Game News Phantasie series and other SSI classics released on Steam and GOG

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Renegade: Battle for Jacob's Star

Wing Commander for cool kids

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and here I thought Impossible Creatures did this first

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genewars

 

[flyingjohn]

On one hand I understand why they were lazy. No matter what they do they will loose money. On the other hand, they could have just chosen somebody with experience in porting older games to do it for free. They are plenty of fans/autistic people who will do it.

 

[Daemongar]

Indeed, it is a shame that gog doesn't pack this kind of games with a proper Amiga emulator. PC gaming in the 80s was really lackluster.

I've been on GOG a while: do they actually have an Amiga emulated (or Atari for that matter) game available? I don't believe they do.

May be that they lack the talent or there is something else at play (licensing Amiga ROMs?) but if they did offer superior Amiga emulated games, like a multitude of C64 rpgs, Black Crypt, PowerMonger, Dungeon Master, or Lemmings, I'd buy them all.

(edit: ok they do have Rocket Ranger and Wings, and one more, so its not impossible for them to emulate Amiga games. Wonder why the don't do it for superior rpgs?)

 

[Rincewind]

Indeed, it is a shame that gog doesn't pack this kind of games with a proper Amiga emulator. PC gaming in the 80s was really lackluster.

I've been on GOG a while: do they actually have an Amiga emulated (or Atari for that matter) game available? I don't believe they do.

May be that they lack the talent or there is something else at play (licensing Amiga ROMs?) but if they did offer superior Amiga emulated games, like a multitude of C64 rpgs, Black Crypt, PowerMonger, Dungeon Master, or Lemmings, I'd buy them all.

(edit: ok they do have Rocket Ranger and Wings, and one more, so its not impossible for them to emulate Amiga games. Wonder why the don't do it for superior rpgs?)

I think it's a combination of things. First, they'd need to pay licensing fees to that Italian Mickey Mouse operation, Cloanto, who are the (disputed) "legal rightholders" of the Kickstart ROMs (it's still being contested in court by Hyperion, AFAIK).

They might not be Amiga guys themselves, and running Amiga games correctly (or at all) requires a lot more arcane knowledge than DOS games that just use the standard MS-DOS filesystem. So for many games, they could either use cracks which tend to have problems, or flux level dumps with the copy protection intact, but then they'd need to include the Software Preservation Societies IPF disk format plugin... and that's a very murky area (using bit exact dumps of the original media created by volunteers, because the publisher did not archive the originals in virtually 100% of the cases, then including an open source plugin developed by preservationists, just for a start; this would anger a lot of people). It would be far more difficult to do things (semi) correctly than for DOS and Windows.

But many Amiga games were hard drive installable, most notably the whole Gold Box series, all LucasArts and later Westwood games, all Delphine Software games, and so on. So a bit perplexing indeed why don't they release those low hanging fruits.

The other reason is maybe they don't want competition between the different versions for whatever reason. E.g., the C64, Amiga, and DOS ports of the Gold Box games. DOS is the easiest to support, easiest to hire support staff for, etc. Maybe it's just too much hassle for little commercial gain for them. At the end of the day, they're very much a for-profit operation.

Then the more you go back into the 80s, the interfaces become more impenetrable to the average modern person. They'd need to explain disk swapping, custom save disks, savestates, etc. It gets technical quickly, so the target market quickly shrinks compared to an early Windows game. And guys like yourself who are interested in these games already know how to source them and set them up anyway.

 

[Daemongar]

I think it's a combination of things. First, they'd need to pay licensing fees to that Italian Mickey Mouse operation, Cloanto, who are the (disputed) "legal rightholders" of the Kickstart ROMs (it's still being contested in court by Hyperion, AFAIK).

I purchase C64 Forever and Amiga Forever every year and have for the past... many years (10?) from Cloanto. It's a damn shame, as for the most part, the only good Amiga rpgs are fancy versions of C64 rpgs - with very notable exceptions.

