4 ms·

I was a kid/teenager in the 90s with little money and nowhere to spend it, so I pretty much lived on shareware games from cover disks. Scorched Earth felt almos

I was a kid/teenager in the 90s with little money and nowhere to spend it, so I pretty much lived on shareware games from cover disks. Scorched Earth felt almost like a pioneer(?) of the "you can customize every variable" game in a pre-mod era. That "Capture the Flag" has a very specific aesthetic and looks very NeoPaint-y. I'm sure I saw a few games use that style. Was it a specific GUI toolkit? While I'm rambling, I want to throw Conquest (1992) into the mix as it's where I got the bug for Risk and it, too, was very customizable like Scorched Earth: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Conquest_1992 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Conquest_1992

cbozeman 4y ago
Do you remember the shareware games website HappyPuppy? For some reason, a few years ago I tried to find out what happened to them, but it's like there's nothing but a few archive.org captures.
- ChrisClark 4y ago
  I first visited HappyPuppy in a text only browser, no idea what it was called, I was probably running Win 3.1 at the time. This brings back memories, very vague memories...
tpmx 4y ago
Almost everyone in the DOS world built their own little GUI toolkit, implementing exactly as much was needed for each app. That was part of the charm IMO. We had a Cambrian explosion of graphical and interaction styles. Then things got gray, uniform and boring with Windows 3.1/95, and then fun again with the early web. I'm looking forward to the next fun UI style period - perhaps it will start with AR. The GUI "toolkit" used by that CTF game (1993) looks like it was partially "inspired" by Borland's OWL for Windows 3.x (1991). Comparison: CTF Game: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Capture-the-Flag-modem-play-1440x900.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Captu... Borland OWL: https://sourceforge.net/p/owlnext/wiki/Replacing_usage_of_BWCC/attachment/Bwcc1.png https://sourceforge.net/p/owlnext/wiki/Replacing_usage_of_BW...
- tssva 4y ago
  I wonder if it used Graphics Vision which was a GUI toolkit for DOS graphics mode that was compatible with Borland's Turbo Vision text GUI library. It resembled the look of OWL.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    I had a fun mini hunt. I couldn't find anything earlier than 1995 - but I absolutely did not exhaust the search space. The bitmaps for OK/Cancel don't match here: https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe/mkm/gv210-1.gif https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe/mkm/gv210-1.gif (From https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe/mkm/ https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe/mkm/) I say - still likely.

cbozeman 4y ago

Do you remember the shareware games website HappyPuppy? For some reason, a few years ago I tried to find out what happened to them, but it's like there's nothing but a few archive.org captures.

ChrisClark 4y ago
I first visited HappyPuppy in a text only browser, no idea what it was called, I was probably running Win 3.1 at the time. This brings back memories, very vague memories...

tpmx 4y ago

Almost everyone in the DOS world built their own little GUI toolkit, implementing exactly as much was needed for each app. That was part of the charm IMO. We had a Cambrian explosion of graphical and interaction styles. Then things got gray, uniform and boring with Windows 3.1/95, and then fun again with the early web. I'm looking forward to the next fun UI style period - perhaps it will start with AR. The GUI "toolkit" used by that CTF game (1993) looks like it was partially "inspired" by Borland's OWL for Windows 3.x (1991). Comparison: CTF Game: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Capture-the-Flag-modem-play-1440x900.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Captu... Borland OWL: https://sourceforge.net/p/owlnext/wiki/Replacing_usage_of_BWCC/attachment/Bwcc1.png https://sourceforge.net/p/owlnext/wiki/Replacing_usage_of_BW...

tssva 4y ago
I wonder if it used Graphics Vision which was a GUI toolkit for DOS graphics mode that was compatible with Borland's Turbo Vision text GUI library. It resembled the look of OWL.
- tpmx 4y ago
  I had a fun mini hunt. I couldn't find anything earlier than 1995 - but I absolutely did not exhaust the search space. The bitmaps for OK/Cancel don't match here: https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe/mkm/gv210-1.gif https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe/mkm/gv210-1.gif (From https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe/mkm/ https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe/mkm/) I say - still likely.