Old PC Games

Writing at the beginning of Year 2000, I find myself still using the Compaq Contura 4/25cx laptop I bought 2½ years ago -- a 486-25 with 12MB RAM and 200MB HDD. Lack of space combined with comfort with what I know and, OK, lack of cash, keeps me tied to the 8.5" TFT screen. But it was worth £2,500 or more back when the management consultant had it bought for him in 1994/5. I was over the moon when I found the PC-speaker driver and then the Net proved its worth and I eventually tracked down Windows and VESA 256-colour screen drivers (see below). Back in the last century, dear reader, the monthly magazines had abandoned 16-bit users, so we would scour MicroComputerMart for adverts from shareware libraries. The Net was wild and free (apart from costing me four times what it does now) and it's much easier (if you can use a search engine) to track down the information and software you need. But you know that...

This machine is about average for the pre-Win95 games now available as Abandonware. When I first got it I was immediately given a copy of Ultimate Doom and revisited the addictive side of my personality not expressed in this form since I had access to the arcade game Battle Zone(?) in the early 1980s. Alongside Doom I had Corncob (a flight-sim, not much to look at, but ...) and Windows Solitaire. When I got an external CD-drive I added the excellent Red Baron and Heretic as well as the less interesting Rise of the Triad. Getting hold of anything else was a problem until I got Net access in November 1998.

Abandonware seemed to start up in 1999 (anyone know any different?) with some websites of incredible value. My immediate quest was for Pacific Air War, which I found but have never freed up enough HDD space to install! I had been too late to buy a copy from the States and had only once seen a copy in the flesh -- on a market stall. The Abandonware sites were doing a better job of distribution than commercial channels, though recently there seem to have been problems due, no doubt, to the onerous task of keeping such large resources up to date.

It seems I now have within my small collection some of the games that are currently sought, along with a generous ISP, so I'll give something back by making available what's wanted and stuff I particularly like.

I'll start with a request from CES, a contributor to Arachne Chat. I tracked down the full version of LHX Attack Chopper for him last year, after I'd had loads of fun on the demo. I'd also sent Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, but neither of us had progressed very far without the manual. More recently I've started to find my way around the keyboard controls, so I suppose I'll have to write a manual.

CES had tried a Chuck Yeager game and now wanted Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, also known as CYAC (1.18MB zipfile).

This game has colourful, simple graphics and supports PC-speaker as well as soundcard audio. There's a family resemblance to LHX Attack Chopper. You have a choice of US and German fighters from WWII, on through jets from US and opposing forces from the Korean and Vietnam wars. Selecting the external view (F10) will give you the challenge of "radio-controlled" flight, with the advantage of telescopic vision by using the + key.

Extract the files to a floppy to run the installation, or simply extract them to a directory on your hard drive and forget about Install.bat. The game can also be played off a floppy. Read Yeager.txt for full details of how to set up the game, and extract Readcyac.txt and print it out: you will need the details of aircraft statistics to be able to start. Note: CES supplied the patch for the game -- Yeager.com -- so you no longer need to look up the aircraft details to start. The game is initialised with command-line instructions as detailed in Yeager.txt -- these options are then saved. To subsequently alter them temporarily move Yeager.com elsewhere.

I find the mouse-control a little too sensitive, but heck, Yeager must've known what it was like and I've had perhaps too many hours of WWI style seat-of-the-pants flying courtesy of of the old kites in Red Baron. I've spent very little time with this game, but plan to take another look over the next fortnight, and hope CES will report his findings.

Update, July 2002:  fellow SurvPC and Arachne user Dale Mentzer exchanged notes about repairing the Contura's screen hinges and inquired after the video drivers. The Compaq site is as labyrinthine as any 3D shoot-`em-up and probably horribly JavaScript-infested, so it's about time I uploaded the drivers here.

The Windows 3.1 display driver is in SoftPaq 1241 (1.24MB self-extracting file). Download the file and copy it into an empty folder, then run SP1241.EXE which will make a 2-floppy installation set. I have a note saying the first floppy mustn't be write-protected when you make the Windows installation. There's README.COM on the first floppy with 12 pages of instructions, but running CPQSETUP.EXE in Windows is what you need to do, assuming your Contura has the 512kB video RAM necessary to support 256 colours. There are performance compromises running in this mode, but if you use this laptop on the Web or for any graphics you'll want more than 16 colours. Some software e.g. ACDSee won't install if you're not running at a high enough colour-depth.

For DOS usage, there's the Compaq VESA driver (10kB zipfile), which is all I kept from SoftPaq 1728 (I can't remember what else it might've contained). Place CPQVESA.EXE in a directory e.g. C:\VESA and add the line C:\VESA\CPQVESA.EXE to your AUTOEXEC.BAT and then run MemMaker or QEMM's Optimize. I've never tried Arachne on the Contura with only 16 colours, but my no-hard-drive Opti 741 486DX4-100 laptop is noticeably faster at low colour-depth (it runs Arachne from a bootable floppy on a 6MB RAMdrive from 8MB total RAM). Arachne's 256-grayscale option can be an acceptable compromise.

Eeeeee... 2½ years on, and the old Contura has recently gone into semi-retirement in favour of a Compaq LTE 5280, after nearly five years' continuous and hard use, with rarely 10MB free on its hard drive. I got a Compaq Microcom 510 modem to overcome the slow UART limitation of the Contura. This modem has both serial and parallel port connection options, and the latter allows pages to arrive about four times faster. It's a hardware modem, but the parallel connection only works with a Windows driver, and won't work at all if you've replaced the original Windows COMM.DRV (took me a lot of experimenting to find that out!). I don't know if there's any benefit in using a parallel connection on a machine with a fast UART, but these modems occasionally turn up on eBay for a fraction of what they originally sold for. If you use other external peripherals it's worth getting a Trust 4-port data switch. They're mechanical, bi-directional, so you can run four peripherals off one PC or e.g. share a printer between four PCs. You could even get extra cables and with two switches share the four peripherals between up to four PCs.

The Compaq LTE series are great workhorses with a wide range of parts regularly turning up on eBay. The RAM can be increased to 80MB and hard drives can be swapped (you need a "sardine can" hard drive caddy; expensive for what it is). I got a 6GB IBM TravelStar hard drive -- never again, as I only used it a month and its S.M.A.R.T self-test went from "fine" to dire warnings that replacement would be necessary imminently. I hunted around and dug deep for a 20GB Fujitsu as its replacement. I hope it'll last me the next five years or more: it's 100,000 times bigger than the drive in the Contura...

Not much of a games page, `eh? To tell the truth, I rarely play anything now I'm in my dotage <grin>, but I have quite a collection of old stuff, so leave a request at Arachne Quick Chat and I'll see what I can find.

What's the betting on another 2½ years before the next update to this page?

Cheers,

Jake