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Pre-NecroBones Software
NecroBones Enterprises
(tm) Ed T. Toton III, 1994
The following are games that I made before I was known as "NecroBones"
(with one exception), and are therefore mostly my "I almost know
what I'm doing" and my "I'm learning to program" projects. They are
here mostly for historical and/or nostalgic reasons, though a few
of them you may find enjoyable to play.
This list is not absolutely complete however. It only contains
the programs I designed after I started distributing them as
shareware/freeware. Prior to that, for several years I averaged one
program a week, most of which were simple attempts at making games,
or they just did some sort of graphic effect that I thought might
come in handy for a game project. Most of these early programs
are either lost for good, lost in a mess of unmarked diskettes,
or are simply unworthy of our attention. There are many other
programs that I have created more recently that are not here
either, due to limited usefulness. As time goes on, I may try
to add a few of the better of my ancient software here.
NOTE: I recommend using DOS Box
to play these games. I've tested that it seems to work with my audio systems in
most of these games, which is really nice to see. It isn't perfect, but it allows
you to actually hear the audio with these games and still play them in Windows. I
recommend a "CPU cycles" setting of 6,000 - 30,000 for most of these. Generally,
set it as high as you can without the audio skipping.
Old Games:
| Name
| Description
|
| Acheron
| Acheron is a mutli-player (single instance) BBS-door
game that I wrote back in '92 for my own BBS and started
distributing. Very few people, aside from those who were
on my own BBS, have ever seen this game. It's still one of
my fondest programming memories though, since I did everything
to make this game as complex and yet as bug-free and
bullet-proof as possible. This game handles it's own user
accounts, has it's own internal e-mail and message boards,
and as such is almost like a small BBS itself, except it
has no modem protocols. All of the I/O is done through DOS
using ASCII control codes, and thus relied on the BBS to
do the I/O redirection. Of course, this means you can run
it yourself from DOS and play it.
The game basically consists of a user base of players who
are all playing one type of spellcaster or another. There
is magic, daemons, monsters, deities, and a variety of
other things. The game rules are NOT explained to you at
the beginning, as the discovery is part of the game. Playing
by yourself is almost pointless, since it's all based on
character interaction. This game was heavily inspired by
an old BBS game called Pyroto Mountain.
|
| Cybot
| Cybot is a little game that I made in QuickBasic.
By todays standards, or even my own standards, it
wasn't a fantastic game, but to this day I'm still
in awe of the fact that I was able to squeeze so
much out of quickbasic, both in terms of performance
and how much I fit into the game. In this game
you pilot a small transformable robot around several
mazes that consist of static rooms, fighting off
small geometric creatures along the way. Loosely
inspired by Thexder. (~105k)
|
| StratSys
| StratSys is a strategy game system sporting 640x480 16-color
graphics and was my first game ever to use a mouse. It
has simple easy-to-learn rules and a simple interface.
If you are willing to take the time, you can create your
own battle scenarios, or use the ones included (this ZIP
file contains the library that was originally distributed
seperately). Includes scenarios that have naval battles,
army battles, space battles, robot battles, etc. Strictly
a 2-player game. (~90k)
Registration is no longer required. You can use the following
free code:
UserName: Unregistered User
Code1: Xquhjlvwhuhg#Xvhu
Code2: BFFDDFFFDFDDBBFDF
Code3: &'%&""$'&%"!!&&"!
|
| Dungeon-3&4
| DUNGEON is one of my earliest game projects. The first
Dungeon was very simplistic, and almost played itself
(meaning there was little to do) The second one was
just my learning some new techniques. This ZIP file
contains the third and fourth versions. Both of these
are very similar, except that in Dungeon-3 you get to
play an entire party of adventurers, and in #4 it goes
back to the single-character idea, and has fewer bugs
than #3. All of the dungeon games are text games with
little plot, but plenty of combat, exploration,
and treasure hunting. (QuickBasic D&D style hack-n-slash)
(~140k)
|
| RoboWar
| RoboWar is a simple text-based strategy game for 1 to 10
players (if I remember correctly). It has no special
requirements, and is easy to learn. Give it a try! (~105k)
|
| R-Space #1
| R-Space is a text adventure game that I almost didn't
even remember until I stumbled across it in my back-ups.
You take the role of Viktor, originally a maintenance
robot on a starship, now turned intelligent and self-aware,
and the ship is doomed. You have 30 minutes to escape
the ship. It's a simplistic game, but interesting anyway.
You will need to have ANSI.SYS loaded in your config.sys
file in order to see a display in the intro that shows
information about the ship, and to see the winning
"The End" screen. You also need a CGA compatable graphics
device (who doesn't?). (~70k)
|
| Stellar_Conquest
| Stellar Conquest was the last game that I made in
Quick-Basic. I absolutely pushed the limits of the language.
