http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/ Something like a resource for (retro-)gamers. en-us http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/2011-11-21.htm I'm still working on the Japanese games a lot. Today, I've added a index for PC Engine games, a PC-9801 screenshot for Puzznic, and a couple more pages have the new design. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/2011-11-21.htm I've added lists for the Fujitsu and Sharp computers. There's a correction for Fruits Fields, which was not an original X68000 game but released two years earlier for PC-88 and FM-7, and an update for Tetris. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/cyrus.htm Richard Lang wrote the chess program Cyrus in just six months of his spare time. He was the clear winner of the PCW-European MCC 1981. Running on an 8-bit microcomputer, Cyrus could even hold its ground against a Cray mainframe. The commercially released PC version was probably the first game that supported IBM's new Enhanced Graphics Adapter, and it did so with a mastery rarely ever achieved again. Cyrus is one of the very few chess programs ported to NEC PC-98, where it bore the name Laptop Chess. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/pf-pc98.htm Nearly four years ago I added a list of PC-98 games. Since then, it has been under construction. Now I've finally finished it. It is now three times the size and should really contain every game on this website where I could verify the existence of a PC-98 version. Each game is now listed under its Japanese name as well. If you want to search for these games on Japanese websites, these are the names to use, even if the title screen uses Romaji. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/2011-11-12.htm At the moment, the Daggerfall page is the second most viewed. Guess yesterday's release of Skyrim has renewed interest in the Elder Scrolls games. And not only those: Gridiron, Bethesda's first game, gets lots of hits as well, though not enough to make it into the top twelve. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/2011-11-10.htm More about Ningyou Tsukai, Return to DOS redesigned, and a dozen new games on Download Central. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/ningyou.htm Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present the first English webpage dedicated to the original Ningyou Tsukai. Ningyou Tsukai is the game on which Metal & Lace is based, but the two games are quite different. In Metal & Lace, you buy armors, upgrade them, pick one to use in the fight. Every hit will cause lasting damage that has to be repaired afterwards. In Ningyou Tsukai, you do nothing of these things. You just fight. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/2011-11-05.htm I haven't written a changelog entry or even RSS entry for a while, so here's what happened in the last four weeks. Mostly, I'm redesigning the games section. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/win16.htm For the first time since quite a while there's a new Windows 3.1 game again: TDK Pinball Machine. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/pf-amiga.htm Around 2000, meanwhile defunct Austrian developer neo released one of their most successful games, the burglary simulation 'Der Clou!', as freeware. Unfortunately, they could only release the German original, not the English translation. Since the game is rather text-intense, some knowledge of German is absolutely necessary. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/ff.htm Okay, this page was crap. I hadn't updated it in ages, well I haven't played a Final Fantasy game in ages. I put some Yoshitaka Amano art on the page, continued the list up to Final Fantasy XIV, checked the links and wrote a personal introduction. Ah yes, and I restored the old FFVI screenshots from summer 2001. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/filler.htm Better description of the gameplay, and a more detailed history. The Filler for Windows page has a new design as well. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/playhouse.htm When I last updated the page about four years ago I didn't even know a DOS version existed. Only now I've actually found it, played it, and took some screenshots which I put on Svatopluk's DOSBox. It looks a bit strange, since cyan is used for skin, not magenta, and it plays a bit strange as well. Judy has a tendency to fold quickly, at some point I started raising $30 (the maximum) though I had only one pair. She raised as well, various sums, till the pot was at $3,400. Then she folded, took everything off, and the game was over. Kim seems to play on the same algorithm. I got bored and didn't play her very far. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/log.htm All changes on Astoria will again be announced via the changelog as well, often with more details than in the RSS and with screenshots. I've made log entries for all the updates since 2011-09-24, when I began working systematically on Astoria again. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/hollywood.htm Apart from inserting the bit about Pokestripper, I replaced the ST screenshot for one in full resolution. Both the 16-bit versions used a higher resolution to display the cards in more detail. I don't know how that worked technically on the ST, which as far as I know did not allow mixed resolutions on the screen and had only four colors on mid-res. But the cards are definitely mid-res, and still there are 16 colors. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/poke.htm Pokestripper was written by Holger Ahrens, I learned, and it was later licensed by Golden Games and sold in the UK as Hollywood Poker for Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The menus got a new font, otherwise nothing was changed. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/poker.htm I've added a longish part about the history of real-life strip poker. In spite of many myths that it was played 150 years ago in New Orleans bordellos, or in Gold Rush California, there is no actual evidence before the late 1920s. For what it's worth, I added Dietrich Eckhardt's claim to have written the first strip poker game on a TRS-80 in 1979. And I gave the page a new design more fitting the topic. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/games-th.htm On Svatopluk's DOSBox and Download Central I gave the article 'The' seperate entries in the alphabets. Now I've done the same here. It helps avoid multiple entries, and with some games the article is so much part of the name that it's included in the common abbreviation, as with The Incredible Machine or The Longest Journey. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/ffields.htm In May I uploaded Fruits Fields for Windows to Download Central and wrote a blog entry whith some screenshots. Now I've added a page here, with a screenshot of the Sharp X68000 original. -- This is the first game page that I have added since AXIA 2009-06-20. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/freetrain.htm The FreeTrain localization has been finished in June 2007. On Windows, it needs a newer version of .NET than the Japanese original. Binaries are available only for Windows, but it has been successfully compiled for Linux and Mac OS X. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/ You know, I really suck at making index pages. They are always the worst ones on my websites. But anyway I've given the game section a new one... kinda to show I'm serious about redesigning it. At the moment it only points to those pages that already got a facelift. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/fintris.htm The Fintris stuff was quite distributed around. I had an old screenshot gallery with download, menu screenshots mostly, since the game didn't run well on the machine I then had. Later I made some gameplay screenshots in DOSBox, but never linked them. Now I've moved the download to Download Central and given the page a facelift. Fintris is, in spite of its annoying shareware messages, a fine Tetris clone with impressive graphics. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/damage.htm The page got a new design based on the old Damagegame website that existed 2001 to 2005 or so. The content hasn't really changed since there is nothing new to write about, but I smoothed the text here and there. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/thb.htm Re-added the blurb I had removed some time ago, and gave the page a new design, basically the same the screenshot gallery has both pages have new colors though (inspired by the original box) to increase the visibility of the logo. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/ultima/ Last year in May I moved them to another server because I was constantly banging my head on the 20MB ceiling. Now I've got 250MB and it's not a problem any more. I'm currently working on the Ultima pages, which are in rather bad shape. Will take me a few more days however. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/gamelist.htm I have removed all the links to my other sites from the alphabetic game list, since Download Central, Svatopluk's Arcade and Game Screenshots are included in the site search, there is no need to list them there. The list is now basically a partial site map. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/popular.htm I have now a counter system on Astoria that actually works, so I added a "most viewed pages here" list to this page, and moved the most viewed DOSBox screenshot galleries to the DOS games page. Today I updated all these most viewed/downloaded pages for the first time in this month, and there are more changes than usual. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/sc_2000.htm I uploaded the Windows 95 demo to Download Central and updated, the page, restructuring a bit and replacing the cropped screenshot with the logo that I edited out of the startup screen. It will look better against a dark background, but I didn't get around to changing that yet. I had to remove only one link, all the others still work. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/torment.htm Removed some broken links, added some new ones, and gave the page a new design based on the old official website, using some of its graphics. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/nwn.htm Removed some broken links, added concept art for two characters and gave the page a new design based on the old official website. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/bricks.htm There are now three games named Bricks on Download Central. Curt Johnson's Breakout game for Windows, Vince Bly's CGA Breakout game that runs in the uncommon and undocumented 160×100 mode, and now I've added Andreas Rotter's Klotski clone for DOS. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/caro.htm Thu Nguyen's Caro, which has been for download for five and a half years, has suddenly gained in popularity immensely, it is at the moment the most downloaded game on Download Central. So I researched a bit and here's now a page about Caro, which is the Vietnamese variant of Gomoku with slightly different rules. Currently there are two games of that name for download. Both are actually standard Gomokus and do not implement the special Vietnamese rule. