Vapourware The definitive, authoritative, and probably non-exhaustive list of non-(IBM) PC cRPGs

[KeighnMcDeath]

How the hell do you run Briley Witch Chronicles? The instructions don't help and I'm scouring the help on itchio. Hopefully they answer my question there. .crt files. WTH? certificate files?

 

[Rincewind]

How the hell do you run Briley Witch Chronicles? The instructions don't help and I'm scouring the help on itchio. Hopefully they answer my question there. .crt files. WTH? certificate files?

.crt is a cartridge file. Just press Alt-C in VICE to insert the cartridge, and that's it.

The big advantage is that loading times are vastly reduced, so most modern C64 games usually have cartridge versions.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Yeah, about VICE the latest version..... how the fuck do you run the damn thing. I went to sourceforge and dl'd it and the damn thing has no exe file or anything. WTF? VICE use to be the bomb now it looks like a pile of shit.

good lord i had to watch a stupid video. Why weren't these files showing up in my last install?



Mother fucker! It popped up and works. Don't I feel like a retarded potato now.

 

[Rincewind]

Yeah, about VICE the latest version..... how the fuck do you run the damn thing. I went to sourceforge and dl'd it and the damn thing has no exe file or anything. WTF? VICE use to be the bomb now it looks like a pile of shit.

Yeah, that gave me a pause initially too. Just unpack the downloaded 7z file somewhere, then the executables are in the "bin" subfolder. For the C64 emulator, you'll want x64sc.exe.

Have a look at the README in the root folder, e.g. this is at the start:

Spoiler

The following programs are included:

- x64sc, a C64 emulator focused on accuracy;

- xscpu64, a C64 emulator with a SuperCPU cart;

- x64dtv, a C64 Direct-to-TV (DTV) emulator;

- x128, a C128 emulator;

- xvic, a VIC20 emulator;

- xpet, a PET emulator;

- xplus4, a PLUS4 emulator;

- xcbm2, a CBM-6x0/7x0 emulator;

- xcbm5x0, a CBM-5x0 emulator;

- vsid, a SID player;

- c1541, a stand-alone disk image maintenance utility;

- petcat, a CBM BASIC de-tokenizer;

- cartconv, a C64/C128 cartridge conversion program.

- x64, the old and less accurate C64 emulator, is no more built by default
and only included if explicitly enabled at configure time;

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

You know, I bet I knew that on my old computer with an older version but when I stopped playing emulation a little I totally forgot or just got used to ccs64 (which can have issues). Maybe I get brain-frustration freeze in my older age. At the moment I still have to get a working MAC emulation to work and I didn't get back to FSAUE nor the MSX. You'd think I'd have this memorized by now but my brain says be a luddite barbarian and smash shit instead. I did that to a couple of mp3 players because they utterly failed. Cheap chinese stuff. It is like they make certain things to just break.

Works now. I just have to personalize the settings and try out a few different games and write down my shortcuts. The game booted right up.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Hey rusty. Don't forget the 3 Ishar games for Mac. Dungeon crawling series that is quite good.

You mean the three Ishar games for the Commodore Amiga, but those were ported to the PC, so Rusty isn't counting them. Similarly, Rusty is not listing The Faery Tale Adventure, despite it being the first Amiga-original CRPG and the first Open World CRPG.

Wow, gameplay may have been subpar but look at those pretty pixels though! I heard that Ishar III wasn't too bad however. It was described as having impressive non-linearity and time traveling elements. Anyone here play it? Maybe the developers learned from their mistakes in parts 1 & 2. But seriously, I love that polar bear and never saw anything like it in game graphics from the era. Bear looks ferocious and almost photorealistic and reminds me of that video of

Spoiler

the animal scientist dude who was tracking a polar bear on his snowmobile with his buddy when suddenly the bear turned and took a swat at him... and took off his entire lower jaw with just his tongue left a'hangin'. Then the dude says to his buddy holding the camera - as clear as day, and far from what you'd expect from a guy who had no jaw - "It's important not to panic." The only explanation is that the guy must have been a ventriloquist prior to becoming a professional polar bear scientist tracking badly behaving bears in the arctic.

Anyway, this is a very cool thread, as cool as that story about the polar bear and The Man With No Jaw.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Speaking of Amiga & C64 emulation, I would use FS-UAE for Amiga and the VICE core in retroarch for C64. FS-UAE is much simpler to configure than WinUAE, I heard, but with the same excellent results, including a decent built-in scraper for your box art and screenshots. I'm curious to see how Amgia games look with the CRT-EasyMode (halation) shader which is easily set-up with FS-UAE, I understand. All this talk of exclusive games for the Mac and the Apple IIGs has got me intrigued. Too bad there were never any decent PC emulators for these platforms; or are there?

