I know it’s not DOS per se but just getting into Caves of Qud and MAN I’m loving it.
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HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 hours ago
Fuck this I’m going back yo freedos.
Best games are DOS games bitches!!!
traxex@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 hours ago
I remember playing ASCII games as a kid, I gotta get back into it. There was a program or website where one could download community created ASCII games and I remember building one or two.
tal@lemmy.today 8 hours ago
I sat down to log into a couple MUDs yesterday. Didn’t stick with it — the combat still hasn’t evolved enough for me — but you could play that on anything capable of displaying text on a screen and running
telnet.It looks like some crazy person has been doing a TCP/IP stack for the 128K Mac, the first Macintosh ever released, from 1984, as well as a telnet client. So you can technically lug a 42-year-old computer out of an antique store and play currently-being-developed Internet games…though you won’t be getting color, since that came a while down the road.
If you get some device that can expose a serial console on some system to TCP/IP — not sure how far back you need to go for that — you could technically play it on a teletype from the 1930s.
The “some device” will have to be later, though, so that’s maybe kinda cheaty.
Technically, Debian Linux has been run on an Intel CPU from 1971, but it isn’t fast enough to be a practical host for such a teletype in that environment. Even stripped down forms of Linux are going to be “too big” to be such a host.
It does sound like the Commodore 64 has a package, Novaterm 10, that runs TCP/IP and telnet, but I don’t know whether it can output to the C64’s serial port rather than video display; you could play locally on one of those, but probably not run on a teletype. That being said, it probably shows that it’s technically-possible, since I’m sure that if it can run a virtual terminal program, it can just dump the text to an actual terminal. I’d guess that there’s probably some system out there circa 1980s that someone has probably built that can both run a TCP/IP stack and expose a serial console.
brynden_rivers_esq@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
I’m just getting into my first MUD! It’s neat!
tal@lemmy.today 9 hours ago
I agree with you that it’s a good game, and it’s very playable on an older computer, but it’s actually not the lightest-weight game from a CPU standpoint. I mean, realistically, that thing should be able to get by with very little CPU usage and essentially none if you’re not pushing buttons, but it actually uses a fair bit of CPU time when you’re just sitting there staring at the screen. It’s actually kind of bugged me, because while it’s irrelevant on a desktop, it really consumes more battery on a not-plugged-in-to-wall-power laptop than is necessary, and it’d otherwise be such a phenomenal game for disconnected laptop use.
Go run
topand just leave the game sitting there and it’ll be keeping an average of multiple cores hot on my laptop at 240 Hz running at vsync rate. And the world state isn’t changing – the game is turn-based.You can constrain the framerate down to 10 FPS — and that significantly reduces CPU usage, down to an average of 37% of a core at the cost of limiting the speed at which the game runs autoexplore, since it will always draw at least one frame in a given state, and at the cost of making the game feel sluggish and unresponsive.
And you’ll get that CPU usage even if you turn off all the graphical “glitz” have it just showing ASCII.
My guess is that they probably could probably benefit by (a) having a lightweight visual “display” thread that doesn’t do anything expensive, just update any animations and draw that to the screen, and if there are no animations, not even run a refresh at all, and (b) having a separate “heavyweight” thread for game logic that only runs if the world state has changed (autoexplore, automove, resting, or the player has pressed a key).
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, which is a similar game (internally a turn-based game that’s basically generating an ASCII grid that can provide some light graphical glitz and tiles) also consumes a lot of CPU time when idle.
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 hours ago
Bro, that was intense. I appreciate you ❤️
one_knight_scripting@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Doom Rogue Like.
Not sure if Jupiter Hell(successor by the creators) will run on dos though.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 6 hours ago
I’ve been playing a lot of Doom recently and I used to run that on an old 486. People just kept on making free wads for that for like 35 years.
SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Can the 486 run GZDOOM? Because if it can, you just became one of the lucky 10,000
www.moddb.com/mods/ashes-2063
www.moddb.com/games/beyond-sunset
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 17 minutes ago
Nice, Beyond Sunset kinda reminds me of Neon Overdrive, which came out last year. I wonder if NO took aesthetic inspiration from the BS setting. I haven’t played through a ton of the total conversion wads but it’s always impressive what people manage to do with the (tweaked) Build engine. Are those two standouts for you? Looks like Ashes got a cacoward runner up in 2018. I had a lot of fun recently with one called Impping, which is a slaughter wad where the enemies are mostly imps and your ammo is mostly rockets.
doomwiki.org/wiki/Neon_Overdrive
doomwiki.org/wiki/Impping!
Oh, and apparently there was a bit of drama a few months back over the GZDoom guy using some AI in his coding so some people switched to the UVDoom fork
SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 6 minutes ago
I think Beyond Sunset came out first but dunno.
Yes, those TCs are definite standouts. Think of them (quite literally) as “What if Fallout but Doom?” and “What if CP2077 but Doom?”. If you like either of those, you should like the TCs. There’s a good Wolfenstein one (I know, I know…very meta) called Blades Of Agony that is astonishingly great also.
Shame about the GZDoom thing. People are ridiculously over-sensitive to AI anything at the moment. C’est la vie