dos game era

What years range would you call as MS-DOS GAMES ERA? the time range when dos gaming was dominant (on computers of course, not consoles).

And your 5 favourite games in this era.

(for example jon says: imo dos games era was btw 1985-1995. Fav games: doom, prehistorik, ...)

I'd say more like 1989-1996(or 1997 possibly).

Before that there weren't really that big of an IBM compatible market for gaming. Systems like Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64 etc were (as far as I can tell) more common for playing computer games. Remember that it wasn't until Commander Keen was released late in 1990 that Dos games even could properly compete with these much more advanced systems. And even then they had a lot of catching up to do. Granted there were a market for Dos games before that. But it wasn't really where developers put their focus.

If you compare the potential of Psygnosis Amiga title "Shadow of the beast" that was released in 1989. To "Commander Keen" that was released for the Dos computer late in 1990.

Anyway I guess my top 5 picks would be: Syndicate, Doom 2, Alone in the Dark, Descent, UFO: Enemy Unknown.

There aren't many DOS games I enjoy, but out of the ones I do, these are the best IMO: Doom, System Shock, Quake, Blood and Shadow Warrior.

st & amiga were generally better for personal computer games, it's true, the dev scenes were more competent and could get more out of fairly low spec hardware

but I still love ultima underworld I & II, ultima 4 & 5 and UFO yeah
 

ahh the dos times. I remember when I played doom and strife on dos. and I hear every of those 8 bit sounds on my computer, that was the memories. plus the legend of Zelda 1986, I remember when I played that on dos too on my windows xp too bad dos doesn't work on modern computers anymore, I forgot about that super Mario game that I've played on dos, I don't remember it

We could try virtualbox though

1 hour ago, RonLivingston said:

We could try virtualbox though

Or just use DOSBox.

2 hours ago, yakfak said:

st & amiga were generally better for personal computer games, it's true, the dev scenes were more competent and could get more out of fairly low spec hardware

It wasn't so much about the dev scene being able to get the most out of the platforms as it was the platforms being vastly superior compared to the IBM PC at the time, which were mostly focused for and used for businesses. 

So on top of being incredibly expensive, the IBM PC didn't have any actual hardware support for stuff in games unlike the Atari and Amiga which had great hardware support for Sprites and scrolling graphics with their shifter and blitter chips respectively. They also had built in sound support greatly superior to that of the IBM PCs which only had the PC speaker (in particular the Amiga that was the more advanced of the two).

I remember back then Ataris were the "musician's computer" while Macs were the "graphic artist's computer" and Amigas were "videogame player's computer".

2 hours ago, kristus said:

So on top of being incredibly expensive, the IBM PC didn't have any actual hardware support for stuff in games unlike the Atari and Amiga which had great hardware support for Sprites and scrolling graphics with their shifter and blitter chips respectively.

Ironically, these dedicated chips that helped them punch above their processing weight for 2D games were what caused them to miss the train of the 3D revolution started by games like Doom.

1987-1996, the approximate span from the introduction of VGA (although EGA would still be used by most well into the early 90s) up until when it was clear DOS was on its way out after the success of Windows 95.

Basically my childhood until middle school.  So yeah, around 96 is when it started to fade.  I dunno if I'd go too far back into the 80s, though.  The early DOS games felt more novel since the platform was more business-oriented at the start.

EDIT: oh yeah, I'd say my favorite games from then are Quake (I could only play it in DOS for a long time), Doom, Rise of The Triad, Descent, and Wolfenstein 3D.

For some of us, that era never ended. :)

5 hours ago, Gez said:

I remember back then Ataris were the "musician's computer" while Macs were the "graphic artist's computer" and Amigas were "videogame player's computer".

 

Ironically, these dedicated chips that helped them punch above their processing weight for 2D games were what caused them to miss the train of the 3D revolution started by games like Doom.

I think what made the later MS-DOS era so great was the fact that you had these monstrously powerful 60+ MHz computers that weren't particularly good at anything, but it didn't matter because they could just throw cycles at things a SNES needed special hardware to deal with, so you got all sorts of weird and wonderful game engines with bizarre rendering techniques. PC games were way more varied and unpredictable around 1992-96 than equivalent console games.

Absolutely - the early "bleeding edge" years of the PC produced some sincerely interesting oddities tech wise.

My favorite years are 1994-1996 as before and after not that much happened that intrigued me besides the fascination with Fallout(original) and playing through Fallout3.

My Top games for DOS are...

DoomII/I(+editing and reading source code)

Warcraft(still playing it today and trying to beat maps faster than before and with differing approaches)

Quake(QTest left quite the impression on me + LAN Deathmatch was hilariously exciting)

Blood(total gem and its tech demo is nice too)

...

X-Com

DuneII

Maniac Mansion(doesn't fit the timeline but was a fascinating game)

Duke3D(mostly played it via serial connection - coop rocked!)

17 hours ago, Gez said:

Ironically, these dedicated chips that helped them punch above their processing weight for 2D games were what caused them to miss the train of the 3D revolution started by games like Doom.

