Before the advent of the Internet, there was the Excalibur BBS (bulletin board system). I discovered several boards based on Excalibur software after my family bought our first home computer. With our trusty dial-up modem squeaking and squawking along, I downloaded every shareware game that caught my eye.

One of my favorite titles from that era is Epic Pinball. These days, Epic Games is best known for the Unreal Engine and games like Unreal Tournament 3 and Gears of Wars 2. In the early 1990s, they built a reputation for developing excellent PC games like Jazz Jackrabbit, One Must Fall: 2097, and Epic Pinball.

Thanks to DOSBox, I can indulge in nostalgia and re-play my favorite PC games of the early 90s in Windows. After discovering earlier today that DOSBox allows users to record video of DOS games and applications, I recorded a video of the “Enigma” table from Epic Pinball.

Click past the break for the video.

Continue reading →

In 1994, just a few months before changing their company name to 3D Realms, Apogee published a shoot-em-up for DOS developed by Cygnus Studios (now Mountain King Studios) and titled Raptor: Call of the Shadows. I downloaded the shareware version of the game from a local bulletin board system (BBS) and played it for hours on end.

I was impressed with the game’s cutting edge (for 1994) graphics, excellent sound effects, and fluid controls. I had played several shmups prior to trying Raptor, but the precision of the mouse-based control scheme was, in my eyes, far superior to controls for console-based shmups of the Super Nintendo/Genesis era.

I recently downloaded the shareware version again, loaded it using DOSBox, and recorded a video of my playing the first level with a trackball. Click past the break for the video.

Continue reading →