They could also do some single disk Amiga games - such as Demon's Winter ... but then in the interest of science I fired up Demon's Winter in an Amiga emulator. Ok, fires up fast, but have to create a character disk. Ok, nothing telling me what to do from the main screen - it's SSI so I suppose you have to use a disk copy of the main game disk OR hit a specific char on the keyboard at bootup to get to the disk utilities menu. Yes, this is beyond the skills of the average gamer.

Even if they did offer these, the amount sold wouldn't add up to what it would take to produce them or convert them. So, these may remain dead.

 

[Rincewind]

I think it's a combination of things. First, they'd need to pay licensing fees to that Italian Mickey Mouse operation, Cloanto, who are the (disputed) "legal rightholders" of the Kickstart ROMs (it's still being contested in court by Hyperion, AFAIK).

I purchase C64 Forever and Amiga Forever every year and have for the past... many years (10?) from Cloanto. It's a damn shame, as for the most part, the only good Amiga rpgs are fancy versions of C64 rpgs - with very notable exceptions.

They could also do some single disk Amiga games - such as Demon's Winter ... but then in the interest of science I fired up Demon's Winter in an Amiga emulator. Ok, fires up fast, but have to create a character disk. Ok, nothing telling me what to do from the main screen - it's SSI so I suppose you have to use a disk copy of the main game disk OR hit a specific char on the keyboard at bootup to get to the disk utilities menu. Yes, this is beyond the skills of the average gamer.

Even if they did offer these, the amount sold wouldn't add up to what it would take to produce them or convert them. So, these may remain dead.

Yes, for Amiga games you either need a blank AmigaDOS formatted disk. Sometimes the disk needs to have a specific AmigaDOS label. Then some games want to do their own formatting. Half of the time you can't figure this out without reading the manual.

To add insult to injury, it gets a bit more complex with emulation. You need to create a "custom floppy" in WinUAE for the savedisks which is around 2MB in size, not the regular ~900K ADF. Some games use their own low-level encoding schemes and/or write a bit more data to the floppy than the allowed standard range—regular ~900K ADF files can't represent that data. Canon Fodder and Neuromancer are two such examples.

Yes, this is beyond the skills of the average gamer.

I agree about current-day gamers. Still, back in the day people were able to play those Amiga games. I guess that's what you get with computers becoming more mainstream :shrug:

It seems you're a satisfied Cloanto customer, but you might still be interested in a new pre-configured Amiga game collection I'm putting together as we speak. It will make the classic games more accessible to the average intelligent person of today who doesn't want to become an Amiga expert just to play a few games (but not *too* accessible to keep the idiots out...) Guess what, one of the most time-consuming things is to document the saving method for each game, providing pre-formatted save disks, etc. It's not that it's hard, just most games do it in their unique ways, and someone not trained in this will just go WTF and drop the game...

 

[Ladonna]

It seems you're a satisfied Cloanto customer, but you might still be interested in a new pre-configured Amiga game collection I'm putting together as we speak. It will make the classic games more accessible to the average intelligent person of today who doesn't want to become an Amiga expert just to play a few games (but not *too* accessible to keep the idiots out...) Guess what, one of the most time-consuming things is to document the saving method for each game, providing pre-formatted save disks, etc. It's not that it's hard, just most games do it in their unique ways, and someone not trained in this will just go WTF and drop the game...

Nice. ExoAmiga?

 

[Rincewind]

It seems you're a satisfied Cloanto customer, but you might still be interested in a new pre-configured Amiga game collection I'm putting together as we speak. It will make the classic games more accessible to the average intelligent person of today who doesn't want to become an Amiga expert just to play a few games (but not *too* accessible to keep the idiots out...) Guess what, one of the most time-consuming things is to document the saving method for each game, providing pre-formatted save disks, etc. It's not that it's hard, just most games do it in their unique ways, and someone not trained in this will just go WTF and drop the game...

Nice. ExoAmiga?

RML Amiga is the working title (Rincewind's Magic Luggage Full of Amiga Goodies) I might as well keep it.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I think it's a combination of things. First, they'd need to pay licensing fees to that Italian Mickey Mouse operation, Cloanto, who are the (disputed) "legal rightholders" of the Kickstart ROMs (it's still being contested in court by Hyperion, AFAIK).

