Hm. I don’t mean to judge, it's just that I would associate many modern text-mode-based DOS retro games with CP/M era, rather. 🤷‍♂️
Rogue-like games, Snake, Pacman, Chess, Ladder Man, Castle, Tetris, Hunt the Wumpus, Zork, Adventure.. They had been on CP/M computers, Commodore PET, DEC PDP..
Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmbQaTDer8s

By typical DOS games, I'm rather thinking of something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ3znwa9AL8

It likely must be a generation thing, also. So each to his own, no worries, it's okay.
I "grew up" in EGA/VGA era, simply. When Shareware was at its height.
That's why I feel a bit disconnected with modern retro game development, I suppose. 🤷‍♂️

MrFlibble wrote on 2024-11-09, 15:38:

"Retro" is such a vague term that has been applied to a wide spectrum of different things recently. Also note that the games you […]
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Jo22 wrote on 2024-10-31, 15:43:

The problem with such recent releases is though that they're all intentionally made "retro", I think.

"Retro" is such a vague term that has been applied to a wide spectrum of different things recently. Also note that the games you mention, Paku Paku and MagiDuck, have a very low resolution because they actually use hacked text modes to achieve more colours on the screen in CGA mode at the cost of lower resolution. They are more of a marvel of programming trickery, than your usual "games with Very Big Pixels(tm)" that people have been trying to pass for "retro" since the 2010s.

Also MagiDuck is a full-fledged Metroidvania-esque platformer that could've very well come out on a console in the late 80s/early 90s as a commercial game. This is in contrast with vast masses of incomplete DOS game projects that have accumulated likely since early-2000s -- a brief visit to a QBasic site will give you plenty of examples, and with the recent resurgence of interest in DOS game programming, new contenders have appeared as well, being either straightforward demos (with the full version coming someday), or "full" games that are still, essentially, tech demos.

However, there are at least several notable DOS games that have come out this year, that are not intentionally "over-the-board retro" in any sense.

Anzu Castle Gracula is probably perfect or near perfect, with its authentic-looking stylised 16-colour visuals and classic Castlevania gameplay it looks better than the actual DOS version of Castlevania, and could've been a commercial title back in the early 90s (or a truly mind-blowing shareware game if it travelled in time back there). Also, for a QBasic game, it is extremely polished and smoothly flowing, at least in DOSBox. Now available on Steam too.

Betrayed Alliance, now, you might argue that this is not a "pure" new game because it still uses the original SCI binary, and the first version came out about 10 years ago, but you just have to appreciate the new art and music, which looks very authentic to the old Sierra's adventures.

Games by Cyningstan (Damian Gareth Walker) feel a bit niche, and I'm not sure they look very much like whatever equivalents for them you could find in the early DOS era, but they are certainly full, complete games and play as such.

Also I think you should not overlook recent Doom engine games/TCs that run in DOS, namely REKKR and Harmony Compatible (granted, the original Harmony came out in 2009) . Especially REKKR, which has a pretty strong authentic feel, with all the sprites pre-rendered in ways similar to what you could see in an actual 90s "Doom clone".

There are fairly decent racing games, RetroFuel (2020), Carser (2023) and RCross (2021), for example.

Death Taxi 3000 is modelled after Quarantine, although I've not yet played it and cannot tell how fully featured it is. It is available on Steam though.

Thanks for listing the games, MrFlibble. REKKR was a nice discovery for me. Nice that it runs in bare DOS.
And running the reker.wad with GZDOOM resulted this weird mixed game looool. REKKR sprites in DOOM 2 maps!

While choosing Heretic map gives the opposite result 😀))

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-09, 20:23:

By typical DOS games, I'm rather thinking of something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ3znwa9AL8 […]
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By typical DOS games, I'm rather thinking of something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ3znwa9AL8

It likely must be a generation thing, also. So each to his own, no worries, it's okay.
I "grew up" in EGA/VGA era, simply. When Shareware was at its height.
That's why I feel a bit disconnected with modern retro game development, I suppose. 🤷‍♂️

To be very honest, while I appreciate the modern efforts to create new DOS games, I think it is unrealistic to expect that there will be many projects that will both aim to recreate the look & feel of the DOS era and actually target the DOS platform. However, you can look for the type of games you're used to on modern platforms. for example, there are quite a few adventures that mimic the classic Sierra style, such as Tachyon Dreams, Heroine's Quest or The Telwynium.

There's this platform/shooter called Haunted Lands that is clearly inspired by Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion. Planet Cloudius IX is a stand-alone Commander Keen tribute/fangame set in its own universe. Heck, there's Dave Gnukem, the original Duke Nuke(u)m "freeclone".

I can list other games that are directly inspired by or overwhelmingly similar to pretty much classic DOS titles from the early-mid-90s, but most of them are not for DOS (although some may probably be ported to DOS or remade in DOS with some degree of effort).

^Thanks for the links! 😃

MrFlibble wrote on 2024-11-10, 10:48:

To be very honest, while I appreciate the modern efforts to create new DOS games, I think it is unrealistic to expect that there will be many projects that will both aim to recreate the look & feel of the DOS era and actually target the DOS platform.

I understand. I'm not asking for remakes of, say, Jazz Jackrabbit also.
What I do rather miss a bit is the 486 DOS era, in which all sorts of genres were around.

