What if ...

after a quick read of the DX11 thread and all the whistles and bells that 'would make my game so much better' bla bla bla
it got me thinking

What if blitzbasic re-emerged on DOS circa the amigas demise

blitzbasic
DOS only gfx 2D only with ega and vga support (did dos do 640*480 or was that just windows 3.11?)

blitz3D
after the release of wolfenstien or doom the "2.5D" racaster is released with real 3D flat shaded polygons for space shooters

blitzplus
the windows 3.11 environment

I think id be much happier not having all these whistles and bells available to me, but as most games (out side of the fps genre) are starting to look flashier with every itteration even casual games cant sell on gameplay alone

Dos was just the management system for the file/disk access. It also came with loadable drivers for memory management and mouse etc.
It did not do much with any other hardware and apps would have to talk directly to the hardware or bios. So anything was possible provided the app and hardware supported it.

Basically apps could have any resolution supported by the card and would switch into graphics mode on start and back to text on termination (same as the way 'fullscreen mode' is handled by windows as a separate graphics environment).

Typical modes were:
80x25(characters) basic text mode.
320x200, 640x460, 800x600, 1024x768. Graphics modes as well as many odd ones.

The main types of video adapters were (<< = backwards comp):

CGA (320x200 4 col / 640x200 bw)
..<< EGA (320x200 / 640x480 16 col)
....<< MCGA(320x200 256 color from palette of 65k / 640x480 bw)
......<< VGA (up to 1024x768 i think, 16 col from palette of 65K)
........<< VESA/SVGA (any normal res at 8bit, 16bit, 24bit, 32bit)

Then you had the odd ones like hercules and amstrad.

Dont forget, 3D Studio, wolfenstien, Doom and many other classics were all DOS games/apps.

As long as we're fantasizing, what if the Amiga had still been around?

Seriously I don't really care for all the bells and whistles. I'd take a stylistic and fun game (like Team Fortress 2) with attention to detail, over a bland and boring game (like Crysis) with attention to "realism". There will always be a market for games with good design, regardless of technological advances. Why do you think the Wii (undeniably the most underpowered of this generation of consoles) is way ahead of it's competitors in terms of sales? Why do you think retro gaming is becomming more and more popular?

Yeah. Not because people want to sit down in front of their computer and have a second job (MMO players excluded, but most of those probably don't have real jobs anyway, so they don't count).

Gameplay/fun

Escape from reality

After a day of serious work, and after watching the serious news on TV, I can imagine it's tiresome to have to walk around in a realistic world shooting people/monsters. Sometimes you need to play something silly.

Spot on, Flameduck/CS_TBL:

I always thought when games like Counterstrike/BF came out, you could have far more realism (if thats what you wanted to do) by joining the Armed Forces.

You would even get paid for your trouble.

I started wondering when someone would release 'Factory work simulator' or something.

And do you know what? As long as its 'fun' then that would be ok.

regards to my first post

all the games i saw from shareware vendors save id were not much of an exertion for most pc's probably work on an 8086 too some of em ;)

yes you could have a solid/fong/goroude (spelling) or wire frame 3D game but you would have to code all that yourself
and as blitz is basic these would be 'bolted on' via the blitz3D upgrade/add on if you wernt up to doing it yourself

when i worked in a pc shop during the early to mid 90's we were still selling 8086 systems which could have a target audience for games of sorts
we used to install a few shareware games onto the demo amstrads we were dealers for, one quick way of showing how much the cirrus logic chipset improved things was to run doom on the system in question and it again on another without (even the 486SX fared better than the DX as it was all about the gfx not the cpu)

if blitz was available then im sure i would have installed it somewhere to tinker with or run demo code as some punters would be interested in dabbling in their own stuff

i know we had the adlib/creative, irq, dma etc for configing the system to run a game but im sure alot of these things could have been streamlined via BRL or some 3rd party

but thats "what if's" for you

It's cheaper and has adds showing happy people. ;)