I purchase C64 Forever and Amiga Forever every year and have for the past... many years (10?) from Cloanto.

What is this? Sounds like something I might be interested in, but I've literally never heard of it before.

 

[Daemongar]

It seems you're a satisfied Cloanto customer, but you might still be interested in a new pre-configured Amiga game collection I'm putting together as we speak. It will make the classic games more accessible to the average intelligent person of today who doesn't want to become an Amiga expert just to play a few games (but not *too* accessible to keep the idiots out...) Guess what, one of the most time-consuming things is to document the saving method for each game, providing pre-formatted save disks, etc. It's not that it's hard, just most games do it in their unique ways, and someone not trained in this will just go WTF and drop the game...

Let me know when it's available. I spent about 5 minutes looking for the Demon's Winter manual/reference card to see exactly what was the endorsed method of playing/saving. Couldn't find it - I have physical copy of the game but I'm out of town for a long time - so I couldn't look it up.

There should still be some no-save Amiga games available: Lemmings, Baal, etc. Then again, if Cloanto owns the rights to "kickstart" including the embedded ROM kickstart, well, any game is dependent on them I suppose and folks would need to negotiate to release something.

 

[Bester]

I was actually considering getting an Amiga emulator and playing some stuff, since I never owned it and have no idea what's on it. A bit scary after reading that every game needs some special treatment on how to make savegames? Really?

 

[mediocrepoet]

I was actually considering getting an Amiga emulator and playing some stuff, since I never owned it and have no idea what's on it. A bit scary after reading that every game needs some special treatment on how to make savegames? Really?

Possibly related, but IIRC Phantasie would basically save the game world state to the disk so if you didn't have a blank one, you'd end up with a mapped wilderness and dungeons, cleared spaces, etc.

 

[Daemongar]

I think it's a combination of things. First, they'd need to pay licensing fees to that Italian Mickey Mouse operation, Cloanto, who are the (disputed) "legal rightholders" of the Kickstart ROMs (it's still being contested in court by Hyperion, AFAIK).

I purchase C64 Forever and Amiga Forever every year and have for the past... many years (10?) from Cloanto.

What is this? Sounds like something I might be interested in, but I've literally never heard of it before.

C64Forever and AmigaForever are both put out by Cloanto and include kickstart roms and pretty much allow one to play and create profiles for every game in ones arsenal. So if one game uses joyport 1 and another uses joyport 2, you can specifiy that in the game profile and not have to mess around. This is especially useful for the Amiga with the mixture of Amiga versions, kickstart, memory, # of disk drives, and hard drive use vary wildly between games.

The applications are planting a flag anywhere, they use VICE, WinUAE, and Winfellow plugins to make it all work - but it gives a nice frontend to manage everything and play your games.

 

[mediocrepoet]

C64Forever and AmigaForever are both put out by Cloanto and include kickstart roms and pretty much allow one to play and create profiles for every game in ones arsenal. So if one game uses joyport 1 and another uses joyport 2, you can specifiy that in the game profile and not have to mess around. This is especially useful for the Amiga with the mixture of Amiga versions, kickstart, memory, # of disk drives, and hard drive use vary wildly between games.

The applications are planting a flag anywhere, they use VICE, WinUAE, and Winfellow plugins to make it all work - but it gives a nice frontend to manage everything and play your games.

Thanks man. I'll have to check it out.

 

[Rincewind]

C64Forever and AmigaForever are both put out by Cloanto and include kickstart roms and pretty much allow one to play and create profiles for every game in ones arsenal. So if one game uses joyport 1 and another uses joyport 2, you can specifiy that in the game profile and not have to mess around. This is especially useful for the Amiga with the mixture of Amiga versions, kickstart, memory, # of disk drives, and hard drive use vary wildly between games.

