Questions tagged [gaming]
Retro games, both hardware and software-based. NOT EVERY GAMING QUESTION IS ON-TOPIC. See tag wiki for guidance.
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Why did they create PC games relying on a fixed CPU frequency instead of a clock function?
I know there have been computer games which rely on a fixed CPU frequency. Instead of a clock function they rely on the fact that the CPU needs some time to execute the code.
But why did they do it? ...
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3
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Looking for a 90's sorcery game on Atari ST
I am looking for a game from the end of 80's/early 90's game on Atari ST. Where two wizards, one purple, one red have to turn the color of a checkerboard tiles to its own color using spells. The main ...
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Arcade/Computer Game: Alien crashed in graveyard, platform/side-scroller
I'm looking for a game which I remember playing at an arcade, probably around 1995-2000. I also think I played it (or a very similar game) on PC under Linux ~5 years ago.
It's your typical platform/...
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Identify a vertical arcade shooter from the very early 1980s
I'm trying to identify an arcade game that I remember playing.
At the bottom was the player's rocket that you could move in left-right direction and possibly also a small amount up and down (not sure ...
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1
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Old game, probably electronic in movie Phantasm (1978)
At minute 40 in the movie Phantasm (1978) there is a strange game similar to a hexagon.
Is probably an electronic game, anyone know which game is this?
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1
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Help me name this Arcade game?
Help me identify an arcade game I played, trying to remember what it was called..
All i remember it was a 2D platformer cartoon-like person character which had a gun and could fly with a jetpack, I ...
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9
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1
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How did Ridge Racer the arcade game store its music?
For both Daytona USA and Sega Rally (released around the same time but produced by SEGA), the arcade machines had sort of a synthesizer soundtrack with no CD-ROM involved. Only the home ports of those ...
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1
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How to fix the inaccurate mouse movement in the Eye of the Beholder for C64 under VICE? [closed]
I'm trying to play the C64 and C128 versions of the Eye of the Beholder by using the VICE emulator on Windows 11, but the mouse movement is too inaccurate and it constantly flutters on a moving ...
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3
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How did the X-Men game for Sega Genesis have its state survive a console reset?
The Sega Genesis system had a rather interesting game. X-Men (1993) was based on the popular cartoon version of the comic book series. But it had what was still one of the most unique (and unintuitive)...
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How is example play stored in Super Mario Bros. ROM?
When you start Super Mario Bros. on NES, the title screen shows 1 PLAYER GAME and 2 PLAYER GAME. If you wait for few seconds the Mario starts to play the first level of the game (this can be seen in ...
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Fighting game with alien or dinosaur-like characters, from the early 2000s, running on Windows
I’m really hoping someone knows this game. I think it came out late 90s or early 2000s for Windows. The gameplay was Mortal Kombat style where two players could dual sharing the keyboard. Other dot ...
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What were the typical game development toolchains for the pre-i386 IBM PC era
On i386 and beyond (assuming MS-DOS as the target OS and IBM PC as the target platform), my impression is game developers most typically used Watcom C / DJGPP plus one of the DOS extenders (DOS4GW, ...
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Status of brute forcing all possible memory states of a video game [closed]
For an old video game that has a small enough memory footprint, it should be possible on exponentially larger modern systems to create a graph of all possible states of memory and the inputs that ...
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25 PIN sound/game ribbon cable
I'm trying to figure out to use onboard sound on a Matasonic MS6260S motherboard.
There is a 25 Pin Connector located on the motherboard labeled as J2.
The motherboard manual states to "Connect ...
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2
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How did Joysticks with more than 4 buttons and all those extra features work on a Game Port?
The question is pretty straight forward. How did they do so much more than the simple, unidirectional 4 axis of analog control, plus 4 on/off buttons?
There was surprisingly precise force feedback ...
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What does this image in Space Travel represent?
I was touching up the Space Travel article on the Wiki and realized no one had answered a question I posted some time ago. I suspect someone here knows the answer.
This image is used in the infobox to ...