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/megatech.htm This is one of the oldest pages on Astoria, and it was the first one that had a link from elsewhere pointing to it, so it is dear to my heart. Since most of the text is quoted from the old Megatech website, I had long thought that it would be a nice idea to give it a design similar to that website as well. Now I've finally done it. There are a few small updates to the introductions. The pages for the games are at the moment unchanged. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/tes.htm These three pages now have a new design using the background image of the book section of The Evening Star, a defunct but archived Daggerfall fan page. On the TES page, I have updated the Travels section, the Arena page has new screenshots and a few new sections, the Daggerfall page has its link section fully back and updated. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/poker.htm As you may have noticed, I'm at the moment updating a lot of strip poker pages. Most of them date back to 2004, when my interest in this genre was greatest. I'm giving them independent designs and layouts as well, something I plan to do with most of the site, but of course it takes time. I've made a section for these updated pages at the top of the main strip poker page, and added thumbnails for the downloads near the bottom. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/cabin.htm Basically I've collected all that can be found about this game, which is not much: A pre-release blurb, the text from the product page (just a blurb as well), a very small boxshot, a resized compressed screenshot, and one review from a newsgroup. I corrected the release year, which was 1997, not 1998. Artworx no longer sells Cabin Fever, the product page is still up but not linked from the homepage. I gave the page a new, unique design as well. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/isomaker.htm This page was seven and a half years old. I expanded the section about IsoWorld, which SpriTec now considers legacy software and sells to a reduced price (you get a commercial license for what previously the consumer license cost), removed a broken link and added some info about FIFE, though it's technically not a game maker and requires actual programming. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/rgsp.htm Since 2009, Pokai Software no longer sell this game. The website is still up, you can download the patches and the hints and screenshots remain, but you can no longer buy the game or download the demo. So I put up the Windows demo on Download Central, and I gave the page a new design similar to the old Pokai website before 2002. I noticed that my page is actually rather poor, there's very little on it, but then RealGirls Strip Poker is not a game I've played a lot. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/stripper.htm I noticed that the Stripper Poker website is gone, has been gone for nearly three years now. The domain is parked, it's probably no longer possible to buy or get the full game. I moved the demo download to Download Central, and I wound up completely redesigning the page. Took me quite some time, I didn't you can sit for the better part of a day over a single page. Some of the opponents had little homepages on the old website, I salvaged those from the Wayback Machine, you can admire them in an iframe approximately the size of a 1997 browser window. The whole page now has a web 1.0 look inspired by a partial mirror of the old Stripper Poker website. I hope you'll like it, I sure do. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/apple/ I discovered a site named FlamingText where you can create logos with all kinds of effects online (not just flaming text). I wrote a blog entry about it and then of course I had to try it out. The best candidate was my old Mac site, The Orchard, which sorely needed an update anyway. Now all the pages have graphic headers, all the links are checked, and the home page is a bit more useful. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/fallout1.htm The page now really links to all my Fallout-related content, both on this site and external. I have replaced the mini games section with a Downloads section that has thumbnails of everything Fallout-related on Download Central, not just the mini games. -- In related news, I have started reorganizing the categories and tags on the ISA-Bus, in part to integrate the blog better with this site, and I'm putting links to these categories and tags on the relevant pages. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/uv.htm 14 years after Fallout, the Unwashed Villagers still exist. Since 2007, they have a new board. I checked all the links, removed and updated where necessary, but found dome new ones as well, added a few details and restructured the page, giving it subheaders. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/download.htm Arachne has become quite popular this month, I decided to include it in this list though it is not a game. This list is now about all the downloads that were not available either from here or from King Svatopluk's Court before, regardless of type. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/tetriscl.htm In the last days I uploaded a dozen Tetris clones to Download Central, most of which were previously for download here. Four are completely new, Atomic Tetris, Megatris, Netris, and Quote-tris. CRTetris had a page, but no download. For WildSnake, both the Russian and English demos are now available. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/lc.htm Yesterday I uploaded Legal Crime 1.1.5 to Download Central, today I updated the Legal Crime page here. I hadn't really touched it in seven years, it's the only page that still has a completely different design, without the side menu. I left it like that. I just removed the broken links, added a short introduction, two small screenshots, and a few additional details.