🚀 go-pugleaf

Spalls Hurgenson  <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>As I said, back in the day I imaged most of my disks. I did this
>partly because I was worried about the medium's longevity, but mostly
>so I could save space; all those floppy games fit on a single CD-ROM
>(it was around the time that same necessity forced me to lose all
>those awesome game boxes too).

I've mostly relied on the fact that I never uninstall games unless I need
to make room for something else, and it's been a very long time since I've
needed to do that.  So my current PC has every MS-DOS I ever installed
on it and on all of it's previous incarnations going back to 1999.
There was was no need to uninstall any MS-DOS games because they're
so small.  (I mean why uninstall Might & Magic I?  It's only 600k or so.)

> While I remember testing them, I was
>never completely without worry that the on-disk copy-protection
>wouldn't  work from disk images (Lemmings 1 was particularly
>sensitive). In most cases, rather than deal with this possibility, I
>often just re-purchase the game from GOG.

For games like Lemmings I just downloaded a cracked copy from some
abandonware site.  I feel I'm justifiend in doing that if I have the
game disk sitting on my shelf.  (As it turns out the "cracked" copy I
downloaded turns out to be exactly the same as what's on my 3.5" floppy
original except with the addition of one extra file "RUSSELL.DAT" that
effectively disables the copy protection.)

>Such was the case with
>Dragon Wars; I didn't even bother with my ancient disk images, I just
>downloaded the game and transferred the files to my giant DOSBox
>installation.

Well, Dragon Wars is easy to install off the disks, just copy all the
files (all four of them) into the same directory.  There was another
game I installed by just running the INSTALL.BAT script from Windows.
Since it was just batch file it ran fine under 64-bit Windows.

>Best thing about Dragon Wars, btw? Automap. 

Yah, that's the one big problem with going back the older dungeon crawlers
like Might and Magic I, no automap.  If I were replaying it today, I'd
probably just cheat and use maps from the Internet.  (Even back in the
day after I completely mapped out a level in the Bard's Tale games I'd
use a program I wrote to print out a map of the level generated from
game's data files.)

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/ 
 db  //