Harekiet wrote:

Hehe funny, duke nukem 2 actually seems to use the 16 color mode and changes the palette. It doesn't work in ega mode since you only have 16 colors in ega mode due to it's cga monitor compatibility for lowres modes.

Didn't the EGA standard have a palette of 64 and a maximum of 16 colours on screen

also so i WAS right when i thought it would be Duke Nukem 2 , too bad i didn't send in a guess

> Didn't the EGA standard have a palette of 64 and a maximum of 16 colours on screen

Only in the 640x350 mode. At 320x200 the monitor would fall back to CGA compatible interface which is 16 fixed colors.

One learns new things here everyday 😁

HunterZ wrote:

I meant to send in a guess for one of the Commander Keen games, as at least one of them had an intro exactly like the opening credits from Terminator 1.

I also thought he was going to review Commander Keen 4, 5 or 6.
If the hint would be that the intro of the game is a parody of Lethal Weapon 1, I would have guessed Duke Nukem II.

DonutKing wrote:

I definitely agree that Apogee games tended to be 'more of the same' beyond episode 1. Halloween Harry is probably the first real exception to this that I can think of.

Keen 2 and 3 don't look like Keen 1. Bio Menace and Monster Bash also have different enemies in the later episodes.

DonutKing wrote:

I'm surprised that you didn't talk about DN2 stealing graphics from Turrican - http://www.nemmelheim.de/turrican/news/duke/

I mentioned the same thing when he reviewed Duke 1:

Gemini000 wrote:

Calvero wrote:

@Gemini000 Since you have played both Mega Man and Duke Nukem I was expecting some comment on the suspiciously similar looking crates, barrels and bricks in both games.

Nah. I know they're similar and that the early Duke Nukem games "borrow" some elements like that, but I tend not to focus on comparisons between other games unless it's extremely blatant and easy to recognize.

Keen 2 and 3 don't look like Keen 1. Bio Menace and Monster Bash also have different enemies in the later episodes.

True enough of keen. Monster bash I really felt had quite boring level design in the two registered episodes. They really picked the best levels for shareware.

Harekiet wrote:

Hehe funny, duke nukem 2 actually seems to use the 16 color mode and changes the palette. It doesn't work in ega mode since you only have 16 colors in ega mode due to it's cga monitor compatibility for lowres modes.

Huh, I assumed this was really the VGA bios being touched to change the 16 color palette for the EGA mode.

Lemmings does the same thing too btw

Hmm so curiosity got the better of me and I installed Duke2 on my 286 with EGA graphics/monitor.

This is the result:

The intro has garbage/corruption everywhere and is unrecognizable.

It chugs a bit on the old 286/10 but if you turn the speed up all the way in options its *just* playable 😀

Interesting. How close is DOSBox's machine=ega mode to that, I wonder?

That's EXACTLY how it looks in DOSBox. At least, the gameplay itself.

In DOSBox, the screen which talks briefly about the game being registered comes up as garbled grey pixels, then the intro doesn't show up at all though you can hear it playing its sound and music.

The "I'm back" intro and the (best imo) Apogee logo are the only parts of the game that IS Mode 13H.

Additionally, vga registers are pushed to fade the text mode colors on quit

Just wanted to point out that for X-Wing I found the mouse control to actually be pretty decent if you set the DOSBOX sensitivity to around 300 or so.

Of course, nothing beats the joystick still!

Anyway, even if the CD version doesn't have SVGA I still recommend it because of the improved sounds and shading engine, and the replaced missions. It certainly makes the game less frustrating by simply throwing less at you at once, but the classic hard missions are still there if you want.

TIE Fighter is still an improvement for several reasons, one reason I liked it more was that the cockpits obscured much less of the view so you could see much more, and there weren't nearly as many escort missions! Plus the SVGA mode on its CD version is fantastic and I found it hard to go back to X-Wing after getting that one.

I remember my cousin showing me Tie Fighter with a mouse back in the day. He was doing one of the training missions like the ones where you have to fly through the gates, and I remember him frantically swiping the mouse downwards, then lifting it off the mousepad to place it back at the top, then swiping it again, etc. That pretty much convinced me right there that a joystick is the way to go 😀

On the other hand: I recently tried playing one of the Freespace games for the first time after purchasing it from GOG.com, and I couldn't hit a damn thing using the analog sticks on a PSX-style Logitech USB gamepad/joystick. I tried the mouse and found it had great aiming accuracy, but crappy turning control. I haven't been able to motivate myself to try again since 🙁

HunterZ wrote:

On the other hand: I recently tried playing one of the Freespace games for the first time after purchasing it from GOG.com, and I couldn't hit a damn thing using the analog sticks on a PSX-style Logitech USB gamepad/joystick. I tried the mouse and found it had great aiming accuracy, but crappy turning control. I haven't been able to motivate myself to try again since :(

Yeah... With the exception of games that are specifically written for mouse control (like Freelancer), or games where weapons auto-lock to some degree, 1st-person space shooters pretty much require joysticks to be playable. It's usually not the fault of the programmers, just the nature of the gameplay. :P

DonutKing wrote:

I'm surprised that you didn't talk about DN2 stealing graphics from Turrican

Without going into a huge rant about this (because I could) and speaking not just as a game reviewer but also as a game designer, I try not to focus on these sorts of things when I do my reviews because often when people use a couple or three tid-bits like this from other games directly in their own games, while the rest of the game is completely original, it's usually because they really like the games those elements came from.

Believe it or not, a lot of people won't play certain games simply because of the tiniest similarities to other games, even if they're not directly stealing elements, and some hobbyist developers who are just making games for fun don't have the resources to make certain elements themselves. I used to BE one of those hobbyist developers when I was a teenager and thus I don't like to draw attention to these things unless it's blatantly obvious.

In Duke Nukem II you can have both Sound Blaster sounds and Adlib sounds at the same time.

Press G+O+D in Duke Nukem II for a surprise.

it's plain to see that DN2 technically uses an EGA mode but then relies on VGA functionality to change the palette... what's weird (and kinda sloppy) is that it doesn't try to ensure that VGA is present before doing that.

it's analogous to what Romero did with Pyramids of Egypt - the mode used is 4-color CGA, but EGA registers are used to remap the colors... so those 4 colors aren't limited by the CGA's choice of fixed palettes. CGA support was still fully intended though, so it doesn't look like ass when you run it on one (not in the way DN2 does on EGA, anyway).

funny that this trick wasn't used more widely - that's the only 4-color EGA game I can think of, but 16-color VGA games were everywhere.

CGA with its interleaving was hell to program for.

I'm guessing the reason for DN2's use of EGA is purely for memory reasons. Remember, real mode is a bitch.

Was DN2's engine coded completely from the ground up or is it based on the Keen engine?

DonutKing wrote:

Was DN2's engine coded completely from the ground up or is it based on the Keen engine?

http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Duke_Nukem_II

It is based on Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures engine.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

CGA with its interleaving was hell to program for.

most games prior to 1989 or so were still pretty much forced to support CGA though, owing to its position as the baseline standard. I suppose they could have saved disk space / time / money by having a single 4-color set of graphics, and just remapping the palette when an EGA was detected.

A similar trick was used by a few PCjr-targeted games - Mineshaft, Alleycat and Sokoban come to mind.... 4 colors freely chosen out of 16. But by the time EGA rolled around (I guess), having dedicated 16-color graphic sets was preferrable.