For the record, those per-game settings are ultimately just individual WinUAE configs. WinUAE has a nice built-in configuration browser, so you get the same functionality using WinUAE directly. Maybe AmigaForever has a slightly more polished frontend to it with images, not just a list view, but it's ultimately the same thing.

I'm creating such per-game configs myself, for sure. My previous method was using a spreadsheet and setting things manually when I play a game, but that's madness... There are so many little things that can differ between configs and can break a game.

So in my pack, you'll literally see a big list of games when you start the bundled WinUAE. Then you double-click on a game, and the game starts. That's it! All from within WinUAE. It even has a built-in real-time search to narrow down the list of titles.

I considered adding LaunchBox as a front-end for cover art and to open the PDF manuals with one click, but I don't like the extra indirection.

Let me know when it's available. I spent about 5 minutes looking for the Demon's Winter manual/reference card to see exactly what was the endorsed method of playing/saving. Couldn't find it - I have physical copy of the game but I'm out of town for a long time - so I couldn't look it up.

Sure thing. This got me interested, so I'll add Demon's Winter to the list. My first release will contain 120 games, so I can do 121 as well

I was actually considering getting an Amiga emulator and playing some stuff, since I never owned it and have no idea what's on it. A bit scary after reading that every game needs some special treatment on how to make savegames? Really?

The situation is no different to the Commodore 64, Apple II, Atari ST, or any other 80s home computer, really. Most people did not have a hard drive, so games came on floppies, then they either saved your game onto the game disks, or you needed to create dedicated save disks using blank floppies. The method for creating those save disks varied greatly. Many of the floppy games did not even use AmigaDOS at all but controlled the floppy drive at the lowest possible level, circumventing the OS completely and coming up with custom disk formats, fast loaders, weird encoding schemes, etc.

Again, the situation is no different to the C64 and many other home computers. You just grew up with DOS PCs, I assume.

Things got simpler on the Amiga with games that were hard-drive installable (not all were) because they could just use the file system, like DOS and Windows games.

You can bypass that whole thing if you use savestates exclusively, though. That works well with all floppy games, and most HDD games, especially with host filesystem directory mounts.

Possibly related, but IIRC Phantasie would basically save the game world state to the disk so if you didn't have a blank one, you'd end up with a mapped wilderness and dungeons, cleared spaces, etc.

Yes, many games do that. The collection will contain pristine original copies I managed to source (e.g., the overworld in Phantasie is unexplored barring from the initial few locations which is by design, according to the manual). Moreover, WinUAE has a nifty feature to do "non-destructive saving" to the game floppies which are always read-only in my configs. When the game attempts to write to it, WinUAE creates a second image that only contains the difference (the written data), then merges the two at reading time. You can reset your game floppy at any time by deleting this secondary save image.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I had a horrible time with MAC emulators. Somewhere I kept fucking up. Damn pity I never got to play the updated Mac Ultima III.

Wasn’t there a few other Amiga emulators?

 

[Rincewind]

I had a horrible time with MAC emulators. Somewhere I kept fucking up. Damn pity I never got to play the updated Mac Ultima III.

Mini vMac is quite nice and easy to use (IMO). If you need to emulate the classic line, that is.

Wasn’t there a few other Amiga emulators?

There are others, like FS-UAE, but basically all they do is take code from WinUAE and repackage it.

There's a new effort called Denise, I tried it briefly, but I'm not overly impressed. Once you learn WinUAE in and out, there's just no going back. It's the RealDeal(tm), and it can do everything.

 

[Bester]

I considered adding LaunchBox as a front-end for cover art and to open the PDF manuals with one click, but I don't like the extra indirection.

Perhaps a standalone website that helps with discovery for newbies, e.g. lists all games, sorts them into genres, shows screenshots, can be sorted by ratings from the magazines? That's also something Exo didn't consider. There's user ratings in the LaunchBox, but they're completely random and there's very few of them. Ranging by magazine ratings would've been a big help.
In ExoDos you can range by "MT-32 support" and other factors that hint at higher quality games, which helps a bit, but not enough imo.

