Wing Commander on the 500 (video)

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Aardvark

Also released in 360k disks.

DOS Days - Wing Commander

From where can it be run?

From a hard disk only. The game comes on six 3.5" or eleven 5.25" low-density floppy disks...

Wing Commander will not run well on any 80286 computer, despite the minimum system requirements shown on the game box.

Wing Commander requires an Expanded Memory Manager such as EMM386 to be loaded in order to fully play all music and sound effects. It also requires a minimum of 560,000 bytes of conventional memory to run the game, and a minimum of 583,000 bytes if you want full music.

It's September 1992 and you have just bought the latest killer PC game with 256 color scaled 3D graphics. Take that Amiga fans!

It comes on six 720k 3.5" disks or eleven 360k 5.25" disks, which covers the vast majority of PCs. But It won't actually run from floppy disk so you have to install it on the hard drive. So you run the installation program and... it hangs while trying to detect your hardware.

For most users this would be the end of it, but being a PC genius you realize a patched exe must be available. So you browse the non-existent web with your DOS only PC until you find it. Now it's plain sailing, until...

It says "Expanded memory not detected. Limited music will play.".

"WFT is 'expanded memory'?", you exclaim. "I have 2MB why doesn't it just work?". Then you remember about EMM386. You quickly type 'edit config.sys' (purely by muscle memory since you've done it so many times before), and insert the following two lines:-

DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM

Quickly Hit Alt, Up arrow, Enter and Enter again to save, wait a few seconds and then reboot. Now it must be sweet you say, as you launch the game...

"Out of conventional memory" it says. "Jesus Christ on a pogo stick!" you weep, as you bury your head in your hands. "Why can't they make it boot from the floppy disk like those Amiga games do?".

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It's September 1992...

No, it's November 2023 and you're ranting about something that you have zero clue about.



These DOS horror stories are a nice cope for the more extremely-minded "Amiga fan", but any actual Nineties PC gamer would laugh you out of the room upon reading such dramatization.

[Alexco]

Originally Posted by Aardvark

Also released in 360k disks.

Ouch. Never thought of DD 5.25” disks. Interesting to know.

[Megalomaniac]

Four different floppy disk standards, with two sets of intercompatibility, was just one of the complications of PCs being so non-standardised. If you went from a PC with only 5.25" drives to one with only 3.5" drives you were potentially losing all your old solftware. Luckily I think only 3.5" HD disks were really left in the market by the time CD-ROMS came alone.

Bruce's words may be extreme and exaggerated, but every PC owner would have this experience at least once. Note the over-optimistic system requirements too - upgrading a typical PC to be able to play this properly will have cost more than an entire A500, yet reviewers rated PC WC based on a top-end perfectly-configured £1500 PC, then reviewed the Amiga version based on its performance on a £300 machine.

Still, many of us played Amiga Monkey Island 2 from 11 floppies without the luxury of a hard drive.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Four different floppy disk standards, with two sets of intercompatibility, was just one of the complications of PCs being so non-standardised. If you went from a PC with only 5.25" drives to one with only 3.5" drives you were potentially losing all your old solftware. Luckily I think only 3.5" HD disks were really left in the market by the time CD-ROMS came alone.

Most PCs of the time would simply come with both a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive. Same goes for some PC releases that would have both 5.25" and 3.5" disks in the box. Later it would be that for some time games would be released on both floppy (3.5") and on CD for a while.

I recently watched a LGR episode about the system requirements stickers on PC game boxes to let you know which kind of machine you'd need to run the game: [ Show youtube player ]

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Bruce's words may be extreme and exaggerated, but every PC owner would have this experience at least once.

And? You're talking about generation which came up from frigging blowing on tapes and praying the chuntey field would keep, so you can load up some shitty game where you'd die on the first screen a zillion times (and this is just one mild example). And after this I'm supposed to be traumatised by some mild inconveniences regarding hardware/software configs, despite huge progress being made overall? Please.

This is precisely why I mention "2023" because the only reasons people spread these falsehoods/exaggerations is that they either project their modern mindset, try to score points in a ridiculous platform war, or both.

Of course here the latter applies, so Amiga is a flawless machine where juggling eleven disks, blankly staring at some out-of-the-blue Guru instance or useless console prompt is no biggie, but anything to do with PC or some other platform is a mind-blowing obstacle.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

And? You're talking about generation which came up from frigging blowing on tapes and praying the chuntey field would keep, so you can load up some shitty game where you'd die on the first screen a zillion times (and this is just one mild example). And after this I'm supposed to be traumatised by some mild inconveniences regarding hardware/software configs, despite huge progress being made overall? Please.