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Looking for a PC 2D platformer game from the mid-2000s or earlier
I'm trying to find the name of a PC game I used to play as a kid in the early/mid-2000s. All I remember from it is that it was a 2D platformer and that one of the levels looked like the following ...
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1
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Why audio of Prince of Persia (1989) produce in CPU rather than audio speaker? [closed]
I used to play this Prince of Persia (1989) in Pentinum III computer.
But audio of Prince of Persia (1989) produce in CPU rather than audio speakers.
Why?
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1
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Fooling a DOS in game timer
I'm curious if it is possible to fool an in game timers in an old DOS game. Specifically, King's Quest 3 makes you wait 15 minutes at one point. I don't know how that timing system works or how time ...
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6
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How were sprites in DOS games programmed?
I would like to know how sprites in DOS games for vintage video cards like Hercules, CGA, EGA and VGA were programmed.
I mean how was the duration of each sprite timed and how they were blitted on ...
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1
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What game is this music from? (probably a Shoot 'em up)
Back in my teenage years (around 1992) I recorded in VHS (but overrecorded it afterwards) a certain console game's opening sequence from a game TV show and attempted to transpose the background music ...
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Why was Wireplay "faster and more reliable" than dial-up Internet, since they both used the same hardware?
In 1997, there was this service called Wireplay in the UK.
Instead of using the Internet, you used it by directly phoning their servers with your modem from your PC, and the point of this was that it ...
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Hardware for higher resolution VESA modes
What computer hardware was needed to run something like Duke Nukem 3D smoothly at the 640x480 or 800x600 VESA modes at the time (1996-1997)?
I was wondering if this was possible with contemporary ...
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What would "Special Makeup" design have been in the 1988 arcade game, Splatterhouse? [closed]
Upon beating the Namco arcade game Splatterhouse, released in November 1988, the following is shown in the credits along with the expected programmers and artists:
SPECIAL MAKEUP DESIGNED
...
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3
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Why might Quake run slowly on a modern PC in DOS, but not in a virtual machine?
I noticed back in the DOS gaming era that DOS games ran slowly in hi-res modes. I was surprised to discover that this could be true on a modern machine.
I booted a 2017 i5 7200u (I think) laptop into ...
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1990s BBS game featuring mining elements from a planet
Sometime in the 90s (sorry, can't be more specific) I used to dial in to a BBS and play a multi-player game that involved manually mining elements from a planet. It was very detailed, you got employed ...
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What is 'Adaptive Tile Refresh' in the context of Commander Keen?
The question Did John Carmack really invent "Adaptive Tile Refresh"? asks about the origins of the scrolling and drawing techniques used to allow an MS-DOS PC to provide a NES console-like ...
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Why was Carrier Command for the ZX Spectrum superior to the C64 version?
The ZX Spectrum version of Carrier Command has 3D rendering, while the Commodore 64 version, despite a greater amount of RAM, was inferior in comparison. You open the in-game map and there's Google ...
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How could/can there exist NTSC->PAL converters for SNES and other classic game consoles?
Re-reading my old video game magazines from the mid-1990s, there's constant mentions of "USA import" games which were not released here and which "require an adapter". Many of the ...
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Why weren't 80s arcade games programmed in C?
I know many arcade games from the 80s were programmed in 68000 assembly. This carried on probably well into the 90s, even though Motorola C compilers existed in the 80s. Why then weren't C compilers ...
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Why did the monsters have "infinite invisible pillars" of hitboxes vertically in all versions of the DOOM engine?
Even in the last version of the DOOM engine, v1.9, used for Final DOOM, there is this strange limitation in which all the monsters have an invisible, infinitely tall "pillar" above and ...
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Which early computer games supported "English" from the paddle controller?
In relation to this answer about the "English" control of the Magnavox Odyssey, I am wondering if the concept found its way into other games for later computers and consoles that supported ...
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Why did some old MS-DOS games lack the ability to exit them?
While playing around in DOSBox-X, I'm reminded of some DOS games which appear to entirely lack the ability to exit/quit/close them.
One prime example of that is "Paratrooper" from 1982. I've ...
