Games for 16-bit Windows

In 1993/94, there was a big change in the world of Windows. Previously, it had been mostly an office thing. Now, Multimedia was the catchphrase. This strongly influenced the type of game that was developed for Windows.

Most of these games run in 640×480, 256 colors. If they support or even require more, I have mentioned it in the rightmost column. Some run in full screen mode, so its basically irrelevant whether you run them under Windows 3.1 or Windows 95.

1991/92: Battle Chess and Mah Jongg

There are very few Windows games running in 256 colors before 1993. First there's Battle Chess from 1991 (still in Windows 3.0 times!); its Enhanced CD-ROM version from 1992. Then there's Ron Balewski's Mah Jongg for Windows. The latter did not strictly speaking require more than 16 colors, it was a port of the author's Mah Jongg -V-G-A-, which ran in high resolution and thus in 16 colors. But since, naturally, none of the existing tilesets used the Windows palette, and no special Windows tileset was provided, a 16 color desktop would result in severe dithering.

1993: The Beginning

The first 256-color Windows games came out in 1993. It was an abrupt and vehement start. DOS SVGA games were still rare in that year, on the other hand, there had been earlier experiments. On Windows, it seems, everybody started programming in 256 colors at the same time. The reason for that is simply support. Windows 3.1 did not originally ship with SVGA drivers, though they were released seperately soon afterwards.

Except for Myst, all these games were Windows originals. Both freeware and shareware (which at the time can be seen as commercial) enterprises were represented. Most of them run in a 640×480 Window, taking up the whole screen.

1993

In a Window
Dominate	Ataxx		Ken A. Foster, Sam C. Misemer
Leapfrog	Cards		Rick Lones, Ella Hobson
Lost in a Labyrinth	Maze		Zane Rathwick
Zanti!	Pipe Mania		PSS/LLCT
The Greens	Golf		Ken A. Foster, Sam C. Misemer
Shih Dao	Ishido
Kalaha	Mancala		Mikael Ekbom
Pipeline	Pipe Mania
Full Screen
Earth Invasion	Arcade		supports hi-color *)
Myst	Adventure
Entombed	Adventure		Henry Thomas, Grantley Day
Get The Girl	sim

*) According to announcements. Earth Invasion is missing in action.

1994: Ports from the Mac

While the games from 1993 were nearly all Windows originals and Windows only, 1994 saw a deluge of ports from the Mac. Many of these were sold on CD and utilized Apple's Quicktime technology. And many of them did not run in a Window at all, but filled the screen the way a DOS game would. If the screen resolution was higher than 640×480, the surplus space would be filled with a solid color or left black.

1994

Mac Ports
Bricklayer	Tetris		Port of Tetris Max
CyberDreams	Adventure		full screen
Poker Party	Strip Poker		hi-color, full screen
SimCity 2000	sim		supports 800×600
SimTower	sim		runs at any resolution
Spaceship Warlock	Adventure		full screen
The Cosmology of Kyoto	Adventure		full screen
Windows Originals
Breakthru!	Tetris		Steve Fry
Boxes	Tetris
Jigsaw 2	Puzzle		Walter A. Kuhn
Pardon?	Board
Tic Tac Death	board		Chris Zinn
VikTRIS	Tetris		Vikram Madan

1995: Multi-Platform

This year saw the height of the Live Actor/Full Motion Video craze. Most of these games were released for DOS, Windows, and Macintosh at the same time, sometimes on the same CD(s). Windows has become one platform among others. Of course there were still a lot of freeware and shareware productions which were Windows only.

1995

Multi-Platform
Blue Ice	Adventure		full screen
Caesar II	strat		full screen
Command & Conquer	RTS
Gabriel Knight II	Adventure		full screen
Phantasmagoria	Adventure		full screen
Space Quest 6	Adventure		full screen
Whale's Voyage 2	RPG
Windows Only
Angband 2.7.8*)	Roguelike		Skirmantas Kligys
Dots	Puzzle		Robert W. Keefe
Hexis	Tetris
Radon	Tetris		hi-color
Reproduction Man	Boulderdash		David Kilmer
The Inside World	RPG		The Softgame Company of Vermont
Tuzzle	Puzzle		Anthony Watson
WWI Air Fighters	Cards		Kamyan Software
Zombie Castle	Action		KomodoWare
Bad Toys 3D	FPS
Blue Angel '69 Remake	MaxIt
Fruits Fields	Mancala		Leslie Tsang
Kalaha 1.0	Mancala		no sound
Lines	Puzzle
Mikan	Shoot-'em-up		Yohei Iwasaki
SFCave	Arcade		Yohei Iwasaki
Passage Plus	Ishido
Sorcerer's Cave	RPG		Peter Donnelly

Note: It may seem somewhat illogical that I have listed Angband 2.7.8 under the Windows only and not under the multi-platform games. I don't wish to argue it, but rest assured it's deliberate.

1996: Still Going Strong

A new trend in 1996 is that DOS shareware games are being ported to Windows: Krypton Egg, Nitemare 3D, Rings of the Magi. All in all, the 16-bit platform is still going strong.

