We really used these machines ?

Yep - I've got bored with the new games again and gone back to a few golden oldies :-)

The three classics are : Freelancer, Master of Orion 2 (no3 was appalling) and Master of Magic. Freelancer is one of the various spiritual successors to the genre creating Elite. Master of Orion 2 (Moo2) is Civ in space, while Master of Magic (MoM) is Civ again but set in 2 worlds with a huge injection of magic. It also gives Civ a tactical layer to join the strategic layer. Civ 4's a decent game but MoM will be a long time classic due to the magic and the tactical battles.

Freelancer's fairly recent and Moo2 just got released when Windows 95 came around ... Yep - this is RETRO Zone :-) MoM on the other hand needs special treatment. It's a DOS only game (remember those ? so last century) but one of the hardest programs to accommodate on machines of its day. The key problem is memory - it needs 576kbytes of Conventional Ram and 2.7Mb of Expanded Memory. It's extremely tough to manage that on anything but an ancient DOS machine.

At least, not without additional software help ...

What's the secret ? A little application called Dosbox is the key. It's a program that creates a computer within a computer. You run it on your Windows desktop and you have a virtual Retro style PC that should handle what you want to throw at it. Magic :-) Here's a link to the home of Dosbox. It pretends to be an old machine, running Dos while emulating the sound and graphics of the day.

That's not really what I wanted to talk about though today ... Elite hit the news this week because it's just turned 25 years old as a game. It was huge in its day, it did things with the BBC Microcomputer that should really have been impossible. The program itself was less than 22kbytes, the last email I sent was 15kbytes. There's more memory in the cache of my desktop PC than there was in the whole of the BBC Micro.

I smell an attack of Numbers ?

Elite - 22kbytes.
BBC Micro - 64kbytes on board
Modern Desktop CPU (Athlon X2-3800+) - 64kbytes of Data and Code cache. And there's two of these ... And that's just the bit on the processor that makes it go fast.
Speed of a BBC Micro 6502 processor - 1MHz
Variance in speed of desktop cpu - well, it's been hunting between 2001 and 2006MHz.

How about this Master of Magic game ?
Needs 574kB Conventional Ram, 2.7MB Expanded
(problem is getting all the Convention Ram, plus getting Expanded at all in XP)
I had that running originally on a machine with 408MB hard disc hooked up to a 80486 processor going at 66MHz, with 4MB of system memory to play with. Oh, it was a DX too, which meant it had a maths coprocessor. Can't remember what graphics it had, probably just a 1MB "I can make lines and circles" thing.

My current desktop has on its processor : 4x 64kB Data & Code cache, another 2x 512kB cache. That's a total of 1.25MB just to make it work properly. The hard discs have around 8MB cache each, or double what was available to the whole machine for the 15 year old box.

The desktop's memory runs at 200MHz, or 3 times the speed of the 80486 processor. That 200MHz is then multiplied by 10 to get the chip speed. And the ante from the maths coprocessor is well and truly upped by there being two full processors on the chip.

HUGE boost in numbers already. And that's before you realise that there is more memory for just the graphics board (512MB) than there was on that 15 year old hard disc ...

Processor - 66MHz up to 2000MHz
Memory - 4MB system to 2GB system
Hard disc - 408MB to 74+250GB
(the Windows folder footprint on my desktop would take 15 of those 408MB drives ...)
Graphics - "I can draw lines" to photo realistic 3d environment

Things have moved on a lot in the past 15 years of me owning PCs. They're a lot more capable now, although the software has bloated to make them just as responsive ("far less responsive" is more the term when we grapple with work's PCs). The games takes advantage of the new hardware but ...

I'm still playing 15 year old games ! Has nothing significantly better come out in the past few years ? There's some good (looking forward to Dragon Age), some appalling but there's no substitute for the excellence in design and simplicity that we used to see in our games.

Long live Moo2, Long live MoM :-)
And a very big thank you to the open source developers of DosBox for making it possible for us to still enjoy these old classics.

PS It could be much worse for the Retro machine ... My laptop beats my 3 year old desktop on everything except hard disc and graphics :-)