DOS Games Discussion

I need some community advice on this. I'd need (early = playable on a 486) dos games with easily (pretty much as soon as the game starts...) reproducible bugs for a museum display.

The idea is that the visitor can experience the bug him/herself without the actual playing taking too long. The bug can be anything from corrupted graphics/controls/sound to problems in loading saved games etc.

The simpler the bug is to reproduce, the better

What games would you suggest?

I am a programmer. I can program a single bug that can be reproduced every time if that is what you want!

tiennguyen1973 wrote:I am a programmer. I can program a single bug that can be reproduced every time if that is what you want!

Thank you for the offer The problem is, the games (with bugs) should have been commercially available at the time.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/vn50px4xlsc4nak/BUG.COM

Well what you could do is insert this into the point where you want the bug to occur.

If you have a commercial games then just insert it.

It is a bug I have written

Hello emuola.

Off the top off my head, Blood has a very easy to reproduce bug related to saved games and difficulty levels. On any difficulty level other than medium, if you load a saved game it will permanently change the amount of damage done by monsters (it will decrease on higher difficulty and increase on lower). However it's probably not really a good bug to showcase I suppose because it requires more or less careful observation to detect.

I'd be most interested to learn more about your museum

Damn, I've encountered so many bugs back in the day, but I can't remember the specific games and bugs for the life of me.

This save-game destroying bug I have encountered, most irritating.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/ ... tId,17289/

Of course it takes a while to build up the required number of units.

Another bug in a flightsim I had, that was most annoying, was a speed-dependent hit/miss effect in EF2000. Normally a flightsim requires a fast PC, but in this game, if your PC was faster than about a 200MHz Pentium, certain missiles were guaranteed to miss the target.

The game used timed sampling to estimate where the target & missile was in relation to each other, and if calculated close enough, the target was considered hit. With a faster computer, the missile moved faster, and the samples were too far apart, and far from the target, even if the track was right through it, so a hit was never detected.

Only one missile type was affected though, others worked.

I don't really remember any bugs from the PC era but I know Alex Kidd in Miracle World on Sega Master System was a TREASURE TROVE for that sort of stuff.

For example, if you punch a block which is half across the map in the water, you cause Alex to scramble and gilitch out, the game music and other animations still go :/

Haven't ever seen that. Perhaps the PAL version doesn't have it.

It's the PAL version that did have it

Wing Commander (the first one) has a bug that can be reproduced every time you exit the game. The message "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!" that shows on the DOS command line every time you exit is actually a EMM386 Memory Error. They couldn't get rid of it, so one of the developers (Ken Demarest) used a hex editor to change the text of the error to "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!" because they never did track down the bug causing it. They made it a feature instead.