 

[Rincewind]

Speaking of Amiga & C64 emulation, I would use FS-UAE for Amiga and the VICE core in retroarch for C64. FS-UAE is much simpler to configure than WinUAE, I heard, but with the same excellent results, including a decent built-in scraper for your box art and screenshots.

Yeah, Rusty claims FS-UAE is easier, and probably he's right. However, WinUAE is not hard to set up either, it's a bit overmystified, really. I made comment about the WinUAE setup a few months back, you can look it up. One area where FS-UAE is superior that I know of is that you can enable aspect ratio correction by enabling a single option -- it's much more involved with WinUAE (again, I made a comment about that).

I'm curious to see how Amgia games look with the CRT-EasyMode (halation) shader which is easily set-up with FS-UAE, I understand.

Well, post some screenshots if you get some authentic-looking results. I know how the output of the C64 looked like hooked up to a TV set, and the Amiga to a typical colour RGB monitor from the 80s, but none of these fancy shaders do it for me, all that I've tried just looked like crap, in my opinion. So I prefer sharp pixels. Having said that, I like the PAL emulation in VICE a lot (the C64 was really meant to be used with a TV), I just dial back the blurriness a bit.

All this talk of exclusive games for the Mac and the Apple IIGs has got me intrigued. Too bad there were never any decent PC emulators for these platforms; or are there?

There are lots of excellent emulators, pretty much all important Apple hardware is covered which makes is possible to virtually play any game from the Apple/Mac library!

Apple II

• AppleWin
  https://github.com/AppleWin/AppleWin

Apple IIgs (note the IIgs is an entirely different 16-bit machine compared to the much older 8-bit Apple II)

• GSPlus
  https://apple2.gs/plus/
  
  It's very good, I briefly tried Bard's Tale I and the rare Ultima I remake in it.

Early Macintosh (for running Mac OS versions 1 to 7.5.5, generally with black-and-white output)

• Mini vMac
  https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/
  
  This one is excellent, I just love it! Very easy to set up and configure. The website contains some tutorials that should help you get started. The guys also wrote a bunch of useful utils for transferring files in and out of the emulator, unpacking .sit archives on Windows, and so on.

• Basilisk II (for running Mac OS versions 7+, colour output)
  https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/basilisk_ii
  
  More difficult to set up; for earlier games the Mini vMac is a lot better, actually, so only use this if you really need to.

You can find almost all the games at MacintoshGarden with helpful tips for each game on which emulator is best to use.

This guide about emulating Macs in general is very informative too.

Then, depending on your interests, quite a few Apple II and IIgs ports of classic adventures are supported in ScummVM, so for those that's the easiest route.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Speaking of Amiga & C64 emulation, I would use FS-UAE for Amiga and the VICE core in retroarch for C64. FS-UAE is much simpler to configure than WinUAE, I heard, but with the same excellent results, including a decent built-in scraper for your box art and screenshots.

Yeah, Rusty claims FS-UAE is easier, and probably he's right. However, WinUAE is not hard to set up either, it's a bit overmystified, really. I made comment about the WinUAE setup a few months back, you can look it up. One area where FS-UAE is superior that I know of is that you can enable aspect ratio correction by enabling a single option -- it's much more involved with WinUAE (again, I made a comment about that).

I'm curious to see how Amgia games look with the CRT-EasyMode (halation) shader which is easily set-up with FS-UAE, I understand.

Well, post some screenshots if you get some authentic-looking results. I know how the output of the C64 looked like hooked up to a TV set, and the Amiga to a typical colour RGB monitor from the 80s, but none of these fancy shaders do it for me, all I've tried to just looked like crap, in my opinion. So I prefer sharp pixels. Having said that, I like the PAL emulation in VICE a lot (the C64 was really meant to be used with a TV), I just dial back the blurriness a bit.

I think most CRT shaders look like absolute shit and I typically cringe whenever I see screenshots of geeks posting theirs, all proud of their scanlined garbage and deluded that it actually looks like their old trinitron CRTs, but CRT-EasyMode is one of the few I liked and it actually looks half-way decent for 1080p in my retroarch setup. I say half-way decent because it still has some problems. Anything with a solid grey background, like the station backgrounds in Starflight (C64), for example, look terrible, and certain games like the Gold Box series or Mr. Do on C64 look awful on huge screens with each individual pixel highlighted so crystal clearly and enhanced with CRT shaders. But most old 8 & 16 bit systems with EasyMode look okay, imo, so I use it. I think a lot of "pixel perfect" stuff from the 240p era looks overwhelming on large screen TVs which is why I prefer a CRT shader.