Well, not exactly. It was a lot more complicated than that. The Atari 520ST and Amiga both were released around '85. These 16 bit systems were significant improvements over earlier 8 bit systems. Long story short though is that both Atari and Commodore ran into issues when they went to release upgraded versions of their systems. Two reasons for this. Their best sellers were the budget systems (Atari spearheaded with a budget system in the Atari 520ST but Commodore actually started out with the very advanced Amiga 1000 which failed to gather a market so they released a budget variant with the Amiga 500). So their users were generally not looking to spend money they didn't have to (or couldn't). But because of this and since they were backwards compatible developers tended to design games for the largest available market, very few games ended up taking advantage of the improved abilities of the improved hardware. So very few people bothered upgrading to a new system. Which in turn were resulting in poor sales for Atari and Commodore and less money for R&D and a bunch of commercially failed systems. This actually impacted the Amiga games in the beginning as well, since developers would make their games for at the time more popular Atari ST and then port them to Amiga, not taking advantage of the extra horsepower the Amiga offered.

But there's a whole mess of reasons and business mistakes (like the Atari ST discovery pack) and failed products in those years between 1985-1996 where things just went downhill for the Atari and Commodore corporations. They had great tech, but failed to capitalize on it. 

By the time games like Doom started coming out, Atari was floundering trying to get the Atari Jaguar to succeed. Their pretty impressive but failed last computer being the Atari Falcon that was only in circulation for one year.

Commodore by this time wasn't doing much better going bankrupt in 1994. 

I remember some games on the PC earlier than 1986, the early Ultima games for sure, Starfleet (not sure it was that early), and I think even an early wireframe-only Flight Simulator was released before 1986. I think A Bard's Tale and Wizardry came out that early, too. What about King's Quest?

I guess this counts as being on topic, but I started playing Ultima 5 a few days ago. As with Ultima 4, it's extremely impressive for its time, and I love the darker and more philosophical story. I'm hoping the dungeons will be better this time around, as they were the only thing about Ultima 4 I disliked. 

Do you know of any system around(s) 1993-1994 that could be able to run doom better/faster than x86 PC (if optimized properly)? My guess would be that the pc doom was first developed on Next was better? (was it?) what else? I want to know if x86 PC was the best commonly available system for doom, or was there anything better?

There was the Macintosh PowerPC too. 

Can't really name a period since I wasn't even a thing until the late '90s, so I didn' t catch a lot of stuff, but my favorite games from the DOS era would be Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Shadow Warrior, Blood, the first Warcraft games, Diablo, and Death Rally.

11 hours ago, roboticmehdi2 said:

Do you know of any system around(s) 1993-1994 that could be able to run doom better/faster than x86 PC (if optimized properly)? My guess would be that the pc doom was first developed on Next was better? (was it?) what else? I want to know if x86 PC was the best commonly available system for doom, or was there anything better?

x86 was most likely the strongest due to DOS & the software running being able to harvest all resources. Was there a port for Alpha around back then?

There were x86 based NeXT systems available albeit I don't know if the id team used these. According to Carmack the Doom source code contained "fpfunc.S"(contents where not included in ReadMe.asm) which also contained M68K code for fixed point and texture mapping functionality.

NeXT was used because it was a powerful development system but I doubt that the end result ran better than on a x86 machine under DOS.

Anybody running Doom on NeXT?

Most notable to me:

Commander Keen (1990-1991)
Wolfenstein 3D (1992)
DOOM (1993)
Duke Nukem 3D (1996)
Quake (1996)

Some other DOS games I like include Jazz Jackrabbit, Heretic, Hexen, Descent, The Terminator: Future Shock, SkyNET, and many of 3D Realms' early titles (Duke Nukem, Bio Menace, etc.)

I have played very few pre-1990 DOS games.  I did play the IBM release of Contra (aka Gryzor) which I think was released in 1988, and it was so terrible and primitive compared to the NES version.

For me, the DOS era ended right around when Jazz Jackrabbit 2 came out in 1999. I remember playing less DOS and shifting more towards Windows right around then. I was born in 1991, and we didn't even get a computer 1997. Jazz Jackrabbit 1, Chip's Challenge, BreakThru, and NESticle are the first things I remember playing regularly. Doom was a little later. We only had a 33MHz at the time and it ran like shit. Upgraded to 233MHz a couple years later.

1 hour ago, NerdyButLazy said:

For me, the DOS era ended right around when Jazz Jackrabbit 2 came out in 1999. I remember playing less DOS and shifting more towards Windows right around then. I was born in 1991, and we didn't even get a computer 1997. Jazz Jackrabbit 1, Chip's Challenge, BreakThru, and NESticle are the first things I remember playing regularly. Doom was a little later. We only had a 33MHz at the time and it ran like shit. Upgraded to 233MHz a couple years later.

You bought a 33 MHz computer in 1997? I think that was the year I upgrade from a 33 MHz 486DX to a 500 MHZ Pentium 3, when they were brand new.

My first pc was bought in 2001 or 2002, 300mhz pentium 3 with 192mb ram(128+64), used to play counter-strike 1.5 with bots (my first game). Then I gave up spending time on pc almost completely in 2005-2007 (had to study hard for university exam). This one never saw the face of internet.

In 2007 I got a core 2 duo 2ghz with 2gb ram, which served me for 10-11 years, ran hl2 and doom3 very good, ran crysis smooth on low settings.

This year (2018 february) I got i3 6th gen with 4gb ram. It is enough for me since I dont play heavy modern games, though it runs bf4 and gta5 on low settings.

13 hours ago, Empyre said:

You bought a 33 MHz computer in 1997? I think that was the year I upgrade from a 33 MHz 486DX to a 500 MHZ Pentium 3, when they were brand new.

LOL. Yeah, we were pretty behind the times. It was given to us. My parents are pretty blue collar and knew very little about computers at the time. I was 5-years-old.