🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 3 Jul 2017 17:44:10 +0000 (UTC), rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
(Ross Ridge) wrote:

>Spalls Hurgenson  <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>Many of the games, admittedly, have not aged well. Almost of the games
>>that used the PC speaker for their sound effects are practically
>>unplayable as far as I am concerned, regardless of how entertaining
>>the rest of the game might be (I'm looking in your direction in
>>particular, 'Vette!).
>
>For some of the older games you've listed the PC port is pretty bad,
>and you'd be better playing on different emulated system.  For example
>the best version of Ultima V is the Commodore 128 version.  The graphics
>are slightly better than the PC version and you get SID sound instead
>of PC speaker beeps.  The Bard's Tale games and Dragon Age probably play
>better on the Amiga for similar reasons. 

In fairness, the Ultima 5 installation has been patched with proper
MIDI support and now -with full Roland output - is the best available
version. ;-P

Bards Tale 3 is quite acceptable, thanks to Adlib support. Bards Tale
1 & 2 were playable, but the square-wave music from the PC
beeper-speaker was a significant downside. I originally played Dragon
Wars on my Apple II and the PC version is actually a step up from
that. 

The one game I just /couldn't/ play was Might & Magic 1. I tried to
play it, I really did, but its speaker effects made my ears bleed and
its CGA graphics made my eyes tear. It was quickly uninstalled (well,
DELTREE'd). 

>>but I love that I have such a huge selection available at my
>>fingertips, all the more so since the whole thing weighs in at a
>>surprisingly light 10GB (less than the 1/3 the space required by one
>>modern game!).

>That's bigger than I would've guessed from the list you gave.
>My collection of 50+ MS-DOS games is only about 5GB and that includes
>a fair bit of duplicate installs.

It's not just games; there's a whole bunch of Windows 3.11 stuff. Just
the screensavers - AfterDark, OriginFX, Johnny Castaway, Star Wars
Screen Entertainment - probably take 10s of megabytes! ;-) But many of
the games include full images of the original CD-ROMs so I don't have
to worry about swapping CDs (I almost killed my CD drive when I
started imaging everything back in the day ;-). Games like "Terra
Nova: Strike Force Centauri" or "Star Trek TNG: A Final Unity" take up
more than a half-gig each. It adds up.