Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

CRPGAddict

Morblot

Aberrant Member | Star Trek V Apologist
Patron
Joined
Aug 30, 2014
Messages
2,288
Location
Finland
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
BTW, PoR's interface, as you remember, was already better in the CoAB. It only took addition of "fix" button and remembering that spells you memorized last time.

Indeed, but the game itself is not nearly as captivating as its prequel is (apart from the awesome otyughs in the sewer, of course). I only managed to play it about halfway through before losing interest, but I do intend to eventually give it another shot.
 

Harthwain

Magister
Joined
Dec 13, 2019
Messages
4,689
What I tried to say is that I wonder if people, presumably younger, who've never before had to deal with a clunky keyboard-only interface, low res 16 color graphics and PC speaker sounds have the strength of character to dig through all that to find the gem hidden underneath. I did, but I grew up with the EGA graphics and the beeper sounds of e.g. the early Apogee games, so the shock was considerably lessened.
Good point.

I did play games using joysticks and keyboard-only controls, but having a mouse makes it so much easier to find your way around that I can see people who are used to mouse being a standard bouncing off a lot of games because of this reason alone.

I think you can help people overcome this in two ways: recommending games where keyboard control scheme feels natural enough due to how the game plays (Time Commando comes to mind) and recommending good games, so people get invested in the game enough to overlook its clunky controls.
 
Last edited:

Fowyr

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Mar 29, 2009
Messages
7,671
Indeed, but the game itself is not nearly as captivating as its prequel is (apart from the awesome otyughs in the sewer, of course). I only managed to play it about halfway through before losing interest, but I do intend to eventually give it another shot.
Yep, some parts of CoAB were somewhat iffy.
Have you tried Krynn and the Savage Frontier series? I especially recommend the latter. It's short and very charming. Plus, it tries adding new things to the formula. From multi-part combat map to low-key romance (!) between one of your party and NPC years before Albion and Bioware.
octavius said:
The Amiga version was even better; you could Join scrolls.
Damn, it's very useful!
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
What I tried to say is that I wonder if people, presumably younger, who've never before had to deal with a clunky keyboard-only interface, low res 16 color graphics and PC speaker sounds have the strength of character to dig through all that to find the gem hidden underneath. I did, but I grew up with the EGA graphics and the beeper sounds of e.g. the early Apogee games, so the shock was considerably lessened.
Good point.

I did play games using joysticks and keyboard-only controls, but having a mouse makes it so much easier to find your way around that I can see people who are used to mouse being a standard bouncing off a lot of games because of this reason alone.

I think you can help people overcome this in two ways: recommending games where keyboard control scheme feels natural enough due to how the game plays (Time Commando comes to mind) and recommending good games, so people get invested in the game enough to overlook its clunky controls.

It took me a long time to get into the Gold Box games due to the keyboard only interface. It finally clicked with the Gold Box Companion as an interface enhancer (although full mouse control would of course be preferable).

The biggest hurdle for 80s games isn't visuals, but controls.
 

Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
9,158
What I tried to say is that I wonder if people, presumably younger, who've never before had to deal with a clunky keyboard-only interface, low res 16 color graphics and PC speaker sounds have the strength of character to dig through all that to find the gem hidden underneath. I did, but I grew up with the EGA graphics and the beeper sounds of e.g. the early Apogee games, so the shock was considerably lessened.
Good point.

I did play games using joysticks and keyboard-only controls, but having a mouse makes it so much easier to find your way around that I can see people who are used to mouse being a standard bouncing off a lot of games because of this reason alone.

I think you can help people overcome this in two ways: recommending games where keyboard control scheme feels natural enough due to how the game plays (Time Commando comes to mind) and recommending good games, so people get invested in the game enough to overlook its clunky controls.

It took me a long time to get into the Gold Box games due to the keyboard only interface. It finally clicked with the Gold Box Companion as an interface enhancer (although full mouse control would of course be preferable).

The biggest hurdle for 80s games isn't visuals, but controls.
On pc, on amiga every game had mouse control and icon interfaces way before its time.
 

Morblot

Aberrant Member | Star Trek V Apologist
Patron
Joined
Aug 30, 2014
Messages
2,288
Location
Finland
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
Have you tried Krynn and the Savage Frontier series?

Krynn only very briefly as Dragonlance really isn't to my taste. Savage Frontier I haven't played at all; is it worth even trying if I only have short playing periods irregularly? My life is rather chaotic at the moment, I cannot really focus intensively on anything.
 

Morpheus Kitami

Liturgist
Joined
May 14, 2020
Messages
2,476
What I tried to say is that I wonder if people, presumably younger, who've never before had to deal with a clunky keyboard-only interface, low res 16 color graphics and PC speaker sounds have the strength of character to dig through all that to find the gem hidden underneath. I did, but I grew up with the EGA graphics and the beeper sounds of e.g. the early Apogee games, so the shock was considerably lessened.
Good point.

