.

Magiduck is technically very impressive and is very well designed and built. It does have some minor flaws, but generally they don’t impact getting enjoyment out of it. The hardware it can run on is very impressive, the original IBM PC was not considered capable of scrolling colourful graphics until later machines got much more powerful and the first EGA/VGA cards became common place. This game can do it on an original PC @ 4.77 Mhz and a CGA card. If you own an old machine this is certainly something you should give a try, you can find it on IndieDB here.

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Shaw’s Nightmare for DOS

Today’s game is some-what unusual, it is a DOS game that was released relatively recently, at the end of 2013. It was mostly developed by one guy, Michael Muniko, which is quite impressive really given the scale of the game. It is an obviously Doom inspired FPS built using the Build engine. Unlike many others, who would produce a total conversion mod for something like Duke Nukem 3d, the developer has instead built their own DOS executable from source. This was certainly an ambitious project right from the get go.

I played today using Dosbox, and there are a few things you’ll need if you want to play. Firstly, whilst the game only requires 8Mb of RAM, it doesn’t recognise it correctly under Dosbox. To get around this you need to set the amount of memory to 24Mb or higher, I have mine set to 32Mb. I have no idea if this is true of an actual machine as I haven’t tried it on one yet. You also need to set a reasonably high cycle count, I tested the game at 60,000 cycles.

Lets start with the graphics. The game uses VGA graphics, which is no surprise as that is what most build engine games support. The art style of this game is what confuses me the most. It looks like it was drawn in 5 minutes per sprite with MS Paint to put it bluntly, but it kinda has a weird childish charm as well. I could imagine having drawn something like it when playing with paint as a kid. I’m not really sure what to make of it, either he was a bit lazy, or deliberately chose this style for artistic reasons which would be clever. After all the game is set with-in Shaw’s dream world.

Unfortunately some of the sprites will cause problems. Their size will sometimes cause them to clip into walls, which fortunately doesn’t happen often. The biggest problem is with the corpses being just as large, blocking your view, and looking not much different to the live creatures. Doom sometimes suffered a little from this when you encountered any number of certain enemies, but you could usually see over them to some degree, and they were obviously dead.

The sound design, like the graphics, is either lazy or very clever. The music sounds like random mashings on a keyboard, as if he threw a random number generator at the music. I can’t say it’s bad, it doesn’t hurt your ears, it’s just somewhat surreal. Sound effects for Shaw himself are much better, albeit a bit quiet, they sound like they are the straight recorded voice of an actor/friend. The creatures however sound somewhat deranged, for some reason he used cats yowling for many of the effects and other strange noises. Weapon noises are fairly run of the mill, but are too quiet to make much impact.

Game play wise, Shaw’s Nightmare is very much like Doom. The weapons, whilst sounding and looking a bit different are largely the same as the weapons in Doom. The creatures encountered in the first episode are much like the basic enemies found in shareware Doom. Although they are much more brain dead than even the zombies.

The level design is different, however I’m not sure how to describe it. They are elaborate in a way, but also simple in their design, not a bad thing by any stretch. There is some variety, some levels are more open and set outside, whilst others are closed and set in corridors and maze-like structures. Because the same simple textures are used repeatedly you may get lost, but I didn’t experience as much of this as I thought I would.

The controls are probably the part of the game which annoyed me the most. I used the keyboard as that’s what I would normally use for a vintage FPS such as Doom or Duke Nukem 3d.  I found it to be kind of like walking in treacle in the sense that it takes a while before you accelerate to normal speed, in turning as well as walking. Then when you release the key it takes much longer than you’d expect stop. This makes it really hard to aim and move with much precision. I would have had much more fun if this was set up more like Doom or other FPS games.

I don’t really know how to summarise Shaw’s Nightmare. It’s certainly feels surreal and strange, much like the dream world it is set in. But on the other hand the graphics and sound clearly could be much better. Neither are obstacles to it being fun, the controls are pretty much the main reason I found it frustrating sometimes. Should you play this? If you’re curious about an obscure FPS made by an individual, then yes. If you want to play something polished like Doom, then you should probably play that instead.

Update: The author has provided a link in the comments to a new version that controls better. It’s still not perfect but makes the game much more fun and easier to control.

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Paku Paku for DOS

Having just got back from my trip away, I haven’t had much time this past weekend. I did backup some 5.25 inch floppies I brought back with me, but I was unable to get what I had planned for this week working. Step in Paku Paku which is actually a recently made DOS Pacman clone for the IBM PC. It uses the hacked CGA text mode to get 16 colours on screen at the same time in the same way that Round 42 does. Jason M Knight made it in 2011 as part of something known as the Retrochallenge winter warm-up. You can find his website here.

High Scores

The graphics are very impressive and work on an impressive array of hardware, everything including CGA, EGA, VGA and Tandy/PC jr. Whilst the pixels are larger, the graphics are colourful, nicely animated and move as you’d expect them to. The graphics were programmed with a mix of Turbo Pascal 7 and assembler and Jason has included the source so you can write games/software that has the same graphics capability.

Getting fast now!

There are many different sound devices supported, including the PC speaker, Creative Music System (CMS), Adlib, and a few others. With so many devices to choose from you are sure to have something that will work quite well. I tried both the Adlib and PC speaker for sound and was astonished at how close to the arcade they both sound. The documentation says the CMS probably sounds the best, but I didn’t test this.

The controls are as you would expect, simple and easy to use. Turning corners is as you would expect, and the game responds correctly even in tight and fast sections of the maze. The ghost AI actively chases you and runs away at appropriate times, but with quick reflexes they can be outrun and outsmarted. The difficulty curve is not too harsh, and even I managed to get quite a respectable score.

Game Over

Paku Paku is an impressive game, it fits 16 colour graphics and sound into about 66k of memory, about half being code. It runs incredibly well on old hardware such as the old IBM 5150, XT machines and clones. It’s not just impressive because of its technical features, it’s a well crafted clone of pacman. It’s obvious that great care has gone into the design of the graphics and sound. I’d recommend anyone with a Dos machine (or DosBox) and some time download it and give it a go.