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What was that old FPS game where you shot rats in a sewer?
In the 1990s, I played an obscure shareware (I believe) FPS game for the PC (MS-DOS) which was closer in technology to Wolfenstein 3D than DOOM. It was rather dark, so I assume it had some sort of ...
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Did the original MS-DOS Quake not have a menu item for freelook, and if so, why?
I know that Quake (the 1996 MS-DOS game) is a "full" 3D engine, and always had some kind of mouse support.
However, even the original Wolfenstein 3D from 1992 also had mouse support from the ...
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How do DOS games like DOOM benefit from a PCI graphics card?
The original DOOM and its derivatives (DOOM II, Heretic, Hexen) were early 90s 3D games released at a time when DOS PCs usually had ISA bus Super VGA graphics cards. In the following few years, PCs ...
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New chess engines on retro hardware
Does anyone know of any efforts to write modern chess engines for old hardware? (e.g. C64, A2e?)
I'd love to see how a pared-down Stockfish or Leela that could fit in RAM could do rating wise etc.
...
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How can I save a custom level in Daisy’s Garden 2 in a DGF file?
I have the game "Daisy’s Garden 2" running in DOSBox with Windows 3.1.
If I now create a custom garden level, how can I save it as a DGF file? When I click "Save as", nothing ...
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Does a source exist for high-resolution PAL (not NTSC) video game cover scans? [closed]
I have created a database table of PAL games that I once owned for these platforms: Amiga, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, Game Gear, Mega Drive, Master System, Nintendo 64, Nintendo ...
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How can I play QBasic Nibbles on a modern machine?
MS-DOS versions 5 and 6 come bundled with the QBasic interpreter and a handful of example programs written in that BASIC dialect. One of the programs is Nibbles, a variant of the well-known Snake game....
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Why do sprites lag behind a scrolling map in first-generation Pokémon games?
This is something I often notice whenever I see a first-generation Pokémon game being played on a Game Boy emulator. It might be present on real hardware as well, but I don’t have that to test.
When ...
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How does the rotary control button of Forgotten Worlds/Lost Worlds encode rotation?
How does the rotary control button of Forgotten Worlds/Lost Worlds encode motion? How does it create a binary signal for game software to know how far and which direction to rotate the player's game ...
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PC 90s 2D Platformer Puzzler Indie Exit Levels With Robot
Platform(s): PC (Used to play on Windows 95/98)
Genre: 2D Platformer, Puzzler, Indie, Overcome some square obstacles, Exit to door or portal next level (100 levels approx if not a bit less or more)
...
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Why do multiple SNES games share the same title screen music?
Please watch the first few seconds of gameplay of the following two SNES games:
Pocket Monster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbPw6-Z2pkU
Disney's Bonkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...
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How can you set the NES RNG to a known state?
The Classic Tetris World Championship uses original NES consoles that are modded to provide the same RNG for both players:
Players WILL have the same RNG
I am wondering how this was done. So, my ...
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1
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How were console games ported to DOS?
Many popular DOS games were ported from video game consoles:
Earthworm Jim
Mega Man
The Lion King
The Lost Vikings
Turrican 2
Rayman
Oscar
Zool
Video game consoles generally have wildly different ...
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3
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Why were early 3D games so full of muted colours?
A lot of games from the PS1 and especially PS2 era are full of low contrast greys and browns and not much else. Some examples:
Why is this? Was it just a design decision, or was there a technical ...
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Is this a real system? Which one?
I was playing Remedy Entertainment's video game Control the other day. Inside the game world, I've come across several computers. (They all look extremely similar.) To me, it looks like some kind of ...
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Who did what exactly for the original Shadowgate (1987) Macintosh video game? [closed]
I primarily know Shadowgate from the wonderful NES port, which was ported by some Japanese company and whose Japanese musician composed the beautiful, iconic music which I frankly thought was there ...
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Why are paddles called paddles?
A paddle is a sort of input device, common on early video game consoles and home computers, consisting of a handheld wheel with one or more fire buttons. Unlike dial boxes, which spin freely, paddles ...
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