DOSBox

And I am so excited about this, 'cause that game was fantastic, and starred Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell.

[laughs] I'd love to be able to play it without having to, you know, break out DOSBox.

Yeah.

That's why-

Mm-hmm

... you had to know how to use DOSBox to do it, um, because it would not run, um, like just as is.

You have to run it through, um, DOSBox to get it, you know, working and stuff.

But once we got it going, it was pretty okay.

Um, it has an auto save as long as you close the application, like using the close application button.

I, I still regularly play this game on, um...

Like, whenever I travel, if we're on a long flight, I'll always have it running on DOSBox, and if it's, like, a seven-hour flight, I w- I still won't even finish my game.

It's, it's just something to kill time, and it's really good at that.

Yeah.

but once you kinda dive into it, it's, it was, it's nothing like what you would expect it to be.

Does the...

Do people play it now, like, in DOSBox or whatever? Or do you play it through Freeciv, or what, what do people do?

Um, I rebuilt a 486, uh, a year ago, and I, I like playing it on my, my, my actual PC-

The DOS prompt.

When you're in DOSBox, that black background is... behind the blinking cursor.

It'll be like staring into infinity.

It's incredible.

You know, every few years I get the urge.

And, um, a few years ago I moved onto a Mac and, um, I realized or I thought, "Hey, I, well, I can't play it." Um, not knowing that DOS Box is a thing, uh, on a Mac.

And then I thought, "Well, with all these AI tools around that I've been using to do various things," and, uh, seems like, you know, how hard can it be? So I decided I'm gonna go and, uh, build my own copy of it and just, uh, sort of base this new game entirely on Ascendancy.

I went and I found this, uh, online, uh, resource that has, you know, all of the sort of detail about it with, uh, all of the buildings and, uh, components and rules and everything else.

Oh, yeah, you can.

Every game that they have on there that's emulated either through MAME or DOSBox or what have you.

Oh, and, uh, okay, this is interesting.

In the, uh, attract mode for Baby Pac-Man for the 7800, the high score table has the names of people that have helped with the game.

but he has given quite a lot of way to members of the community in Australia.

He still plays games through DOSBox and the GOG release of Free Space 2 is what he's playing at the moment on Windows 11, which he describes as beautiful.

He's heading back overseas next year with a second child on the way.

So again, congratulations to Phil.

And I'm like, oh my God.

DOSBox to the rescue, by the way, is an incredible piece of software for making that happen.

But yeah, it's ridiculous.

You see these businesses that are locked into their old solution, whether it be for hardware or for some old piece of software that...

It's a little hefty, it's a little large, and I don't need to ship a ton of games.

You'll notice I also am not shipping Elkaz with ScummVM or DOSBox or any of a variety of other gaming systems and engines and tools that I use on a daily basis.

But we don't need to fill the system up with them.

But I'm like, you know what? SimCity and Zork, people should play those more.

It was great.

Me, uh, m-many, many years ago when I was in university, um, the, the computers in our, in our labs obviously they had DOSBox on it 'cause I did a video game course.

So it had DOSBox and more often than not if, if my friend group, if we in my friend group had nothing to do we'd go into one of the labs, we'd load up DOSBox, we'd fire up "Age of Empires II" on it and we'd do a LAN party game and it'd be great and I remember there was one time we were doing it, um, and a tutor had a lecture in that, in that lab but he was, he was cool about it.

It was only a small group so he didn't need all the computers so he was like, "You guys can stay here and you can, you can play your game just don't interrupt the lesson." It's like, "Absolutely sir, we can do that.

No problem." Headphones on, locked into this game of AoE II and one of my friends got hi- one of his major, um, I think it was one of his major military production sites destroyed by someone and he just went, "Oh, fuck!" in the middle of this lecture.