Category: Oldskool Games

You might have picked up on two recurring topics around these parts: ancient PC games, and ancient bitmap fonts.  This installment combines the two for fact-finding purposes, and possibly sets some new records in going down silly rabbit holes, but it's all about what you learn along the way!

This is what happens when you don't resist the urge to poke at old games with sharp sticks.  You get 1 (one) ancient Asteroids clone for the IBM, a whole bunch of variations on a positively bonkers video mode, and a complimentary detour on the trail of a non-PC version, because that's how we roll.

A little hack of Space Commanders from last year gets an unexpected (and awesome) makeover, courtesy of someone else's talent.

Does VGA 40-column text mode hurt your eyeballs and disfigure the games you play?  A couple of small, mode-specific font replacement TSRs to the rescue.

My present: 'Sorry Ass' - a 512-byte boot sector version of Bill Gates' DONKEY, the infamous demonstration game included with DOS and BASIC 1.0.

A little bit of reverse-engineering fun.  Why was a seemingly-unused routine left over in Commander Keen 4's executable code, and does it do anything useful?  Let's find out!

After giving Keen 4's CGA version a 16-color composite overhaul, I figured I'd have a go at the next episode.  More custom code and graphics for the artifact-color aficionado.

This game is a pretty impressive piece of CGA programming, but there's one thing it doesn't do: exploit NTSC quirks to get 16 colors on a TV/composite monitor, instead of the familiar 4.  Here's how you can change that with a patch and a custom set of converted graphics.

An archeological riddle: these very early public domain games all have similar title screens, which say "IBM" although they were clearly homebrew creations.  Where do they come from, who made them, and what is that cryptic "mystery code" all about?

Most Apple ][ emulator screenshots out there completely misrepresent the color and resolution of that machine's composite video output.  Here's how to fix that.

IBM officially discouraged PC programmers from exploiting hardware-specific tricks, since that came at the expense of compatibility.  Then, they went and released a game that did just that.  Here's why it was (artificially) prevented from running on color systems.

Back in 1981, this was part of the original set of software available for the IBM PC on launch.  As it turns out, its roots go even earlier than that - and there's also the easily-bypassed copy protection, and a mysterious check for a BASIC error code that isn't documented anywhere.