 

[Rincewind]

I considered adding LaunchBox as a front-end for cover art and to open the PDF manuals with one click, but I don't like the extra indirection.

Perhaps a standalone website that helps with discovery for newbies, e.g. lists all games, sorts them into genres, shows screenshots, can be sorted by ratings from the magazines? That's also something Exo didn't consider. There's user ratings in the LaunchBox, but they're completely random and there's very few of them. Ranging by magazine ratings would've been a big help.
In ExoDos you can range by "MT-32 support" and other factors that hint at higher quality games, which helps a bit, but not enough imo.

I'd say that's out of scope for eXoDOS, and definitely out of scope for me too. That's basically asking to create a mini MobyGames or something, which is a huge amount of work. And these game database websites already exist, so why duplicate the work? Here are some links, going through all the info on these websites could keep you easily busy for decades... I really see no point duplicating that. Figuring out what to play and researching the games is outside the scope of such collections.

Having said that, I think writing a single article about what is worthwhile to play is not a bad idea. Maybe multiple articles per genre. I'm actually interested in creating such write-ups, perhaps with the help of the readers of our prestigious magazine. Kinda up to 4-5 sentence mini-reviews to get people started. But I sure as hell won't start another MobyGames / Hall of Light / etc.

So here are the websites:

Hall of Light – Online Amiga database (has links to magazine reviews)
https://amiga.abime.net/
---

Another popular Amiga game database (with user reviews)
https://www.lemonamiga.com/
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A site devoted to the Amiga, its games and magazines that have reviewed them (UK focused)
https://amigareviews.leveluphost.com/

Quote from the front page of this last one:

"This website contains 7811 reviews of 2375 games for the Amiga home computer that originally appeared between 1987 and 2000 in seven mags I regularly bought: Amiga Computing, Amiga Format, Amiga Joker, Amiga Power, CU Amiga, ZERO and Zzap!"
---

A small number of in-depth reviews
https://www.amigalove.com/games.php

 

[Bester]

I didn't know about these, they'll definitely do. Is there something like this for Dos games?

 

[Rincewind]

I didn't know about these, they'll definitely do. Is there something like this for Dos games?

Umm, okay... No disrespect, but have you been living in a shoebox? I assume you're not trolling, so here are some links:

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/

MobyGames & search for DOS

The CRPG Book (by our own felipepepe, PDF version is free)
https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/

Computer Gaming World Museum
https://www.cgwmuseum.org/

Museum of Adventure Game History
https://www.mocagh.org/

The Digital Antiquarian (questionable opinions & use of pronouns, but lots of interesting info otherwise)
https://www.filfre.net/
His "Hall of Fame" is not half bad: https://www.filfre.net/hall-of-fame/

CRPGAddict (of questionable opinions, but his "must play list" is not half bad)
https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/

The Adventurer's Guild
https://advgamer.blogspot.com/

Or just mine the codex for info

There are tons of other for specific topics (e.g., text adventures, strategy games, wargames, etc.) Googling those is an exercise for the reader.

 

[Bester]

Thanks. DOS games were just a little before my time, my PC gaming career started in '97, so while my first PC had Doom, Hexen and some other DOS stuff preinstalled by the kind seller, I definitely missed that era. I'm trying to catch up now. I found it difficult before because of the graphics, but with CRT shaders, which is a recent development, it's much easier (my brain finally accepts these graphics as okay, some look even great), so I'm just starting out.

Before my first PC, I had a NES and then a Sega Genesis, so I got familiar with the consoles instead of the DOS/Home Computers at the time.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I’m still sad about the loss of the library at gamebase 64. I don’t think it’ll ever come back. All those magazine types games just poof!

 

[Rincewind]

I’m still sad about the loss of the library at gamebase 64. I don’t think it’ll ever come back. All those magazine types games just poof!

But Gamebase64 is still available via FTPs and I think I have the whole collection. Try the English Amiga Board FTP.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Interesting sites like https://www.c64games.de/ include solutions, box scan, and manual if they have it. I’ve never ran the gamebase front end and forget what their last version even was.