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

I still play these games from time to time.

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?

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!

Hello everyone. For the past 2.5 years, I’ve been "porting" MS-DOS games—or, more accurately, creating custom builds with my own on-screen control layouts—using Magic DOSBox. I’d like to share some of my work.

1) Might and Magic: World of Xeen - Portrait mode with layered combat controls.

2) Tomb Raider Gold - a version with truly intuitive controls for combat and acrobatic maneuvers.

3) TES: Arena - A classic with a snappy interface and a convenient combat system, set within a rather unbalanced RPG.

4) PowerSlave - I just love this Egyptian aesthetic

5) System Shock - version with a patch that locks the cursor in place, making it easier to interact with the interface and aim/shoot

6) Stonekeep - a colorful dungeon crawler that I personally played for a long time, specifically in a mobile format

🔥 KAMULOS HAS FALLEN! 🔥

One of Albion’s toughest adversaries thought his magic and reputation would be enough to ruin our day. But Driscoll has other ideas. And when the whole party joins the fray, even a demonic boss doesn’t stand a chance.

Showing treasures from my own collection.

https://retronaut.tech/retronauts-assemble-311026/
​

**Remaster DOS Games** (https://github.com/DrEvil-TitaniumHelix/remaster-dos-games) is a documented method with tools and templates for taking a DOS game from the raw executable to a full decode (every byte of code accounted for, the compiler runtime named, each module as pseudocode) and then to a verified rebuild that is checked screen by screen against the original running in DOSBox if you want.

Why do this?

1. Make your favorite DOS games playable on modern platforms

2. The remastered version becomes broadly modifiable: fix bugs, upgrade graphics, QoL changes, etc

3. Preserve DOG gaming masterpieces with little effort

**Gate test:** checks if the DOS game you want to remaster is passable, If not, please modify my code and create a PR to gradually improve the coverage of the toolkit.

**Tools in the repo:** DOS MZ parser, 16-bit disassembler, EXEPACK unpacker, Turbo Pascal overlay splitter, context grepper; compiler profiles for QuickBASIC 3, Turbo Pascal 6 and Microsoft C 6 that say what each runtime looks like in the binary and how to name it once.

BUT THE REAL MAGIC is the adaptable agent graph that works the decode

**Pipeline:** static whole-program disassembly, per-module pseudocode with every routine tagged by its original address, independent verification by a second model, DOSBox as the pixel reference, then translation into an HTML5 engine. Templates for the Foreman agent, decode gate agents, build plan and agent lane assignments are included.

**Proof it works**, both playable in a browser, alpha, bring your own copy (the repos hold none of the games' files; the browser checks your copy by hash and keeps it in local storage):

- Star Command (QuickBASIC): 90 acceptance screens, 90 pass, 64 compared against the original in DOSBox. https://github.com/DrEvil-TitaniumHelix/star-command-remake

- Pool of Radiance (Turbo Pascal with overlays): 105 screens tracked, 69 pixel-identical to the original; overland and endgame not verified yet. https://github.com/DrEvil-TitaniumHelix/pool-of-radiance-remake

Note that you can try these remakes now, you just have to have your own copy of the original.

**Open challenge: Darklands.** Everything known is posted: the overlay directory, 81 overlays, a proven route to a full Ghidra export, Microsoft C 6 code that decompiles well, and where two earlier attempts stalled. Pull requests to the method, the profiles and the tools are the point of publishing this. (I suspect if you tune the agent graphs, the project might succeed)

Disclaimer: all or part of this post may have been written or edited by super intelligence

Im tired of everyone complaining I just want to see people enjoying dos games :(

I'm looking for an old DOS puzzle game called 'Hearts' (or with 'Hearts' in the title). That's pretty much all I can remember. Does anyone know what it might be?

Long ago when I was s kid I found a 3.5 floppy disk with the Chef Boyardee brand on it while playing around at my grandmothers. I thought nothing of it for years and eventually I gave it to my friend as a gift just for display. I thought it would be a cool little item to show off. I saw it the other day still sitting on his shelf and thought maybe I should research it a little bit and see what the contents were like as I have never had a pc to boot it up and try it out. Low and behold there is no information about this thing on the internet, not even a picture. I looked on here and multiple other places and I can't even find a conversation about this thing. I asked my friend for a picture of it and I'll post it tomorrow if this thing is indeed lost media. If it's confirmed I'll try to find a way to make a disk image of it and dump the contents online. If anyone has any information about the game please let me know. I would have posted this in r/lostmedia but my account is too new. If anyone knows someone over there that would be interested in this maybe discovery let me know as well. If I have a piece of lost gaming history here I'd like to let this little artifact be marked as found. Thanks in advance!

edit: Picture added

Marsport is a science fiction computer game that was released for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC home computers in 1985. It was published by Gargoyle Games in the United Kingdom and Dro Soft in Spain. Marsport was intended to be the first part of a trilogy called "The Siege of Earth" but parts two and three (Fornax and Gath) were not forthcoming. Because of this, it is often regarded as being part of an unofficial trilogy alongside Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach (both of which are part of the same official series) due to its having very similar gameplay to these titles. Marsport also has similarities to the later Gargoyle game Heavy on the Magick