This is precisely why I mention "2023" because the only reasons people spread these falsehoods/exaggerations is that they either project their modern mindset, try to score points in a ridiculous platform war, or both.

Of course here the latter applies, so Amiga is a flawless machine where juggling eleven disks, blankly staring at some out-of-the-blue Guru instance or useless console prompt is no biggie, but anything to do with PC or some other platform is a mind-blowing obstacle.

You're over exaggerating in the other direction....

[Raid27]

Originally Posted by Aardvark

Also released in 360k disks.

Is that your pic? Looks great. I'd like to use it on wcnews.com wiki site

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

You're over exaggerating in the other direction....

No, I'm mocking the style and implications featured in the previous posts.


Feel free to disagree with the actual conclusions though.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

No, it's November 2023 and you're ranting about something that you have zero clue about.



These DOS horror stories are a nice cope for the more extremely-minded "Amiga fan", but any actual Nineties PC gamer would laugh you out of the room upon reading such dramatization.

Did you follow my link? What I am describing is straight from that web page.

BTW I was a computer retailer in the 90's, so I had to deal with it all - buyers bringing games back because they couldn't get them to run on their PCs, trying to get PCs going again after the hard drive got corrupted and the original install disks were lost, sorting out incompatibilities when building PCs from parts and doing upgrades. I lived that scene 7 days a week for 11 years. Eventually I got sick of it and switched to a less frustrating business and hobby.

[Aardvark]

Originally Posted by Raid27

Is that your pic? Looks great. I'd like to use it on wcnews.com wiki site

No, it's from Ebay

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Did you follow my link? What I am describing is straight from that web page.

BTW I was a computer retailer in the 90's, so I had to deal with it all - buyers bringing games back because they couldn't get them to run on their PCs, trying to get PCs going again after the hard drive got corrupted and the original install disks were lost, sorting out incompatibilities when building PCs from parts and doing upgrades. I lived that scene 7 days a week for 11 years. Eventually I got sick of it and switched to a less frustrating business and hobby.

You seem to miss the point (unsurprisingly, of course) which is the fact that you're blowing these water-is-wet anecdotes out of proportion, in an extreme fashion, and not that these things did not happen at all.

Secondly, the fact that you worked in a computer shop, something you seemingly will never tire of reminding us, only excarberates the depth of disingeniuity on display here. Somehow we never hear tales about Amiga's hdds getting corrupted and install disks lost, incompatible games returned, etc, nah, it's always something wonderful that happens with Amiga and only terrible things with PC. Not biased at all, no sir.

This is the reason I said "you haven't got a clue" about PC gaming, because your bias clouds your vision so much that you can't even get a simple date right (WC came out in September 1990). And it so happens it was one of PCs' first killer apps, which countless gaming fans were willing to buy'n try, despite these insurmountable odds that your posts imply they were facing.

@thread: sorry about this derail, even though I did not start it I probably shouldn't bite, but I do have a thing about stupid retro-platform wars/hate still going on in 2023. I'll leave it at that though

[Megalomaniac]

Hard drives created more issues than floppy drives, on home computers as well as on PCs. For most people (including myself), their first PC was also their first hard drive - and their first experience of drivers, boot disks, IRQs and the like, most home computers didn't have similar complications. Even allowing for less Amiga owners having had hard drives, I'm sure related issues were more common on PCs.

Software incompatibilities were a bigger issue on home computers though, the A1200 was probably worst in percentage terms for old games not working, though things like the A500+, STe and Spectrum +2A had these issues too. Mostly new models launched at Christmas too, which no doubt made the headache worse for retailers and developers.

Wing Commander was the first game that made home computer users jealous, but a machine that could do it justice (a VGA 386, realistically) wasn't affordable for most people. Even if you had a business-capable PC with the processor and memory, buying the graphics and sound card to bring it up to games spec would cost more than an entire A500.

And, I hate to point it out, but that photo only has ten of the apparent eleven disks in...

[Torti-the-Smurf]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

.....I hate to point it out, but that photo only has ten of the apparent eleven disks in...

I just wanted to point out that the 11th Disk can bee seen in the Picture; thats all



Greetz ...and please be nice to each other

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Secondly, the fact that you worked in a computer shop, something you seemingly will never tire of reminding us, only excarberates the depth of disingeniuity on display here. Somehow we never hear tales about Amiga's hdds getting corrupted and install disks lost, incompatible games returned, etc, nah, it's always something wonderful that happens with Amiga and only terrible things with PC. Not biased at all, no sir.

