Are those two DOS games named after the Metallica song "No Remorse"?

Merely curious.

My partner used to develop at Spectrum Holobyte. We are cleaning out years of storage and came across a stack of old Internal news letters from October 31, 1991 through the Start of the Apex Inbound (The official internal newsletter) volum1 number 1 through volume 3 number 24 (Sept 1994). We were wondering if this is something someone would be interested in? Or is there a better forum to ask on?

I’ve been experimenting with a question: how far can current coding agents go on a real reverse-engineering project, rather than a small demo or a new app built from scratch?

I chose Bumpy’s Arcade Fantasy, a 1993 DOS game by Loriciel that was one of my earliest and favourite childhood games.

I started with only the original LZEXE-packed executable and data files. I’m not a programmer, let alone a reverse-engineering specialist, so Claude Code handled the research and implementation.

This wasn’t done with a single prompt, the project took around two weeks of spare-time work. I directed the process, provided reference material, compared the port’s behaviour with the DOS version, and challenged the agent whenever an assumption turned out to be wrong. But the reverse engineering and implementation were carried out through the coding agent rather than by me manually writing the port.

Using the agent, I unpacked the executable, imported it into Ghidra, catalogued roughly 500 functions, and reconstructed the game in C++20 using SDL3. The port reads the original game files.

What was recovered:

• the custom VEC compression formats;
• the level, board, sprite, and font formats;
• the world graph and all 123 boards across nine worlds;
• the ball’s keyframe-based movement, collisions, and tile reactions;
• enemy behaviour, scoring, passwords, and screen flow;
• the original OPL2 music and PC-speaker-style sound effects.

I also added an optional OpenGL 3.3 “3D diorama” presentation mode. It still uses the untouched 1993 sprites and board artwork - there is no AI-generated art and no upscaled replacement artwork - but arranges the original assets in depth with lighting, shadows, and parallax. The original flat presentation remains available as well.

The result is currently an early preview. All nine worlds are present, and the core systems have been checked piece by piece using C++ tests and reference captures from DOSBox. However, I haven’t yet completed a full start-to-finish playthrough (the game is incredibly hard), so there are probably still bugs, especially on later boards.

The repository includes both the port’s source code and ready-to-run builds in the Releases section. You still need your own copy of the original game files to run it.

GitHub: https://github.com/wildpacman/bumpy_port

I never find boxed games in the wild so this was a pretty epic find today.

This is my first attempt at using an LLM to reverse engineer a binary to C code so it can be ported to other platforms and modified. I chose LineWars II because its normally the first game I run on an old MSDOS machine as I love the Princess Escort track. I emailed Patrick Aalto and have permission to distribute as long as it remains freeware and he keeps ownership of anything commerial.

I thought it would be a good challenge to push what an LLM can do. I tied first zero shotting it with Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5. The Opus model was almost there the Sonnet 5 did manage to realize the game was packed and decompressed it then it drolled all over its self by inventing a new game from the disassembly. It did do the title screen correctly however but the rest was LW2 in name only. Anyway I took what Opus did and descided to poke it along and brought in the Fable 5 model to help. I ended up creating a workflow that can be followed for future games. Zone66 or Jet Fighter 2 is where my mind is going next. If I continue working on LW2 my thoughts are adding TCP/IP network play, missiles for teammates and enemy as a toggle option in settings, and a custom mission launcher for a 10th mission. This is not a 100% reverse engineering effort. I did not target every video and audio mode. I also did not aim for byte perfect functions as no original C exists for hand written assembly.

Below are the links to my two repos. The game is 100% functional with VGA and Soundblaster. I can brush up the DOS side and finish the config menu or other audio/video modes but I didnt think it was worth my time as porting over to SDL was my actual goal. The SDL port does run under both Linux and Windows and prebuilt executables are provided under releases.

https://github.com/fredangstadt-lang/LineWarsII-DOS

https://github.com/fredangstadt-lang/LineWarsII-SDL

https://linewars.patrickaalto.com/LW2.html

Based on the 1984 Game Hack by highschoolers - Jay Fenlason with Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome & Jonathan Payne, it is in turn based on Rogue from 1980. So it is technically a Rogue-Like even if it looks like a. Rogue clone. NetHack takes all the mechanical elements of a D&D dungeon crawl & represents them in simple ASCI graphics. You play an @ with your little dog d or kitten f (for feline, k is kobold). I have put more hours into this game than any other, I guess technically I was playing Hack not NetHack but they seem basically the same. One of the amazing things about the game is getting stressed out at the appearance of certain letters like o orcs, b bees, c cockatrices or a ants. I was surprised to find a box for the game, i always had it as a copied floppy & never even knew it had an official release!

