DOS PC Games
About PC Dos Games
Few people I knew growing up had the luxury of being able to switch between Console gaming and PC gaming back in the days when MS-Dos was the operating system of choice. Today everyone runs console games on PCs which is something that back in those days I could only dream about.
Depending on the time period Dos games were run on anything from an XT (8086) to Pentium 1 (80586). This spans a period of several years and generations of consoles. I switched back and forth between console gaming and pc gaming regularly during this period.
There was a special appeal that PC (especially dos) games had to me.
About music
Depending on what period you tune in on the music for these games will be very different. You could be running on PC speaker, adlib, realsound, gravis, sound blaster products. The music could be coded into the game, written in midi, tracked modules, on CD audio, uncompressed wave data and finally MP3 or compressed (though by this most games were windows based). Personally I find it harder for me to separate the objective quality of the music from the game on a PC than I can with a console game and maybe that’s because it’s so hard to compare game to game when they all use different sound capabilities.
Dos games had an excellent list of games and for me it was found in ID software (wolfenstein, doom), Epic megagames (jill of the jungle, OMF 2097, epic pinball, tyrian), blizzard (Warcraft 1 & 2, blackthorne), westwood (c&c, red alert), 3d realms (duke3d, shadow warrior) and countless BBS shareware downloads too numerous to list off.
It’s getting more and more difficult to put together authentic Dos gaming PCs but I still have one running for now, I don’t find that dosbox is a good enough replacement yet.