 

[Rincewind]

I think most CRT shaders look like absolute shit and I typically cringe whenever I see screenshots of geeks posting theirs, all proud of their scanlined garbage and deluded that it actually looks like their old trinitron CRTs, but CRT-EasyMode is one of the few I liked and it actually looks half-way decent for 1080p in my retroarch setup. I say half-way decent because it still has some problems. Anything with a solid grey background, like the station backgrounds in Starflight (C64), for example, look terrible, and certain games like the Gold Box series or Mr. Do on C64 look awful on huge screens with each individual pixel highlighted so crystal clearly and enhanced with CRT shaders. But most old 8 & 16 bit systems with EasyMode look okay, imo, so I use it. I think a lot of "pixel perfect" stuff from the 240p era looks overwhelming on large screen TVs which is why I prefer a CRT shader.

Yeah, I'll try CRT-EasyMode for fun, but it's no surprise you're getting different results because all these different machines had quite different types of outputs. Some random thoughts about the topic:

• C64 has progressive output, at least on PAL that I'm familiar with. VICE emulates PAL splendidly, no generic CRT shader can replicate this.
  
• All stock Amigas output a single-scanned image when hooked up to a monitor, so CRT shaders designed for single-scanline consoles might be able to come close to this (if you can turn off the simulation of other TV artifacts).
  
• VGA adapters used a hack to double the scanlines, hence the pixels on old PC VGA monitors more looked a lot more rectangular than on an Amiga at the same resolution. Plus VGA monitors tended to be higher quality than Commodore monitors and exhibited less halation, but that might be just my personal experience with what I had.

I would really like to get my hands on a shader that could do a good job emulating a real Commodore 1084s monitor like you can see on these actual photos (well, with the option to turn off the screen geometry distortion):

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

More difficult to set up; for earlier games the Mini vMac is a lot better, actually, so only use this if you really need to.

Pst, kid, its not that hard if you use one of these. Unless you're playing one of them Japanese Mac games, in which case I wish you a lot of luck.

 

[Rincewind]

More difficult to set up; for earlier games the Mini vMac is a lot better, actually, so only use this if you really need to.

Pst, kid, its not that hard if you use one of these. Unless you're playing one of them Japanese Mac games, in which case I wish you a lot of luck.

Man, that's super handy, somehow I missed it! I can't speak Japanese, so that's one less problem for me then.

 

[Rincewind]

Ok, I gave some "advanced" CRT shaders another go in WinUAE in the last few hours. Long story short, although this looks quite "authentic", I don't miss that blurry shit. It's sharp pixels or GTFO for me.

 

[mondblut]

I heard that Ishar III wasn't too bad however. It was described as having impressive non-linearity and time traveling elements. Anyone here play it? Maybe the developers learned from their mistakes in parts 1 & 2. But seriously, I love that polar bear and never saw anything like it in game graphics from the era. Bear looks ferocious and almost photorealistic and reminds me of that video of

You were lied to, Ishar III is as linear as II. You do some prescribed shit to open some portal to the past, walk in to do something that would open some passage back in the present, rinse and repeat. That's basically the sum of its storyline.

They didn't shy away from using digitized photos all over the place, that's why the bear looks photorealistic

 

[Rincewind]

They didn't shy away from using digitized photos all over the place, that's why the bear looks photorealistic

Yeah, I was gonna say I would have bet on it that bear was scanned. And so were the NPCs on the other screenshots, I'm pretty sure.

 

[Lady Error]

Goldbox-style...ish... game for the TurboGrafx by Westwood similar to the one they made on Genesis. Huh, appears to use basic D&D rather than AD&D though, that's pretty unique.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/turbo-grafx/order-of-the-griffon
As an aside, I hate youtube videos where the person tries to be a personality, I just want to see gameplay footage...

This one looks very interesting, anyone played it? D&D in a Goldbox engine basically.

 

[Lady Error]

Just tried Order of the Griffon:

There is no character generation, which sucks. You can only select out of pre-made characters.

 

[mondblut]

This one looks very interesting, anyone played it? D&D in a Goldbox engine basically.

I did, it's okay.

 

[mondblut]

They didn't shy away from using digitized photos all over the place, that's why the bear looks photorealistic

Yeah, I was gonna say I would have bet on it that bear was scanned. And so were the NPCs on the other screenshots, I'm pretty sure.