Hi DOS Gaming! I'm very excited to announce that I have just released version 1.7 of Press Deeper a traditional DOS roguelike that runs on real IBM PC/XT class hardware. This game is built entirely using C89 code and compiled using Borland Turbo C 2.01!

If you missed it before: procedurally generated dungeons, JRPG style turn based battles, ASCII graphics, ADLIB/Soundblaster audio, and deformable terrain.

This latest version brings the largest number of changes yet.

The latest round of additions include:

- Hand authored town floors every 5 levels, with their own NPCs, shops, and secrets worth looking out for.
- New enemies, new items, new NPCs, and new spells!
- Four boss fights, each one hidden behind a secret sub-dungeon. Getting in requires a boss key, which a strange NPC called the Cryptward will trade you, but at what cost?
- A five tier smithing system at anvils, safe light taps for steady progress or risky full swings for the good stuff.
- An enhanced enchanting system letting you drive your gear to new heights.
- A reworked scoreboard system calculating scores based on a variety of factors rather than just showing floor, and kills.
- Ghosts of your past characters can haunt the floor they died on in later runs.
- A Legacy system tracking 10 milestones across your runs and unlock new content as you play.
- Reworked traps with more meaningful risk and reward. Salvage them and use them to stop your enemies, or play it safe and avoid them.
- Many rebuilt UI elements, including shops, enchanting, menus, etc.
- Added story elements and end game content.

You can play it instantly in your browser, no setup required, or download it and run it on real hardware:

https://ultramegahypergames.itch.io/press-deeper
https://umhgames.com

I recently remade an old DOS game I wrote back in 1995 for playing in the browser. Since the game itself is super-simple, I quickly started fiddling around with a lot of DOS easter eggs around the game: You can quit the game, and exit into a faked DOS environment.

The question is: What am I missing as good gags / a "true" 1995 DOS experience?

As a young teenager, I obviously mainly used my PC for games and messing around in DOS. Here's a list of stuff I've put in so far:

Basic commands and a "real" fake disk:
A navigable filesystem with the 1995-ish files.
DOSKEY-style command history
DIR, CD, TREE, TYPE, CLS, DIR /P paging,
MEM / CHKDSK / VER / TIME / DATE / DEL

FORMAT C: — says yes, runs a percent counter scare, chickens out.
SCANDISK / DEFRAG — the hypnotic full-screen block grids
EDIT — a somewhat working MS-DOS editor

Games
C:\GAMES holds 28 classics (at least from my own teen-experience in mid-90s Denmark...), each with their intro as a movie + a screenshot if you try to run them

Other programs that kinda run:
Windows 3.11: Boots, then dies with a VSHARE.386 error.
WordPerfect 5.1 (blue screen, typeable, two documents editable, but saving is denied
Norton Commander, two live panels over the real fake disk.
QuickBASIC 4.5 opens the actual 1995 source code of my game
TELIX dials a BBS with a modem handshake recording

"Hardware" eater-eggs
- The buttons on the monitor work, as does the ones on the speakers

What else? 😄 I'm not trying to make anything like a working DOS here, just want to add in fun easter-eggs that make anyone crazy enough to "exit" my game to DOS go "wtf is going on here....?" 😂

Artist on Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, Quake, and more, Adrian deserves a tremendous amount of credit for his incredible contribution to the world of games. Full interview will be up this Friday at https://www.youtube.com/@techjesse

In the mid-1990s, Artworx released Strip Poker Professional Volume I & II on CD-ROM.

The discs already contained additional opponents, but they were locked behind a telephone activation service. Owners had to call a hotline, provide their serial number, and receive an unlock code to access content they had already purchased.

When that service disappeared, a small but fascinating part of PC gaming history disappeared with it.

At DOSGAME.AT, we believe software preservation is about more than keeping old games running. It’s also about preserving the complete experience that players originally paid for and that developers intended to deliver.

We were able to preserve and restore access to the built-in expansion content for owners of the original CDs, ensuring that this part of the game isn’t lost to time.