Steingrim Dovland's MZ-Yatzy is a special case: It uses very few colors, but some of them are not part of any Windows palette and will be dithered on a desktop with less than 32k colors.

1996

Original Games
Amazeing 5.11	Maze		Stuart Swain
Anarchy	Puzzle		Cascoly Software
Amanda's Yahtzee	Yahtzee		Tony Clemens
Ancient Yacht 3.0	Yahtzee		LatticeWork Software
Apollo - Mission to the Moon	Lander		Roger Robertson
Crystal Place 1.6	RPG		Mat Trafton
Funsol 2.1	Cards		The Softgame Company of Vermont
LandMine	Minesweeper		Roger Robertson
WinChess 2.50	Chess		Phe Meas
WinNibbles	Snake		Tyler Dauwalder
WinPac 1.8	Pac-Man		Tyler Dauwalder
Y.A.A.C.	Asteroids		Dave Bollinger
Cognito	Concentration		Carolyn Nordin
Flowers Ishido	Ishido		Luciano Vernaschi
Wari 2.0	Mancala		Alberto Airaudi
GoldPusher	Puzzle		Erich Friedman, Daniel & Willem Vree
MZ-Yatzy	Yahtzee		Steingrim Dovland
Space Bastards	Space Invaders		Didier Dambrin
TZ-Breakout 2.0	Breakout		Thomas Zeh, Robert Mundt
WinBrick96	Breakout		Stefan Kuhne
XLM's Dr. Harrison	Chip's Challenge		Axel Meierhöfer
Mah Jongg – The REAL Game!	Mahjong		Berrie Bloem
ZoneGame from Outer-Space	Targ		John Biddiscombe
Ports from DOS
Nitemare 3D	FPS		David P. Gray
Rings of the Magi	Puzzle		Dave Bollinger
Krypton Egg	Breakout

1997: Going out of Fashion

As of 1997, 16-bit Windows was becoming obsolete. Some programmers, like Philippe Basciano, were busy porting their games to the new 32-bit platform. Others were still writing 16-bit programs because they still had Visual Basic 3, or because they were using a 16-bit version of Macromedia Director, or something like Klik & Play. There is something unintentional about these latter games, you will often find them listed under Windows 95, sometimes they are wrapped in 32-bit installers, and not even their creators seem to have been aware of their true nature. But occasionally commercial products, too, still value compatibility with the older platform.

1997

Collidascope	Columns		Sergei Savchenko
Shuttles	Board		Hypnovista Software
Tetris Jr. PC	Tetris
3DCubes 1.5	Blockout		Bruno Maya
Farocar	Soko-ban
Hockey Pong 1.11	Pong		Pellenc
Kyodai	Mahjongg		runs at 800×600 by default
BrainsBreaker 2.0	Jigsaw		Juan Trujillo Tarradas
Life on Mars?	Strategy		Innaky
Metropolis	Board		Innaky
Numerománie	MaxIt		Petr Václavek
New Beetle Tracks & Gaps	Puzzle		Mario Knezovic
Sokoban 97	Soko-ban		Gerald Holler
The BEER! War	Strategy		Marc-André Seekamp
Ringstones	Puzzle		Carolyn Nordin
RusCell Malachite	Card		800×600 hi-color
Siege			Christos Iliopoulos

Since 1998: More and More Hi-Color

By 1998 16-bit Windows programs felt like fossiles. One thing that most these games have in common is that they display correctly only on a hi-color desktop, even if they use as few as 32 colors. Deflektor PC is an exception, and Dragons runs in hi-color to begin with.

Bad Toys 3D v1.95	FPS	98		Tibo Software
Dragons	Mahjongg			Ron Heuse
Mystic Marbles	Puzzle			Frank Burkart
Pastel Fantasy	Puzzle			K. Shimizu
Solitaire Package One	Cards			Kertes Gábor
Rory's Reversi	Othello	99		Rory Johnston
Ultimate Othello	Othello			Florent Boudet
Deflektor PC	Remake	04		Ignacio Pérez Gil

Hardware

While you can play most 16-color games on anything that moves, err, has Windows 3.1 installed, a little more care should be invested in the hardware that is supposed to run these games. It is still easier than setting up a computer for DOS games.

A CD-ROM drive is indispensable. This is not a great problem, all the Pentium and many 486 boards have a BIOS that supports ATAPI drives.

A sound card is essential. I would recommend getting a good sound card, one with wavetable synthesis that is, but since this is Windows, it need mot be compliant with any standard, neither Soundblaster nor MPU-401. As of 2005/6, ISA sound cards, even very good ones, have become rather cheap on eBay, since fewer and fewer people have ISA slots in their computers, so you can go over the top here.

The graphics card will hardly be an issue. None of these games require or even support any kind of acceleration. 1MB video RAM gives you 640×480 at hi-color or 1024×768 at 256 colors and therefore should be sufficient.

Hard drive space will be an issue. The early Windows games were small, several of them fitting on a floppy. These games have higher requirements. Entombed, in its smallest instance, takes up 2.5MB, Breakthru! twice as much. Some are intended to be played directly from the CD, but if you don't want to do this for some reason, they will take up even hugher amounts of disk space. Spaceship Warlock, for example, has about 180MB.