Even the mountainside behind the bear looks clerarly downsampled from higher resolution as "nearest neighbor". Genuine pixel art would never have such random distribution of lighter and darker pixels.

Still pretty like porn, ofc.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Ok, I gave some "advanced" CRT shaders another go in WinUAE in the last few hours. Long story short, although this looks quite "authentic", I don't miss that blurry shit. It's sharp pixels or GTFO for me.

That actually looks quite good (once you click on it to enlarge it or download it for an external viewer). What shader are you using here and what's your display's resolution? One problem is that for those who are still on 1080p like myself, even the best shaders can look very disappointing. Certain higher resolutions get much better results. I like CRT-easymode since it looks subtle compared to other available CRT-shaders and looks acceptable (most of the time) on 1080p displays.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I'm beginning to think that that Ishar series from the french developer is like a french horn - very pretty and fancy-nancy looking on the surface, but not sweeter sounding or better than regular horns, and apparently even a good deal worse. It's like those over-engineered german tanks in WWII that had 60+ gears; more is definitely not necessarily better.

 

[Rincewind]

My display res is 1920x1080, as you can see from the screenshots below. The shader I was using for these is called CRT-Guest-Hires-SmartRes; it's a DirectX 9/11 shader made specifically for WinUAE, so I don't think you can use it with RetroArch (I guess that thing only supports OpenGL shaders?). It's been developed by a guy called guest.r from the English Amiga Board. You can download his shader pack from here, and this is the direct link.

The very nice thing about his shaders is that most of them are resolution independent; in other words, they support all Amiga resolutions in a single shader. That's a big deal for games that use split-screen with multiple resolutions (e.g. Lemmings), or if you keep switching back and forth between games and the workbench, or if you're watching demos that switch between all sorts of resolutions. All shaders in his pack with "Hires-SmartRes" in the name have this feature.

It's a bit tricky to set it up correctly and you need a powerful GPU. I've included a screenshot of my filter settings I used for testing it, you'll need to set it *exactly* like that (read the linked 18 page topic for details if interested). The "Vert. size" slider set to 400 is my NTSC stretch trick to get aspect-ratio correct image for US made games released for PAL Amigas, you might not want to set that.

And some of my test images. It's one of the best such shaders if you're into emulating old displays, but I just prefer sharp raw pixels. Also, I think people would have killed to get a display with such sharp pixels back in the day...

 

[Rincewind]

Just tried Order of the Griffon:

There is no character generation, which sucks. You can only select out of pre-made characters.

Huh, these portraits are repurposed from the EoB series (quite badly, actually).

 

[Rincewind]

Fuck, I just can't stop tinkering with these WinUAE shaders. I hate to admit, but when the blurriness is significantly dialed back, I really like what I'm getting with the CRT-A2080-HiRes-SmartRes shader.
I just maxed out the sharpness settings in the source and this is what I'm getting at 1.5x scale (have to download it and view it at 1:1 zoom level):

#define h_sharp 10.00 // pixel sharpness (1.0 to 10.0)
#define cubic 2.00 // 'cubic sharpness' from 0.0 to 2.0

This is damn near perfect to me (in terms of how I remember my Amiga monitor), and with 1.5x scaling the resulting image on my 24" LCD is very close to the actual physical size of a 14" monitor. I think this is where people screw up big time: if you want the "authentic experience", the physical size of the image has to match that of a typical 80s 14" monitor (I never used my Amiga with a TV). Plus I use no aperture grille overlays, in my view they look like shit (at least at 1920x1080), they just darken the image and mute the colours a lot.

I just like it how this adds texture to the large solidly filled areas, and individual bright pixels are little specks of light instead of rectangles.

However, I still maintain that for DOS VGA games CRT shaders are stupid. VGA is double-scanned, I never saw scanlines on any VGA monitor, and they're much higher quality, I never saw any significant halation or bloom on mine in the 90s.

 

[Rincewind]

Btw, check this out. Actual photo of the 320x200 output of a VGA monitor. Where are those funky "CRT shader artifacts"? Screen geometry distortion, vignetting, heavy scanlines, glowing pixels, blurriness? I can't see any of that nonsense. This is how a non-broken VGA monitor looks like, kids. Just sharp pixels.

Zoomed in it's still pretty sharp, and you can clearly see the double-scanning on the individual pixels. But from a normal viewing distance, those pixels seem pretty much as small rectangles.

I think all these magic shaders people use for DOS games are like Germans attempting to cook Italian food or something. They have an *idea* of what they want to achieve, and they might even succeed, but that just doesn't exist anywhere in reality except in their heads...