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Not much of an update today to finish the month, mainly some new paragraphs for Quake, and a new screenshot. And I added a pic of the Soundblaster AWE32 card.
You will also note that there's a new stylesheet for the games gallery. I noticed that the small Verdana, unlike the large Times New Roman I had previously and still have down here, wasn't very good to read on the gray textured background, so I gave it something lighter. I toyed with the idea of a solid white background, but ended up adding a texture again.
And that's it for August. There were 45 new game pages, and I added/updated 236 pages in the games gallery.
I'm still dragging along a few half-finished pages. One of them I have finished (more or less) and linked today: Galapagos, a strange game from 1997 I bought more or less by accident years ago.
And I removed Quake from the AWE32 and Gravis Ultrasound listings, from the first, because it used the AWE only as a DAC, which makes it irrelevant, from the second, because it never supported the classic GUS and ACE at all, only the PnP and MAX.
I thought there'd be a bigger update before the end of the month, but probably there won't. For today, I added a page about Quake II. It's still a stub, but will hopefully grow. There's an update, again, for Quake (video modes and sound/music), an update for Half-Life (pointed out that it's based on the Quake, not the Quake II engine, with a long quote), and an update of the games supporting Transform and Lighting.
Today's update is one of those that took quite some time to research, though there's not all that much to show off for it. I added a section about Rendition Vérité to the Quake page. This was one of the first 3D acceleration techniques, and the only one I know that had a DOS API. Quake was among the first games to support it. Ah yes, and you can now download the Quake shareware from this site.
There are 25 or 30 new icons, no need to list them all of course, but a few of them I found that the game was not available for download yet though it could have been. Here are the new downloads:
And here a few more updates:
Just a small and late update for today, but it's good news. Things have gone back to normal. I rebuilt my main machine, which did not go without problems, but now it's running more smoothly than ever. If anybody is interested (not that I actually think so), here are the specs:
For now, I just did the most popular lists, and there's a screenshot on the Quake page, as well as some stale links removed. I hope to have something bigger tomorrow.
Completely rewrote the Sound and Music (previously just sound) section for Dungeon Keeper. There is now a complete list of supported soundcards and I figured out how and to what end the game uses the AWE32 soundbanks.
Okay, just another small Dungeon Keeper update. Regular updates should be starting again soon.
Bored with the constant Dungeon Keeper updates already? I added a list of the creatures that do not get along with each other.
Another update for Dungeon Keeper: how to play without the CD.
Alas, my computer troubles are not over yet. I do not want to go into details, suffice to say that I am sitting at my Pentium again. So there will not be much new today. Doing anything web related is not much fun on this machine.
What is fun, however, is playing the original Dungeon Keeper. I've been doing this a lot lately, and for today I have partly rewritten the technical section of the page.
Back to normal? Let's hope so. At least I have updated the most popular lists again. I extracted a number of icons during the last days on my Pentium, these are up now. For two of the thusly enhanced games I have added direct downloads:
There are a few other updates, but not really worth mentioning in detail.
Okay. so everything's back to normal—more or less. For today, I just uploaded what I had worked on before the crash without looking at it too closely. There is one new game, New Beetle Tracks & Gaps, which is essentially a remake of Stone Age with new graphics and a publicity stunt for Volkswagen's New Beetle. It is also one of the most graphically advanced games to run under Windows 3.1. There are more than 50 new icons, in some cases I have added a direct download:
(More than 35% of the games on this website can meanwhile be downloaded.) For a few other pages there were other, minor, updates:
I have not done my logs and updated the most popular lists yet. I hope to have that by tomorrow.
In my offline period in June I wrote some strategies for the 15 stages of Lord Monarch Online, as far as I could figure them out. Then I lost them in the harddrive accident afterwards. Now I installed the game on my Pentium 120 and rewrote them with more detail.
No, I haven't reinstalled yet, still there's a small update: I have added icon and screenshot to Smugglers and given more precise system requirements. The online comics page recieved its usual update again, too.
I'm sorry for the current lack of update. It's really just one more chapter in my never-ending story of computer troubles.
I have water cooling in my machine. Some simple, pre-assembled system, similar to CoolRiver, but with a different pump. This pump has proven to be not very reliable; lately, it sometimes just doesn't start. That is not such a problem in itself. The bulk of the water block provides enough cooling for the startup process, and then I get a warning by ASUSprobe so I can shut the system down again. The CPU hasn't gone over 35° centigrade yet.