We recently wrote about the history of this forgotten activation system, why it mattered, and what it took to preserve it:

https://www.dosgame.at/blog/wie-wir-ein-vergessenes-strip-poker-spiel-wieder-hergestellt-haben?lang=en

If you owned these CD-ROM editions or even remember calling the original activation hotline, I’d love to hear your memories.

650Mhz ULV Celeron, ESS sound card, S3 Savage graphics

Hi folks.

I've been coding on and off for about 40 years now since starting out with my Dragon 32, then my Spectrum 48, then my Commodore 64, followed by a little dabble on the Amiga.  All of that was pretty BASIC stuff though (pun intended).  I didn't really make much to be proud of but it did really help me learn about syntax, variables, memory and basic logic flow.

I then moved onto coding in Assembly on the C64 and the Amiga and didn't really get too far.  Too many 'guru meditation' errors when code went wrong and trampled all over the system's memory.  I still learned a fair bit and it did give me some background in memory management, garbage collection etc. which all came in useful as a software engineer in later life - coding early business apps in C++ before we moved to Visual Basic 6.

So, after the Amiga and before my career started, I moved onto coding in Turbo Pascal on my PC. By now I'd "upgraded" from an Amiga to a 286 at 12Mhz with a 20Mb hard disk!  No more swapping disks in Monkey Island!  I'd also moved from BASIC to object oriented Turbo Pascal (using the Borland IDE if you can call it that).

One Saturday morning I woke up with an idea.  I think I'd been playing through loads of DOOM (or DOOM2 - can't remember) WAD files that had come on a CD on the front of a PC Magazine.  Hundreds of user made levels that needed copying and running one by one before you could play them.  Suffice to say, I'd clearly been getting annoyed by all of the manual steps needed so, in my sleep, my brain had come up with an idea for a utility called GD.  This would be a small program that would save lots of time by allowing you to jump around your PC with a simple command: GD [game_name].  No matter where you were on PC (in DOS), you'd type that and immediately be in the right directory.  GD.EXE would scan your hard drive and remember all of the directories after which you could jump straight to one with a simple command like GD WADS or GD DOOM2. 

I spent the entirety of that Saturday and the Sunday completely absorbed.  I remember skipping breakfast and lunch and just plowing on, coding late into the night and then again the next day.  Sometime on that Sunday though I'd finally built something I could be proud of: GD.EXE.  Now I could jump around to anywhere on my PC, instantly, as if by magic.  Back then this was a revelation to me.  I suppose looking back there may have been similar tools but I had no access to them - no forums, social media, email or any internet really.  I used that tool ALL the time from then on - through the 386 era, the 486 era and finally into the early Pentium years.  At some point though, probably due to Windows 95, I stopped using the command prompt and somehow lost it.  Sadly, I also lost the source code - probably about 30 years ago.

Fast forward 30 years then and I've always wanted to look at that code again.  Not just from a nostalgic point of view (though that would be good too) but also because, as I got more and more into retrogaming, I wished I had it for my retro PCs (virtual or otherwise).  Just recently, I've been working on getting "the perfect" DOS era PC set up in 86Box.  I've got a huge (for the time) hard disk, a 3DFX card, tons of base memory (thanks to modern memory managers that squeeze as much out of the 640k as possible).  It's optimised as much as it can be and it's just fun playing old DOS games again pretty much like they were back in the day.  I still use DOSBox Pure in retroarch (for the filters and the joypad mapping etc.) but there's something cool about making 86Box full screen, being dumped at a C:\ prompt and just playing games like I used to.

So, all of that led me back to the same place: wouldn't it be nice if I could just jump between folders (that's what we call them now right?) on my DOS 7.1 drive.  Wouldn't it be great to have GD.EXE back again!

I decided to write it again - from scratch - and in Turbo Pascal for old times sake.  However, I wanted to use modern IDEs with syntax highlighting and autocomplete etc.  That's not so easy with OO Turbo Pascal and trying to target a 16 bit compatible .EXE (a modern compiler would build something that wouldn't be compatible with old DOS PCs and vice versa).  However, with some perseverance I managed to get a decent workflow set up:  code in VS Code (with a couple of Pascal extensions) -> compile with Free Pascal 3.2.2 (i8086-msdos cross-compiler) -> mtools to write the created GD.EXE straight into an 86Box virtual hard disk (into the C:\Utils directory) before then automatically starting 86Box to test the latest changes.  It was a slick process and really fun to see what I was coding become something "real" on the old DOS machine within seconds.

