20 MS-DOS games released in 1984 - in under 5 minutes

Hello and welcome to the third episode of evolution of MS-DOS gaming.
We are in 1984 now.
It was obvious that the games released for MS-DOS were getting better and better. And in 1984, there are quite a few very good games that also aged well.
Tapper, Moon patrol, Boulder dash and Soko-ban - just to name a few of those.
Have fun and let us know in the comments if you think of any games we might have missed.

[@dennyhaynes3]

Definitely an improvement and the signs of things to come for the PC.

[@retrononame]

Agreed. Found a few really good games released for DOS in 1984!

[@CATinBOOTS81]

Alley Cat was definetely a popular and fun game. Something you'll never expect from IBM...

[@nevinleiby]

Omg! Pitstop 2! Wow….yeah, I remember those tracks

[@CastleKnight7]

Some nice gems in there.

[@CaptainRufus]

Whole lot of games that were much better on much cheaper platforms. Yet by 1990? Lord of all it surveys.

[@retrononame]

I think EGA gave us a taste of what was yet to come, but with VGA coming to PC (along with soundblaster), the writing was on the wall for other "game machines". Amiga had a chance to compete (at least for awhile), but bad business decisions from Commodore (sadly) resulted in demise of Amiga as well.

[@kamilciura7953]

you must take into account that at the time, PCs were expensive and used mainly for work. So the fact that anyone has bothered to make games for them at all is kind of a miracle, lol.

[@Miler97487]

I had a TI-99/4A and Buck Rogers and the Planet of Zoom left the PC version in the dust, same for Moon Patrol on the Atari 800XL. Much more colorful (no CGA) and much faster action none of that lousy PC speaker sound, but actual sounds.

[@neilthomas8070]

It is interesting to see how good some of these games were for 1984. Sega produced a few of the games.

[@AngryCalvin]

CGA graphics. Why I much preferred home computers.

[@retrononame]

At least until VGA and Soundblaster came to the PC. Tables turned after that happened.

[@obregr]

tapper,boulder dash,buck rogers,zaxoon,moon patrol,qubert(maš na ps4),spy hunter so legendarne đe od spesya igre

[@CondemnedToBeMe]

👍👍👍👍

[@timlocke3159]

Having owned a Commodore 64 in 1984, these ports are terrible in comparison. It's amazing how bad the IBM PC was. CGA graphics are poor and the flickering shows the CPU was slow. Terrible sound. The only things the IBM PC had going for it was IBM's name and the 80 column text screen. If it hadn't been cloned and become an open architecture, it probably would have failed and we'd have Apple and perhaps Commodore or Atari computers today. Maybe CP/M would have beaten out DOS and become the OS of the open architecture system. Maybe some of the Z80 hardware manufacturers would have survived. DOS would have lost out to CP/M and Microsoft might not be as dominant today. While I liked the C64 versions of some of these games, I prefer the 286 / EGA / Sound card era which while they came out in 1984 but weren't common until a few years later and even then hadn't caught up to the 1985 Amiga in capability.

[@CATinBOOTS81]

"Sound". The PC Speaker has always been painful for my ears. And it has continued that way until much later, with the introduction of the first sound cards... I remember that when 10 years later, in 1994, I bought my first PC, an IBM 486 DX-33 and started playing DooM... My PC still had just the PC Speaker. Can you imagine how cool it was, when 1 year later, I bought a Sound Blaster 16, and went back playing DooM? It was like when people at the cinema for the first time saw a movie with an audio track. It was... AMAZING! Well, being DooM... it was SCARY! But damn coool!

[@drg5352]

@@CATinBOOTS81 My first PC was a C64, which was then joined (but not replaced) by a 386 in 1993. The 386 at least had a VGA card. So it was capable of some awesome graphics, like Might and Magic 3, which a C64 wasn't going to see in those days (these days however I wouldn't be surprised if there was a port of World of Xeen, with Voice, for the C64 in the works!). Sound though was a horrendous step back compared to the C64. The C64 stayed in constant use, partially due to that, partially due to the large number of games we already had, but I tended to play RPGs on the 386, while the arcade titles went to the C64, unless the RPG in question was horrendously bad like Phantasie (stuck with the C64 versions of those). But I don't think I'd have played Ultima 6 nearly as much having to swap the dozen or so disks it required. Finally in 1998 or so both were replaced with an E Machine powered by the mighty AMD K6-II, which still had DOS in the background and could run most of those games, except with better sound, and it could also run a C64 emulator (I think it was VICE, which saw it's first release in 1993; not sure since that has been a day or two). Once EGA came out, and various Soundblasters and Adlibs were out, the writing was on the wall, sadly.

[@CATinBOOTS81]

@@drg5352 my first computer, in the 80s, was also a C64. I had a great time with it! However, when Sega Mega Drive came in Europe... well, I ditched the C64 for it. It was like stuff from a different galaxy, you have the excellent arcade conversions that I always dreamed to have at home. That until when I first saw DooM. I bought my first PC just to play it, and ditched at that point also the Sega Mega Drive. And with finally, a year later a sound card and a CD-ROM player... It was without comparison with other platforms :)

[@drg5352]

@@CATinBOOTS81 We kept our C64 running alongside the NES, Genesis (Mega Drive) and finally 386. They all had a different set of games really, with little overlap, and I never cared that the graphics were better on other systems. By the time Doom came out, DOS was far ahead of other platforms for sure. Of course, I didn't get to play it until much later, by which time Quake was out. More importantly, Might and Magic 6 and Baldur's Gate were out, and I was spending a lot of time with them and the PS1 I got from my brother in lieu of what he owed me.

[@nalim81]

The flickering was not only because of the CPU. Special measures were required to handle vertical sync, but some programmers did not know about them and some did not care. Not sure whether the modern PC emulators handle this behavior of old hardware correctly (bits in port 03DA and lower refresh rate of the old displays / TV screens).