Actually, now that I think of it, even a few such boot processes wouldn't hurt the processor. But in a moment of panic I interrupted the Windows start process by simply powering off the machine. Usually this should not cause any problems either, but it seems the hard drive didn't forgive me (I'm beginning to wonde if maybe system on a SATA drive is not such a good idea, they seem more fragile). Since then, Windows won't start up any more.
So I'll have to go through the process of installing again. The prospect is nauseating. I haven't brought myself to doing it yet. Instead I started doing other things I've been putting off for a while, like cleaning my apartment.
So this is the situation at the moment. For this update, I'm accessing the server with an old Pentium. But I can't get any real work done on this machine, since it lacks a copy of the website and many of the tools that I use. I guess by tomorrow or the day after I will have fixed my main machine, and everything will be back to normal.
I thought I'd take this icon thing slowly, add a few icons now, and then mostly when I was updating pages. It turned out the other way round. I added more than a hundred icons for today, and I find myself updating pages as I add them. There are eight games where I added direct downloads:
The most interesting in this bunch is Awale, for here I uploaded an old version (from 1998) you won't find anywhere else, and that at least still runs under Win32s. I hope to dig up the native 3.1 version one day. And here are a couple more games with more significant updates:
The missing log file was actually not bad news. It cost me some extra work, but I now have complete logs back to the 4th of this month. The most popular lists are updated again and are now more accurate than before.
I got no logfile for yesterday. This is not necessarily bad news, the logfiles of the last weeks had always been missing the last hour of the day, but were delivered immediately. Before that, I had complete logfiles, however delivered a day later. Maybe my host is returning to the previous method, and I will have complete logfiles again. But for today, there is no update of the various most popular lists.—There are two new games for today:
I have always been an admirer of the icon culture that emerged under Windows 3.1, and I've always thought it would be fun and interesting to display the icons of the games on their pages, and maybe compare and rate them. For now, I have started adding them. Here are the first eight games with icons:
This is not restricted to Windows 3.1 games, or to Windows games, or in any other way, but I am more interested in 16-color icons and will start with those.
It is interesting that since I added the most popular downloads to the navigation, the way people use this site has changed. The number of files downloaded has doubled since the beginning of this month. The number of people who download more than one file has increased too. On the other hand, the number of people who look at the page but don't download the game has increased too. It used to be that these pages were just visited by people who were searching for the game, came, downloaded it, and went. Now, they read the list, take a look, and decide they don't want it after all.
The new game for today is Tristix. It took me a while to finish its page. I wrote quite a lot. In the beginning I was about to pass it by as yet another Tetris clone, then I played it again and thought it was the hottest thing since sliced bread or at least Tetrix, then I played it some more and my enthusiasm cooled down a bit again. Try it out yourself and see what you think. Then there are a few changes to existing pages:
Finally there are a few changes that affect the whole site, or
rather the Game Gallery. As you
will notice, I changed the stylesheet of a bit,
mainly to another font. Currently, the link colors don't go well with
the navigation, but chnaging this involves the google ads and is
therefore more complicated. And I added a Digg This!
link to
the navigation. Feel free to use it, that's what it's there for.
Well, now that I've already met my goal for the month, I'll reduce the speed of updates somewhat, add less games and maybe work on some structural improvements. There will still be something new every day. The new game for today is Assimilation, an unknown Ataxx from Canada. Of all the Ataxx clones I have played, I enjoyed Assimilation most.
I usually set myself a goal for the month. My goal for this month was 800 games. Now guess what: not a third of this month has passed, and I have reached my goal. Here are the six new games that made the eighth hundred full:
There are a few other updates too. I cut the huge table of 256-color games for Windows 3.1 apart and added a real timeline, and I added a most popular list to the 16-bit Windows games index.
Again, six new games for today, this time thea are all Ataxx clones from the first half of the 90s. I don't feel like long comments, just check them out:
Then I noticed that the Surround Gaming page was hopelessly out of date. Some time ago, Matrox introduced the TripleHead2Go adapter. This is an external device that works with most newer nVidia and ATI chipsets. The number of supported games has increased to about 150.
I keep hacking away at my backlog, but it doesn't seem to get any smaller. Six new games for today, no particular connection, in alphabetical order:
BTW the most popular downloads are already the second most visited page.