I did play games using joysticks and keyboard-only controls, but having a mouse makes it so much easier to find your way around that I can see people who are used to mouse being a standard bouncing off a lot of games because of this reason alone.

I think you can help people overcome this in two ways: recommending games where keyboard control scheme feels natural enough due to how the game plays (Time Commando comes to mind) and recommending good games, so people get invested in the game enough to overlook its clunky controls.

It took me a long time to get into the Gold Box games due to the keyboard only interface. It finally clicked with the Gold Box Companion as an interface enhancer (although full mouse control would of course be preferable).

The biggest hurdle for 80s games isn't visuals, but controls.
On pc, on amiga every game had mouse control and icon interfaces way before its time.
Amiga emulation is harder than DOSbox, even if you're not going to the trouble of installing AmigaOS. It just ends up with a different issue. While there are pre-built emulation environments around, they still require a bit of know-how to get working.
 

Grauken

Gourd vibes only
Patron
Joined
Mar 22, 2013
Messages
12,787
Have you tried Krynn and the Savage Frontier series?

Krynn only very briefly as Dragonlance really isn't to my taste. Savage Frontier I haven't played at all; is it worth even trying if I only have short playing periods irregularly? My life is rather chaotic at the moment, I cannot really focus intensively on anything.

Savage Frontier is very much a solve a city after city plot token hunt
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
What I tried to say is that I wonder if people, presumably younger, who've never before had to deal with a clunky keyboard-only interface, low res 16 color graphics and PC speaker sounds have the strength of character to dig through all that to find the gem hidden underneath. I did, but I grew up with the EGA graphics and the beeper sounds of e.g. the early Apogee games, so the shock was considerably lessened.
Good point.

I did play games using joysticks and keyboard-only controls, but having a mouse makes it so much easier to find your way around that I can see people who are used to mouse being a standard bouncing off a lot of games because of this reason alone.

I think you can help people overcome this in two ways: recommending games where keyboard control scheme feels natural enough due to how the game plays (Time Commando comes to mind) and recommending good games, so people get invested in the game enough to overlook its clunky controls.

It took me a long time to get into the Gold Box games due to the keyboard only interface. It finally clicked with the Gold Box Companion as an interface enhancer (although full mouse control would of course be preferable).

The biggest hurdle for 80s games isn't visuals, but controls.
On pc, on amiga every game had mouse control and icon interfaces way before its time.
Amiga emulation is harder than DOSbox, even if you're not going to the trouble of installing AmigaOS. It just ends up with a different issue. While there are pre-built emulation environments around, they still require a bit of know-how to get working.

Anyone wanting to try old games is willing to put some effort in.

And a bit more effort up front is preferable to constant effort throughout the game because of a cumbersome interface.
 

Fowyr

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Mar 29, 2009
Messages
7,671
Have you tried Krynn and the Savage Frontier series?

Krynn only very briefly as Dragonlance really isn't to my taste. Savage Frontier I haven't played at all; is it worth even trying if I only have short playing periods irregularly? My life is rather chaotic at the moment, I cannot really focus intensively on anything.
Try it. I remember finishing GttSF just in two days. You always could a stop after, for example, foiling Society of Kraken's plans in the first city.
 

Morpheus Kitami

Liturgist
Joined
May 14, 2020
Messages
2,476
Anyone wanting to try old games is willing to put some effort in.

And a bit more effort up front is preferable to constant effort throughout the game because of a cumbersome interface.
True, but the subject is about people who don't necessarily want to put in that effort. Having to do minor fiddling if its not something your heart is in might be enough to make you stop. I know it took me a while to get used to Amiga emulation, and I was actually trying.
 

octavius

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 4, 2007
Messages
19,184
Location
Bjørgvin
Have you tried Krynn and the Savage Frontier series? I especially recommend the latter. It's short and very charming. Plus, it tries adding new things to the formula. From multi-part combat map to low-key romance (!) between one of your party and NPC years before Albion and Bioware.

For me the best part was the final battles in Gateway of the SF. Quite unique in the GB games.
 

Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
9,158
Anyone wanting to try old games is willing to put some effort in.

And a bit more effort up front is preferable to constant effort throughout the game because of a cumbersome interface.
True, but the subject is about people who don't necessarily want to put in that effort. Having to do minor fiddling if its not something your heart is in might be enough to make you stop. I know it took me a while to get used to Amiga emulation, and I was actually trying.

There's one executable to install winuAE, you download the amiga bios and put it in the folder thats all. Any tweaking is extremely easy to do . If someone cant do that he cant possibly enjoy those old games, or will play 5 min and stop like for GOG dosbox games.
People are just getting incredibly lazy.
 

Viata

Arcane
Joined
Nov 11, 2014
Messages
9,885
Location
Water Play Catarinense
Anyone wanting to try old games is willing to put some effort in.

And a bit more effort up front is preferable to constant effort throughout the game because of a cumbersome interface.
True, but the subject is about people who don't necessarily want to put in that effort. Having to do minor fiddling if its not something your heart is in might be enough to make you stop. I know it took me a while to get used to Amiga emulation, and I was actually trying.