I didn't just 'work in' a computer shop, I owned it. And I sold both Amigas and PCs so it was easy to compare them.

Amiga hard drives didn't get corrupted as often as PC hard drives did, and if they did it wasn't so much of a problem. On a PC if the hard drive died you were dead in the water because the entire OS was on it. Later versions of DOS had files compressed on the install disks, so you couldn't even run many DOS utilities without somewhere to extract them to first. Few PCs had two floppy drives of the same type, so this was often quite awkward.

As we know, the vast majority of Amiga games ran from a boot floppy (even those that could be installed on a hard drive) which was configured to make the game work properly. The OS in AGA Amigas was smart enough to keep the hardware in OCS mode when booting from a 1.x floppy, increasing the chances of an older game working.

One of the big attractions of the Amiga was that you could just shove a game disk in and it worked. If it didn't work it was due to one of a few well-known reasons, such as not having 1MB RAM (when it clearly stated on the box that you needed it), or your external disk drive using up memory, or having a later OS and/or 68020+ CPU (one reason for continuing to produce the A600 even after the A1200 was released).

PCs, as everyone knows, were a different story. There were so many different configurations that it was impossible to know whether your PC would run a particular game out of the box. That's why I offered a free installation service to my PC customers.

This is the reason I said "you haven't got a clue" about PC gaming, because your bias clouds your vision so much that you can't even get a simple date right (WC came out in September 1990).

You are right, Wing Commander for DOS was released on September 26, 1990. The Amiga version was released in 1992 and I got the years mixed up. Sorry about that. However that doesn't mean I 'haven't got a clue' about PC gaming in the 90's.

I have owned and used many different computers over the years, so any 'biases' I have have are simply due to how I found them. My first PC was an IBM Jx, which I studied intently and enjoyed using even though it was far less capable than my A1000. Soon after that I got an Amstrad PC-20, and also had a PC1512 for while. In the 90's I had a 386DX-40 and a 486 in the workshop. Perhaps I am a bit jaded due to having to deal with PC customers' problems during that time, but I also had a lot of Amiga customers who didn't have those problems.

[petran]

One other serious issue with pcs at least in first half of 90s were computer viruses, especially boot sector types. They could also make a, system unusable
Many users had no idea about using a proper anti-virus like TBAV.

I don't recall Amiga having such a huge problem with viruses unless I am mistaken

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by petran

I don't recall Amiga having such a huge problem with viruses unless I am mistaken

Some Amiga fans did have big virus problems, but only because they were filthy pirates who didn't know what the write-protect tab was for and why you should always power down your Amiga after running a 'suspect' program. Very few viruses targeted the hard disk, and they didn't propagate well because most Amiga users didn't have one.

Amiga viruses were spread through the pirate networks. In New Zealand it took ~3 months for legitimate software to make its way here via slow boat, while pirated games were sent via MODEM within hours of being cracked. A friend of mine in Auckland used to send me 'demos' of games, until I got sick of the viruses and told him not to send me any more.

I don't remember it being big problem on PCs either until Windows 95. This provided a much more fertile ground for malware and was a lot harder to fix. Often it was safer to just format the hard drive and reload the entire OS, which took several hours from floppies.

When the internet arrived the problem exploded, largely because people with no previous computer experience were buying PCs not understanding anything about how they worked and what the risks were. It didn't help when scripting stuff was added to browsers which made it much easier for malware to get in.

I thought it was quite funny that the same people who were cracking and spreading 'warez' also put viruses on them - almost as if they were saying to the greedy recipients 'serves you right for being a filthy pirate!'. It was even funnier when people downloaded commercial songs from Napster, not realizing that it was a malware magnet. Served them right too!

[copse]

Maybe the problem was your friend :-) I ordered from the outfit that had many hundreds of titles and advertised in the national papers for years on end at $5 a disk. I never got a virus from them.

[petran]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I don't remember it being big problem on PCs either until Windows 95. This provided a much more fertile ground for malware and was a lot harder to fix. Often it was safer to just format the hard drive and reload the entire OS, which took several hours from floppies.

with W95 you did not even need a virus to damage the system. Hadn't seen a more self-destructive OS

[Raid27]

Originally Posted by Aardvark

No, it's from Ebay

Dang! Thanks anyways

And thanks for the replies all.