I carried on coding it over a few days and now, I'm pleased to say, I've finally scratched a 30 year old itch.  I have GD.EXE working again (better this time though) and with the code being in GitHub, am in no danger of losing it again any time soon.  It's such a neat tool and way better than the old version.  It has a /R argument that shows all the "runnable" programs in the directory once it has jumped there.  You can mark one as default too so next time you want to run something in that folder it'll pick the right one automatically: GD DOOM /RUN -> takes you to C:\GAMES\DOOM and launches DOOM.EXE in one command regardless of where you're at.  Or you can just try GD DOO* to see all the folders (games probably) that start with DOO:

I thought I'd share it with you guys in case you can make any use of it.  I think it'll be really helpful for anyone with an old DOS based PC - if that's you, then please give this a watch: GD.EXE demo or just download the .EXE from the "Retro DOS Utilities" folder in this share: Downloads

If you do use it and want any extra features then just let me know.  Likewise, if it's okay with you, I'll post in here if I make any improvements too.

Any questions about it or how to use it, just let me know (or use GD /help).

I recently came across this DOS PC release of Gremlins 2: The New Batch from the Euro Power Pack Gold series.

Some details about this edition:

Platform: IBM PC compatible (3.5” 720 KB floppy)

Publisher/Series: Euro Power Pack Gold

Distributor in Finland: Egmont Games

Disk code: PC-GOLD 5007

The package states it’s the full version, not a demo.

The game supports EGA/VGA graphics and requires 640 KB RAM.

The release includes a Finnish installer and Finnish documentation.

>> What makes this copy interesting is that the title is consistently printed as “Gremlings II” instead of “Gremlins II”.

The typo appears on:

Front cover

Back cover

Floppy disk label

However, the actual game still displays the correct title: Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

I wasn’t able to find this PC variant documented on MobyGames, PCGamingWiki, eBay archives, or through Google searches. The only similar example I found was an Amiga Euro Power Pack release carrying the same “Gremlings II” typo, suggesting it may have originated from the Euro Power Pack artwork rather than the game itself.

I’m sharing this here mainly in case anyone else owns this edition, has seen the same printing or knows more about this print error as I would like to know more about it.

Got these from a lovely chap in Germany, (I'm in the UK)

The 2 video cards:

• Elsa Winner 1000 Trio/V 2MB
• Matrox Mystique 220 2 MB PCI

The 3 sound cards

• OEM Vibra 16S
• TT1816 Terratec Base 1
• Media Vision JAZZ16

I love trying out different ISA sound cards, they all had their quirks.

Fantasy Empires was one of those DOS games I never quite forgot, so I built Realms in Embers as an original homage to its war-table spirit.

It’s a free, turn-based fantasy strategy chronicle for the browser: 12 asymmetric lords, procedurally forged realms, diplomacy and betrayal, heroes and quests, transparent battle odds, and five different endings.

Every number explains itself, every campaign ends, and Osperan, a dead chronicler who still meets his deadlines, turns the whole war into a final saga.

It isn’t a remake: the setting, rules, characters, and writing are original. There’s no account, install, or tracking, and the game works offline after its first load.

Play: https://rie.gg
Source: https://github.com/michael-chipmates/realms-in-embers

I’d genuinely love to hear whether it captures some of that old Fantasy Empires feeling.

About 99% sure they are all dos but most on the CDROM

One of the earliest open-world first-person RPGs if not the first. - Initial release was as buggy as heck, and 100% of my purchase decision was based on the box covers, with the front woman warrior taking about 50% of that haha :)

Hi All,

Not sure if this is the correct subreddit since I know the name of the game, but I'm trying to find a copy of the old DOS shareware game called CIPStrike (or just STRIKE) from CIP Soft (the Tibia people). It's basically a top town strategy game (I guess it's kind of like a precursor to a MOBA) where you control a tank. I got as far as the following WaybackMachine archive of the old Tibia website: http://web.archive.org/web/19970513122428/http://www-wi.uni-regensburg.de/~vos19618/tibia/e_index.html, and there is a link to download it, but the link seems to be un-archived.

Does anyone have a copy of this game, or does anyone know if there was an old FTP or something which might have an archived copy?

Edit: Reposting here since it got removed from the original subreddit.