There's one executable to install winuAE, you download the amiga bios and put it in the folder thats all. Any tweaking is extremely easy to do . If someone cant do that he cant possibly enjoy those old games, or will play 5 min and stop like for GOG dosbox games.
People are just getting incredibly lazy.
Besides, it's almost impossible for one to being unable to find a single tutorial on "how to play this old as fuck computer game on your OS" now.
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
22,205
Location
Ingrija
There's one executable to install winuAE, you download the amiga bios and put it in the folder thats all. Any tweaking is extremely easy to do . If someone cant do that he cant possibly enjoy those old games

Um, no. There is a fuckton of amiga bioses some of which are incompatible with some games, there is a fuckton of obscure settings that can make any game run better or worse (or not at all). And don't get me started with AmigaOS, floppies and shit.

Compare and contrast to dosbox, where you just up everything reasonably high, mount your dos game folder as a hard drive, run a fucking norton commander (!) then launch anything the old way without any fidgeting, one size fits all.

I don't miss making boot disks or autoexec.bat loading menus at all, and Amiga emulation stinks of it.
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
22,205
Location
Ingrija
mount your dos game folder as a hard drive
No need. Just drag and drop the game's .exe or .bat onto the Dosbox .exe directly in Windows.

I'd rather browse the folders pondering what am I going to play today. Just like I did 27 years ago, y kno.

The bottom line though, you don't need to make individual profiles for each and every game in dosbox. "It just works". I guess backward compatibility wasn't Amiga's forte.
 

Morpheus Kitami

Liturgist
Joined
May 14, 2020
Messages
2,476
There's one executable to install winuAE, you download the amiga bios and put it in the folder thats all. Any tweaking is extremely easy to do . If someone cant do that he cant possibly enjoy those old games, or will play 5 min and stop like for GOG dosbox games.
People are just getting incredibly lazy.
Not really, unlike say, the PSX, its not obvious which BIOS you should use. And its worth pointing out that not all BIOS work in WinUAE, I have some that don't. Its not obvious what the settings do when you're just starting out, and that includes the model numbers. And that's what, five pages of settings you don't know anything about? Compared to basically every other system they could emulate, which at absolute worst means getting a single BIOS and typing some commands they don't understand. That's time they're going to count against the game, not stuff they're going to forget about. It might be easy for you, and that's fair, but you probably owned an Amiga back in the day, you have experience with it. Chances are you'd flail around a bit if you were dealing with the system for the first time too.
Yes, tutorials help, but doing a quick search and the first one that actually tells you how to run an Amiga game without installing AmigaOS still tells you to pick your own Amiga model. That's not a problem in most other emulators.
 

Darth Canoli

Arcane
Joined
Jun 8, 2018
Messages
5,687
Location
Perched on a tree
Some fans put ready to use packs out there, like for Dragon Wars, nothing to do but to unzip them.
That's as far as i'm willing to go, i've used emulators before, back when you needed a shitload of plugs-in and fine tune configuration... No more!

Getting the right cycles with DosBox is bad enough.
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
22,205
Location
Ingrija
Not really, unlike say, the PSX, its not obvious which BIOS you should use. And its worth pointing out that not all BIOS work in WinUAE, I have some that don't. Its not obvious what the settings do when you're just starting out, and that includes the model numbers. And that's what, five pages of settings you don't know anything about? Compared to basically every other system they could emulate, which at absolute worst means getting a single BIOS and typing some commands they don't understand.

Precisely.

Imagine being unable to run a DOS game because it needs a 386 emulated processor rather than DX2-66, cannot output EGA graphics with SVGA device, and cannot handle more than 2 megabytes of RAM. Oh, and needs DOS 4.03, no less and, god forbid, no more. That's the secret of understanding WinUAE :/
 

Nutria

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 12, 2017
Messages
2,252
Location
한양
Strap Yourselves In
This is the main reason why DOS/Intel/Microsoft/etc won in the end, isn't it? That IBM put in a huge amount of investment into creating the first real PC that totally dominated everything else, but their lawyers fucked up somehow and Phoenix was able to reverse engineer their BIOS? So there ended up being this whole ecosystem of computers that were designed to actually be compatible with each other.
 

octavius

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 4, 2007
Messages
19,184
Location
Bjørgvin
My "fondest" memory of Amiga emulation was when save disks defaulted to a Temp folder.

I knew a guy who could hack into other people's computers and remote control them, but WinUAE defeated him.
 

Morblot

Aberrant Member | Star Trek V Apologist
Patron
Joined
Aug 30, 2014
Messages
2,288
Location
Finland
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
That IBM put in a huge amount of investment into creating the first real PC that totally dominated everything else

More like they just slapped ready components together and put it on the market, even outsourcing the OS, with known results. They didn't initially do all that much themselves apart from the BIOS. But it was enough to achieve the (eventual) domination.

They tried to pull in the reins with the PS/2 but that ended up costing them everything as the clone manufacturers took a route of their own and the market followed.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom