eXoDOS — Some gems and a whole lot of frankly ugly graphics from the early days of PC gaming
From the eXoDOS website: “eXoDOS is an attempt to catalog, obtain, and make playable every game developed for the MS-DOS and PC Booter platforms. We strive to find original media rather than using scene rips or hacks. This collection uses DOSBox to allow these older games to play on modern systems. All required emulators are included and have been set up to run all included titles with no prior knowledge or experience required on the user’s part.”
In the late 1970s and early 80s I was an arcade fiend. I don’t even want to know how much money I spent plugging quarters into great old games like “Tempest,” “Pac-Man,” and “Donkey Kong.” I became an avid PC gamer from the time I purchased my first computer in 1990, spending hours on games such as “F-19 Stealth Fighter,” the “Leisure Suit Larry” series, various Advanced Dungeons & Dragons titles, and “Lemmings.” Of course, “DOOM” and “X-Wing” got a lot of play time out of me as well. I still keep a couple games at the ready on my modern systems, including “Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus” and “Bioshock Infinite,” but I rarely play for more than an hour at a time at this stage in my life.
I first read about eXoDOS on the Gizmodo web site. eXoDOS uses DOSBox to replicate the conditions necessary for old games to work properly on modern hardware. I was not unfamiliar with emulators when I first used DOSBox to resurrect an old chess program called “Cyrus” from 1985.
Back in the mid-1990s I experimented with M.A.M.E. (the multiple arcade machine emulator) when it was dedicated solely to arcade ROMs. I also toyed with various Atari, ColecoVision, and Nintendo emulators. It was fun revisiting “Super Mario Bros 3” and Atari’s “Adventure” but none of the games held my attention for very long except for one — I spent a surprising amount of time on the Coleco port of the game “Miner 2049er” (a Pac-Man influenced game that was fast, fun, and challenging due to having ten different maps to clear).
When installing the eXoDOS emulator you can choose a games on-demand version called the Lite Release, or the whole enchilada (Full Release). I was quite silly and selected the whole version. Who can resist the urge to grab over 7,600 games? However, after downloading all 638 GIGABYTES of data, I found that the hard drive space I had available at the time didn’t have room to actually install more than one or two games! So, I nuked it and downloaded the Lite Release.
The menu system for eXoDOS is okay. It’s called LaunchBox. I say it’s just okay because it’s a little slow when scrolling through the games but to be fair there ARE 7,666 entries after all!. Most of the menu selections feature original box art or a screenshot. The menu also does not recognize if you’ve already downloaded and installed a game, that prompt happens after you try to load a game that doesn’t already have a home on your hard drive. However, you can search for a full or partial title of a game as shown below.
LaunchBox isn’t perfect. See the top middle game “Alone in the Dark?” The word “doom” not only isn’t in the title, it isn’t even in the description of the game which appears on the right when highlighted. But that’s a minor complaint.
So, let’s play a game! One of the LucasArts games which received rave reviews back in the day was “Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.” It was a graphical adventure. I played a three-level demo on a sampler CD I got my hands on and remember enjoying it at the time. After double-clicking, eXoDOS reminded me that I hadn’t downloaded it yet and prompted me to do so. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you how big that download is going to be until after you’ve selected “Y” to download. In this case, the game was only 168 mb and took very little time to retrieve. However, earlier I had grabbed the 1996 adventure game “The Pandora Directive” (a part of the Tex Murphy series which I’m very fond of) and it originally came on four CDs, making the download a total of 3.57 GB. Nothing compared to games nowadays with their 50–100 GB installation sizes, but still a little lag between download and game time!
I encountered a murky area when I was loading this game. I was curious to see if the title is still available for purchase and was surprised to see that it is. Good Old Games has it for only $5.99 and it is guaranteed to work on Windows 10/11, some Ubuntu distros, and Mac OS X (10.7.0+). Since I was only installing games I wanted to test for this article and not planning to play any of them all the way through, I encountered no moral quandry. But a good number of the old games in this project are technically still available commercially through services like Good Old Games and Steam. You’re stealing if you keep and use them.
One very cool thing that eXoDOS does is emulate old school sound cards for music! In the case of this game, you can select a SoundBlaster, the famous Roland MT-32, or another Roland product called the SoundCanvas. There are many other cards represented depending on which game you’re playing, including something I’ve never heard of called “Game Blaster Music.” I had a Reveal SC-500 card in my computer around the time I played the three-level demo of the Indiana Jones game on an old 486 PC. That audio card used a chip which Roland sued (and won) over because the manufacturers had stolen most of the instruments from the MT-32. So, I selected that option and it immediately brought me back to state of the art PC gaming in the mid-1990s. Here’s a short recording of the game’s opening…
You gotta love how they squeeze in a few more credits every time Indy passes out! LucasArts releases were prime stuff back in the day. While the artwork was primitive compared to modern games, they were state of the art in terms of music, sound, and story. Many were quite funny as well, including “Sam & Max Hit the Road” and “Day of the Tentacle.” Another company with a great reputation for graphical adventure games was Sierra On-Line. Their roster included “King’s Quest,” “Police Quest,” “Space Quest” and the “Leisure Suit Larry” series of games.
Now let’s take a look at the opening for a game I remember enjoying at the time I was playing it but which is quite something to behold graphically — Advanced Dungeons & Dragons “Pools of Darkness” (released in 1991)…
It always amused me that the first thing this game does is remind Tandy 1000 users (a PC sold by Radio Shack) to turn on their NumLock. Wouldn’t you just put something like that in the manual? Not in this case!
What about the colors on those villians? Calling them “atrocious” is being kind. Thankfully you can skip the intro with the press of the ENTER key. Yet EVERY location in this game is BUTT-UGLY. And even though the game tells you which door you’re standing next to, wandering around towns or cities with all-too-similar graphics can really wear on the eyes.
Now let’s discuss that text font. I vividly recall despising that font. Sometimes it was blue and sometimes it was a sickly yellow like you’ll see near the end of the video below. A lot of the game involves reading except for when you’re moving through graphically-gauche dungeons or fighting monsters on a turn-based combat platform that barely qualifies as animated, and that font gets old REALLY quick.
Here’s some combat from the game…
I hope you like those noises because you’ve just heard every sound in this game! I recall playing this one before being able to afford a proper sound card for my computer, so just imagine those noises being pushed through a one-inch mono speaker built into the PC case. Granted, I was generally listening to music on my stereo during game time but the constant repetition of those effects could grate on the ears. Nowadays I just don’t have the patience for repetitive sounds like that. In fact, the only reason I played this one to completion was because I spent full price on it and kept hoping things would get better. They did not! And as for music? There is NONE except for the opening sequence.
While this appears to have become a mini-review for this weak game, it is part of the broader picture. I’ve downloaded and tested the beginning portions of about a hundred games. Most of them are terrible to look at! From pixelated graphics to ugly colors and outright horrible sound choices, there is a lot of trash in these games. For every well-executed LucasArts game there are twenty eye-straining graphically-banal releases which are not as good as you may remember them if you were a gamer when they were released. I discovered this to be the case before downloading eXoDOS. I had a version of the Tex Murphy adventure game “Overseer” from 1998 and created a virtual Windows Me system to test it. It was just plain ugly. And that’s what a lot of these games are. And it’s not because I’m playing on an LCD screen while they were created for CRT (tube) displays. The Nintendo games I’ve played with an emulator look great on a modern monitor. The push to 3-D in the 90s made a lot of games quite blocky to look at, and any time full-motion video was included it would have crashed your system if the resolution was anything near resembling VHS quality.
So ultimately, is eXoDOS any good? It’s quite good. The creators have taken the time to make sure every game runs well. I think they’re using a customized version of DOSBox. And the ability to select different sound card types for music is a fantastic feature. The downloading process for games when using the Lite Release is painless and everything just plain works. I kept a very close eye on my network traffic when using the program and it doesn’t seem to be reporting or stealing data. It scanned as 100% virus-free as well, that’s always something to think about when using an emulator such as this. If you’re sitting on a copy of an old game that just won’t work no matter which specs or options you choose, this is a decent option because that work has already been done for you. The team has also announced that they’re planning a version for older games that specifically ran in Windows, that should be very interesting.
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