1/3/2023 0 Comments Fun dos games![]() Most booter games are small so they wouldn’t run into the size limits associated with the format either. The extension itself doesn’t distinguish between executable formats, but booters do tend to be ripped as binary images rather than MZ-type executables: whichever technique is used to dump the executable, it’s easier to store it as a headerless binary than work out the MZ header. EXE) goes, it doesn’t have any impact on whether the program can exit or not. ![]() The reference for PC booters was Retrograde Station the site disappeared long ago, but most of it is archived, including many images of games.Īnother project to look at if you’re interested in booter games is Digger this is a remaster of a booter game, and its documentation includes various titbits about booters in general.Īs far as the executable extension (. If you’re interested in how it goes about this, it comes with extensive documentation and complete source code. You can also exit the game if you use an image of the original booter version, instead of the DOS conversion: there’s a piece of software, Flopper, which can “boot” booter games on top of DOS, and it allows you to exit back to DOS. Pressing Ctrl Alt C (followed by Enter in some environments) will return you to the DOS prompt. However, Paratrooper is well-behaved - it doesn’t overwrite anything it shouldn’t -, so you can add an exit feature to the game yourself: download HBREAK, and run it before you run the game. As Jim Nelson explained in a comment, rebooting wasn’t at all unusual in DOS days², so adding an exit feature wouldn’t have been high on anyone’s to-do list! ![]() “Ripping” a booter to an executable already involves making a number of changes in many cases: some PC booters were copy-protected, so that has to be defeated, and many would write to their floppy, which also would have to be disabled (or re-implemented). In most cases, people converting PC booters to DOS executables wouldn’t add an exit feature - it would likely have been quite complex to do so. ![]() ![]() As pointed out by ssokolow, this is similar to how many other micros were used at the time, and continued for a long time on home computers such as the Atari ST. There was nothing for such a game to exit to - once you’d finished playing, you’d switch the computer off, or reboot it from a different floppy (or from the hard drive, if you had one). All PC booters run without DOS or any other operating system¹ - to start them, you would insert the floppy into the drive, and switch the computer on (or reboot it). Paratrooper was originally a “PC booter”. ![]()
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