Hacker News Reader

Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

Dune II was the game I bought a Soundblaster card for. It was one of the first games with voice acting. That the Soundblaster also worked for Wing Commander was a bonus.

My favorite tactic in Dune II was to build concrete tiles right up to the enemy's base and start planting turrets. You can do a Protoss cannon rush in Starcraft, but the tactic was available in Dune II first.

It seems like this distribution requires the original game files. I tossed my 5 1/4" floppies when PCs stopped shipping with floppy drives. Silly me.

View on HN

Ha! Likewise. I borrowed money from my grandmother to buy a soundblaster II if I remember correctly. I also remember that I got home, it didn't work, turns out I had insufficient RAM, had to upgrade to 1MB, and fiddle with EMM386 in some .sys file to get the voice to work in Dune II. But oh man, that first "The planet Arrakis" spoken by a human gave me the shivers

Is that 1MB in addition to the 640KB?

Uh,

Assuming he meant a Sound Blaster 2.0, that came out in 1991

Dune II came out in December, 1992

640KB of ram would've been pretty dated by that point

Yup my PC was... what's the polite phrasing? Let's say "not envied by my peers". A hunk o' junk, in other words.

My 386DX with 1MB and a SoundBlaster Pro (I think) could barely manage this game’s audio for some reason. The intro video’s audio would cut out at times. My brother and I still recite back the humorous portions to this day.

Hehe, I remember tinkering with 2 files in the root (config.sys and autoexec.bat?) for hours and hours trying to free enough memory for the Soundblaster drivers to run!

Hah, I recalled correctly: http://www.cubic.org/docs/configuring.htm

That link really brings back some memories!

I remember trying to free up memory by throwing LOADHIGH in front of everything. With no internet we were all just making it up as we went along.

> It seems like this distribution requires the original game files. I tossed my 5 1/4" floppies when PCs stopped shipping with floppy drives. Silly me.

Theres not a lot to feel guilty about when downloading it from and abandonware site if you've legitimately bought it in the past and there's not a valid option to purchase it now...

By the way, do modern antiviruses detect and cure DOS viruses? In just so many cases DOS games copied around between computers used to be infected, I suspect a portion of those available for download on unofficial websites can be infected to.

I think since in most cases you're running things like that on dosbox, and without network in most cases, whether they come infected or not likely doesn't matter much.

Well, perhaps it can infect a half of the other games on the VM and encrypt the other half or something like that - not a disaster yet not a thing I'd like to happen :-|

Make a VM snapshot before running the game and restore it afterwards.

I use DosBox with a single set-up for all the games and store them all in a single DOS/GAMES directory (with sub-directories of course) that I mount under C:\ root in the DosBox autoexec. Of course I have a backup but I can't even remember where :-]

I think you're vastly overestimating the complexity of virus' available in that time period. :)

Not really. My uncle had to spend quite a time curing the OneHalf virus that I have brought with a game copied to our 486 DOS PC from a friend once when I was a child.

"Dune II was the game I bought a Soundblaster card for. It was one of the first games with voice acting."

I remember staring at the demo in software etc. as the voices came out of the computer ... it was amazing.

I, also, bought a soundcard just for that game - the pro audio spectrum SCSI card (PAS16SCSI) - and later that year, with the help of two different MSDOS SCSI software packages (pirated, of course) and an entire weekend dedicated to various iterations of config.sys and autoexec.bat, I successfully formatted and used a 20MB Apple Macintosh external SCSI disk in DOS.

I thought I was a genius. It remains one of the hacks I am most proud of.

What I liked and miss from modern RTS is the coordinated logistics applied to resource harvesting. 'thopters for your harvesters, sandworm defense, etc! Plus, IIRC, the game was early to the "tanks crush infantry" mechanic...

> My favorite tactic in Dune II was to build concrete tiles right up to the enemy's base and start planting turrets.

Ha! We've done the same thing and gave it a dumb name: "bagging them in" or "baggin em in". That name came much later as we used a similar tactic in command and conquer where you built sand bags up to their base and walled them in. You built a snake from your base and sell the tail as you built along. Once you reach their base you simply walled off their entrances or their ore fields. The developers never thought if this and their AI didn't know how to handle it's own base being walled off.

My brother and I had another trick for Dune II: enemy's move slower if off screen. If you were running from a faster vehicle, you scrolled until the enemy vehicle was out of view and kept it off while following your units.