Well, I didn't clear out my Tetris backlog, of course—there are just too many entries—but it has become a bit shorter. There are eight new games for today, most of them from the mid-90s:
Seems it was not a bad idea to add the most popular downloads to the navigation; it has become the fourth
most visited page in just two days. Since they get so many hits, I have
decided to put the relevant additions on the two most popular
pages, too.
The problem is, of course, that I find games much faster than I can upload or review them. My backlog is never shrinking, it is always growing. The two games I am adding today, I did not know about them 24 hours ago. And there are more, so many more, but for today I'll stick with these two, since one of them is a true gem that I don't want to hide in a crowd.
The gem I am talking about is Pairs. Pairs is a Shisen-Sho, Tobias Lenz developed it in 1996, when the great German Shisen-Sho craze had already subsided. But therefore it also had far better graphics with particle effects, and it had a variety of tilesets to choose from, with the option to add more. It is easily the most beautiful Shisen-Sho ever. Pairs was developed for Amiga and DOS, you can download both versions here. It's the first time I offer an Amiga game for download.
The other new game for today is Sidetris. It's nowhere as exciting, but it's interesting because it is one of the not so many Tetris clones from the UK (the fifth only in my gallery), and one of the few horizontal Tetris clones. Sidetris was developed by Adrian Millett, at least I think so, since it bears the copyright notice of his company, PC Solutions. It seems that the PC Solutions website is currently down, so I have added downloads for Adrian Millett's other two games that I have pages about as well, Flip-It (Othello) and Drop-It (Connect Four).
Tomorrow there will probably be a larger update. I think I'll clear out my backlog of Tetris clones, or something like that.
Before I get to today's detailed updates, some minor general changes. Since last weekend, the FreeFind robot spiders this site not once a week, but daily. The searches should therefore be nearly up-to-date. The actual intervals between the spiderings are 25 hours, currently it's about six hours after my update. I have added the list of the most popular downloads to the navigation, but removed the timeline, since it desperately needs an update and I didn't want the navigation to grow too long. I did reduce the font size a bit and may reduce it further to make room for more items.
The new game for today is Doom 3. While I'm not much into first person shooters I found this game remarkable since it is, in my opinion, thefirst 3D game that managed to actually look good.
Eirik Milch Pedersen, the creator of Atomic, sent me an email telling me that his game is not a remake of A.R. Wright's Chain Reaction, but was instead based on an old MSX Basic game Atoms whose source code was published in a mid-80s issue of Personal Computer World.
The vast majority of the games I added this year were freeware and shareware games, and most of them were puzzle games, board games, and Tetris clones. There are several reasons for that. First of all it is simply nice to be able to directly offer the game you are writing about. Then I increasingly became aware that many of these games are in danger of getting lost. The BBS that were their main channel of distribution have long ceased to exist, more and more of the big FTP servers vanish too. Occasional a BBS got converted into a website, but this is the exception, not the rule. Some old shareware CDs have been put on the web, too, but not every author allowed his games to be put on CDs.
Besides, these websites are little more than collections of download links, there are no screenshots, maybe a short description that is not always accurate. There is no way to look for a certain type of game. Many of the games I have uploaded you could not easily find elsewhere. And it's getting more and more difficult. Some of these games were easily available only a few years ago. There is a high motivation in this. Whether or not I write an article about (say) Dungeon Keeper will not change anything. But whether or not I upload an old Othello or Tetris clone may make the difference whether or not this game is still available a few years hence.
But that does not mean I want to convert this site completely into a shareware archive and give up on articles about commercial games altogether. After all, it is still what the majority of my visitors is looking for. The abovementioned article about Dungeon Keeper will still get read ten times as often as YATC will be downloaded.
So today I have added a page for a game that was already overdue: Oblivion, the fourth RPG in the Elder Scrolls series, that was released in March. Since I'm not as familiar with this game and its community yet, the page is still a bit sketchy, but more is to come.
Three new games for today:
I'm a stickler for GUI-correct screenshots. If a game is for Windows 3.1 then the screenshot should be from Windows 3.1. This often delays the addition of 16-bit Windows games. Since I haven't bothered installing Windows in DOSBox yet, this means transferring them to an appropriate computer. So I fired up my trusty PS/2 57 once again and took a bunch of screenshots. First, there are two Ataxx:
Then, there are three Connect Four:
Finally, there are four Othellos:
So much for today. Ah, so many games, so little time…
