A journey
through the 90s.

GOG as a foundation

For many classics, GOG is the most convenient source. The games are already prepared for modern systems and can then be integrated into the BrickDOS structure relatively easily. Since GOG usually uses DOSBox, its configurations can often be adapted with little effort.

DOSBox-X or ScummVM

If ScummVM supports a title, it should usually be used, since the games tend to run much more smoothly and, above all, do not require extensive configuration through DOSBox-X.

Breadth over perfection

The collection is deliberately intended to cover different genres, technical generations and release years. BrickDOS is therefore less about perfectly emulating a single historical PC and more about creating a playable journey through several generations of PC gaming.

The list remains flexible

The game collection is not a permanently finished part of the project. Titles can be added, replaced or removed again if technical problems arise, without having to change the fundamental structure of BrickDOS.

Not every game is the same

Even games from the same period can require very different settings. CPU speed, sound, graphics mode and memory management can vary from title to title. This also consumed most of the time spent on the entire project. Every game had to be configured and then tested individually. The biggest problem with testing is realizing after an hour that you stopped testing quite a while ago and simply kept playing.

Despite some very extensive testing, longer play sessions still occasionally reveal that certain settings are not quite ideal. In hindsight, I might have been better off relying more heavily on existing databases such as the one from D-Fend Reloaded. At the same time, the same DOSBox-X setup noticeably behaves differently on my regular desktop PC than it does on the Raspberry Pi.

Game availability

As mentioned above, I purchased many of the games through GOG. If you are looking for a game that is not available there, the additional search terms "abandoned" and "archive" can be useful. There are several websites that offer old classics for download. These days, such sites often redirect users to GOG or Steam when a classic is still commercially available. That seems fair enough to me, although the original developers probably do not benefit much from those sales anyway, since the rights to the games usually ended up elsewhere.

I found the game Z particularly difficult in this regard. GOG offers a revised version that runs on modern systems. It is very well made in its own right, but unfortunately differs too much from the original in several places, so I ended up spending quite some time in the basement looking for the original floppy disks.

Windows 98

The biggest setback in the project was giving up on Windows 98. In terms of the user interface, that is not a major loss and may even be an improvement. However, it reduced the game selection considerably. Several important late-90s titles are missing as a result, even though the Raspberry Pi would most likely have had enough performance to run them.

I had also already tested and configured all of the games extensively in DOSBox-X on my desktop PC beforehand, which meant a lot of that time was ultimately lost.