Games of that era had very different looks, from Jill of Jungle to Whacky Wheels and beyond.
Their most common thing was the use of mode 13h and 256c graphics, maybe.
And from what I've learnt in the past recent years, some of these games were even multi-platform.

Those advertisement games, for example, had been released simultanously on PC and Amiga at the time (with their graphics being down-converted to 32c).
One game (?) had been compiled using a Pascal language on Amiga. Not sure what the PC version had used. Turbo Pascal?

Anyway, this makes me wonder why there's seemingly no new development in that area.
I can understand that DOS is seen as unspectacular these days, but aren’t there any Amiga fans anymore, either? 😟
How comes that C64 or ZX Spectrum still have new games like the way they've used to have?
Porting games to DOS/VGA must be more straightforward, I suppose, because you have an HDD and a filesystem to work with.

The only rational explanation that comes to mind is that people simply don't care.
And that's the point I fail to understand. Because Linux is even more boring and unnecessary, but has a cult following. There are even x86 Linux builds at itch.io!
From a purely rational point of view, though, there shouldn't be any games for it, at all.
Because it's just as pointless and as much of a niche platform as DOS here, if not more.
Wine and Cedega can run Win32 games on Linux just fine, so any native ports are superflous. Especially if they're x86 only.

Edit: What I think is special about DOS platform is that is an ancestor of today's leading PC platform.
Retro programming for DOS platform doesn't necessarily involve emulation, as it is the case with the other retro platforms (Amiga, C64, Acorn).
A virtual machine can create an sufficient faithful environment to let DOS games run, with the actual binary code being processed natively by the host processor.
This allows for very complex, very demanding games. Some that might use things like SSE and AVX.

Edit: And that's what I find fascinating, the low-level approach.
On DOS, programs are technically free to do anything.
It would be possible to compile executables that take advantage of modern features, too.

Edit: What I've also found fascinating was the virtual reality phase of the DOS era.
In the mid 90s, in the 486DX and Pentium days, there had been experiments with 3D graphics using VR helmets and shutter glasses (ex. VFX-1, Cybermaxx and i-glasses).

Edit: VR ads from 90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y44pPRydc5s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dji9YiPZ4AM

So if the "Monkey Island era" has become boring these days to coders, why hasn’t Virtual Reality retro development catched on?

I mean, there had been high-level standard APIs like LCDBIOS. Why aren’t there wrappers to modern VR APIs being written?
Or how about patched versions of DOSBox that support LCDBIOS emulation? For use with Occulus Rift?

It's things like this that puzzles me. Were have all those energetic people of the past have gone? 🤷‍♂️
They can't be dead or retired yet, if they were 20 something in the 90s!? 😥
Why must have become everything so boring, so unsopthisticated these days? 😟
Back in the 90s everything seemed possible eventually, even though technology was humbler than it's now.

Edit: Please don't get me wrong, this isn't meant as a rant or complaint.
It's just that I don’t understand people anymore, despite I really want to. 😟
For example, I have a hard time understanding why people (incl. my former school mates) love shooters these days so much, despite there being so fascinating/exciting things such as interactive fiction, chess and books*!
I try to analyze the situation, also from a psychological point of view, but the results are always pretty vague.

(*and radio plays! When I was little I've used to listen to audio books on my cassette walkman with headphones on! Among of them stories by Enid Blyton.
This was so much more exciting than watching TV. Choose-your-own-adventure books were amazing, too!)

MrFlibble wrote on 2024-11-09, 15:38:

Anzu Castle Gracula is probably perfect or near perfect, with its authentic-looking stylised 16-colour visuals and classic Castlevania gameplay it looks better than the actual DOS version of Castlevania, and could've been a commercial title back in the early 90s (or a truly mind-blowing shareware game if it travelled in time back there). Also, for a QBasic game, it is extremely polished and smoothly flowing, at least in DOSBox. Now available on Steam too.

i had to check that one, a new QB game! It does play well. I checked the source and it uses DirectQB - late 90's wonder library! nice to see it still being used!

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-10, 22:55:

Anyway, this makes me wonder why there's seemingly no new development in that area.
I can understand that DOS is seen as unspectacular these days, but aren’t there any Amiga fans anymore, either? 😟

I'm not very knowledgeable of the Amiga affairs, but it is my understanding that new games are being developed, or at least ported to that platform.

Occasionally, I visit Indie Retro News, and they ceratinly feature news for the Amiga platform. However, the only project that I had any interest in so far is Grind, which started as an attempt of a Freedoom conversion to Amiga, but eventually developed into its own thing. The same developer has a few other projects that look very much "retro" in the right sense too.

But you're right, those new Amiga games could be ported to DOS I guess, maybe someday?

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-10, 22:55:

stories by Enid Blyton.

I used to be a fan of the Five Find-Outers series when I was a kid.

Hi again. I've found a home video on Youtube that was recorded in early 90s.
https://tinyurl.com/4bjjy6b8

I think it's quite interesting and matches my idea about what DOS game development meant at the time.
The person in the video probably has an PC/AT compatible w/ VGA and a Sound Blaster card (or comparable).

The microphone roughly is the kind of model my father had used for his cassette-based dictation machine (cardioid microphone in silver).
(That recorder was a silver "walkman" with a built-in microphone, voice control and jacks for ear/mic/remote.)

That being said, I'm no way affiliated.
Just found the video online while looking for video about Amigas/Ataris running DOS in emulation (since it's DOScember again, I think).