MS-DOS Games, Programs, Trivia, Pixels, Grog

Syndicate
Bullfrog Productions 1993

Companions of Xanth
1993

I live....AGAIN

Note that Dosbox-X is VAST. And some programs simply won't work with the default setup and you have to configure.
But once understood, it is very powerful.

Another fork, offering great options but being less complicated, would be Dosbox-Staging - also highly recommended.

DOSBox-X

The classic Dosbox 0.74-3 handles pretty much everything great out of the box, but it doesn't offer too many options in case you want something special to be different.
That's where Dosbox-X comes into play.

It is VERY extensive, offering numerous options.
The menu is pretty handy, too.

Pinball Dreams
Digital Illusions / 21st Century Entertainment
MS-DOS 1993 (first release on Amiga 1992)

I really love the design of this record, paying tribute to the good old days.

Quake OST, composed by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. Released for the first time on vinyl in 2020.

Pic from here:
www.turntablelab.com/products/nin...

Save the Lemmings
Psygnosis / DMA Design 1991

A rare (back in the days) Lemmings demo a.k.a. as the Covox Levels.
It was bundled with the Covox Speech Thing or you could get it by calling 1-800-GET-PSYG.

The Covox was a rather rough tech D/A converter, connected to the printer port.

PS: write down any setting before doing changes

As pictured in this closeup, the convergence (where the blue, green and red beams meet), is a little off - blue is too far to the lower right, resulting in a blurry picture. No sharpness parameter can fix that!
Newer CRTs let you adjust convergence via menu.
"Colour Grid" in VTB is great for that.

Video Test Bench V 4.5F
Warren C. Martin, 2011

As our beloved CRTs are slowly getting old and probably need some care sooner or later, here is a DOS software for those of you, who do it themselves:

github.com/unclejed613/...

It covers pretty much everything, best tool I have seen so far.

Design your own pinball table with

Macadam Bumper
ERE Informatique 1987

‪From a time when we counted the free MEGABYTES.
Stacker by Stac Electronics, a disk compression utility.

Other companies found the idea interesting, too.
"Microsoft Loses Patent Lawsuit, Must Pay Rival $120 Million":
www.latimes.com/archives/la-...

NHL Hockey
EA Sports 1993

The game was called NHL '94 on other platforms.
I found the videos in the rotating puck quite impressive in the year 1993.

Scorched Earth v1.50
By Wendell Hicken, 1995

Walls: Rubber

The path of Jupiter in the next four years, as seen in

SkyGlobe 3.6 by Mark A. Haney, 1993

This can be done by incrementing the time automatically by one sidereal day (23h56m4s).
Jupiter and Mars can be seen going retrograde several times.
The thing zooming through every 3⁄4 second is the moon.

This is the DOS version. MD looked a little different

Blockout
1989

My preferences depend mostly on what I grew up with... in this case, it was EGA <3

Why not NTP over the internet? Besides the advantage of being self dependent with RighTime, NTP could fluctuate quite a bit in the early 90s, well over a tenth of a second at times.
My guess is that RighTime was used to synchronise systems with a local NTP server in a LAN.

"The program has found application in a wide variety of industries, including astronomy, satellite tracking, communications, broadcasting, transportation, public utilities, manufacturing, medicine, and the military."

ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19...

RighTime v2.53, 1993 by Tom Becker.

A program to correct the system clock on MS-DOS

Due to many reasons (e.g. temperature fluctuations that affected the oscillator), old systems could be off up to several minutes a day.
I found this referenced when searching for software used by NASA.

You have chosen...not so wisely.

From the VGA version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
The GIF is from this page:
www.superrune.com/tutorials/in...
A really great comparison of many scenes of the EGA and VGA versions of Indy3.

Well, this could mean a lot if you weren't there

Good decision. I never looked back.

From a time when you could quit Windows:
WinRAR 1.54 BETA

Masterpiece

And you want the checkerboard to fill the entire screen of course...pictured is a work in progress.
This can be done with advv to a certain degree of accuracy and then fine tuned on the CRT itself.

Sadly, the Trinitron does not display the post decimal positions of the refresh rate, but I can confirm from my experience with other CRTs, that it works properly.
This does most definitely not work with any given graphic card or CRT - I am using a Voodoo Banshee.