I played it with my Amiga and didn't need no upgrade nor to fiddle with config.sys :)

Using defensive structures offensively in such a way does seem like such an RTS tactic that probably wouldn't get used IRL - does any have any examples to prove me wrong?

The closest real life has come to that is to assemble siege engines (like trebuchet) on the battlefield before use.

Actual turrets on an active battlefield? Not against a modern military, but maybe something like this: https://mwi.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Spencer234.j...

Early siege towers were basically what you'd consider a watch tower, but on some kind of rollers.

> does any[one] have any examples to prove me wrong?

Perhaps NATO [0] in:

- Turkey (1952)

- Poland, Hungary (1999)

- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, etc (2004)

- Ukraine (2017)

...might qualify as this tactic?

"The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union." [1]

[0] https://www.nato.int/nato-on-the-map/

[1] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/nato

(EDIT: Formatting)

WW1 trench warfare. Trenches generally had pillboxes which could be described as defensive structures, and the entire trench warfare was about slowly building these defensive structures towards the enemy.

Tunnels were part of this too along with defensive counter tunnels. These go back a surprisingly long way and it’s worth reading the Wikipedia page for the ancient Greek account of tunnel warfare. The way they detected enemy tunnelling activity is clever.

Modern offensive tunnels pop up in the news regularly in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and occasionally with Noth Korea too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_warfare

Since you mentioned the Greeks, anyone with the slightest interest in Ancient Greece should read “A War Like No Other” by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s a fascinating account of the Peloponnesian War. There’s a chapter on siege warfare.

Yeah, this brings back fond memories.

I think Dune II was the first game I heard on Sound Blaster. That or Wing Commander II.

I was at a friend's house when he showed me those games on his dad's computer. I couldn't wait for my dad to get home that evening to sell him on the idea of a Sound Blaster.

He did surprise me with one a couple of weeks later. I think he must've ~seen~ heard one himself at a computer store and buy it on impulse.

I still have the files, on a Zip disk. I still have the old SCSI zip drive in a box somewhere, it might be possible to cobble together some old parts to get it working again, but it's probably easier to just pirate the files at this point.

Or find it on an abandonware site like https://www.myabandonware.com/game/dune-ii-the-building-of-a...

Somehow I expected gog.com to have it :(

could probably do the whole dosbox thing. native is nice though as per the openDUNE project.

Or play the Javascript version in your browser. http://epicport.com/en/dune2

I'm guessing that people who fell off their chairs when digitized voices came out of their computer in Dune II hadn't owned Commodore 64s (vividly remember Impossible Mission, in 1984, with a digitized voice intro).

A great way for open source games to gain momentum is to provide a pre-packaged Win/MacOS/Linux installer. Or, like Battle for Wesnoth, be available on Steam as well.

Without negotiating for rights beforehand, that’s more of a way to attract DMCA notices and C&D letters.

OpenXCOM manages quite well with a Windows installer which includes a "specify your original game folder to copy over required assets" install step.

I've gotten a few dcma letters over the years. I've ignored them. One time I did respond with a few swear words. Nothing ever came of it. They are just scary threatening letters that generally won't be followed up on.

Why would you get a DCMA letter? Your webhost would get a DMCA letter

I was the webhost.

was quite surprised to see wesnoth on steam. steam let's you put basically shortcuts on there interface as well though which is nice too.

That tactic was the only way I could beat the final level, I had to build over the enemies building spawn points or they would pop back up.

> It seems like this distribution requires the original game files. I tossed my 5 1/4" floppies when PCs stopped shipping with floppy drives. Silly me.

Anyone else remember a hacked copy floating around that allowed you to play as the Fremen? Sadly I also threw out my copy when I purged my floppies.

Yes, it’s called Super Dune II

I couldn't edit my comment anymore so here is a link to a bug fixed version: https://www.moddb.com/mods/super-dune-ii-classic

It's hard!

I think the first time I saw this was Warcraft 2 :)

Your battle for Dune begins… now…

The game I bought my first soundcard for was X-Wing. The card was the Pro Audio Spectrum.

"your sound card works perfectly!"... Or was that from Warcraft ?

Couldn't say for sure, so looked on YouTube. It's Warcraft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_A1GNx0M9M

Reply on news.ycombinator.com