It got to the point that if I added one more line of code,
the program would not compile due to it's size. I ended
up removing a few bells-and-whistles just to do some bug
fixes. It was finally the last straw, and I switched to
pascal. Later, I revisited the idea of Stellar Conquest
and made a new version: Stellar Conquest II. (~105k)
|
| Stellar_Conquest_II
| SC2 was intended to be more of a replacement for SC1 than
to be a sequel. It too sported 640x480 graphics, but also
made use of the lower-resolution 256 color mode for
the ship menus. In the end, it was a far superior program
and a much better game than the original. However, it
too has been surpassed by Stellar Conquest III, which
is available on the Games Page.
(~85k)
|
| Snappy
| Snappy was just a simple game that I threw together.
It is somewhat of a game of skill, in that you have
to steer around walls and pickup the balls to solve
each level. Crashing into your own trails or into the
walls means death. Uses vector graphics. (~65k)
|
| Apex
| Apex was a silly program that was based off of a Basic
program that I had found years before in which you could
pretend to hack into the NORAD mainframes. This one was
designed to look like an actual terminal program however.
(~20k)
|
| Bot
| BOT was my first robot-programming game. Basically, you
write a flow-chart style program to control a robot, and
then pit it against other robots to battle it out in an
arena. Unfortunately, the flow-charts are not graphical,
and instead you have to program with numbers only. It's
rather cryptic, but it was fun for me and a few friends
at the time. This game was superceded by R-Bot. (~65k)
|
| R-Bot
| R-Bot is actually a replacement for BOT. It uses the same
sort of flow-charting system, but had a lot more options,
larger arenas, fewer bugs, etc. If you would like to see
where I've gone with robot programming games, check out
AT-Robots. (~135k)
|
| Dragons_Domain
| This is a self-extracting EXE file containing all 4 of the
Dragons Domain tetralogy. DragDom was inspired by the old
Atari game called "Adventure". If you've played that game,
and would like a little nostalgia, you might want to give
these a try. They were designed on a 286, but should run
fine on current computers. Each sequel not only continued
the story (a story that can only be understood by reading
the documentation), but also improved on the graphics
and interface. This package was distributed as the 1-year
anniversary edition, and includes as a bonus a small
"Dragon card game" called Drahkarin. (~300k)
|
| Cell_Quest
| Cell-Quest was my first scrolling-background adventure game.
In this game you play a mysterious little microbe that
ends up having to save the human host from a nasty little
infection by going around and solving sub-quests in each
limb before continuing the quest into the chest. It's
actually a cute little game with interesting single-cell
characters and some minor combat. It will probably take
less than an hour to play through, but is worth the
download. Features 256 color graphics and FM sound effects
(adlib style). (~75k)
|
| Codex_Arcana
| This game was not actually PRE-NecroBones,
but I've never really pushed it out into the shareware
market. I was a little distracted and lost interest
in the project about half-way through, and just ended
up quickly finishing it off. However, you may still find
it enjoyable. I was attempting to make a graphics based
adventure game. For the most part it consists of fighting
off elementals while navigating a maze of ever-changing
terrain (corresponding to the elements) while trying to
solve the puzzle of how to get home. This was the first
(and so far only) game of mine to actually use my
digital music system, and it features scrolling 256
color graphics, with vibrant background images and
of course, I'm in the game too (look for the blue mage
that wanders around in a crabby mood). (~220k)
[Please note that for some reason, the sound-effects are
missing from this archive. At a later date I will put the
correct copy of the game up here, sound effects and all]
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Other Old Programs:
| Name
| Description
|
| Firedots 1.4
|
FireDots is a VGA fireworks screensaver. It's only 16-color,
but is quite configurable and is a good choice if you want a
simple program to run on your big-screen TV. :)
|
| Blaze 2.6
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My first screen-saver, and my first "official" shareware release,
this program makes dazzling 256-color displays on your screen. It
was designed for a 286, so it may run way too fast on your computer.
|
| Quick Quotes 4.31
|
A random text generator, using predefined dictionary and
sentence strecture files (you can add/edit if you wish).
This program was completely replaced/superceded by Non-Sequitur
which you can see on my Games Page,
or you can run the online version.
If you really intend to seriousply play around with this program,
you really should download Non-Sequitur too, and use that one mostly.
|
| Markov 1.0
|
A simple markov-chain text generator. Feed in some sample
text, and it generates statistical tables of word combinations
and then generates random text from it. Usually very humorous
results. :)
|
| Blab 1.2
|
Similar to the Markov program, this also generates lots of
random text using text files as source to draw from. This
program also went by the name of "Nonsense".
|
| Ramble 1.0
|
A real-time interactive random text-generator, with multiple
generation methods, similar to the above programs.
|
| Piglatin
|
DOS text filter - converts text to piglatin.
|
| Anti-Spel
|
A DOS text filter that is the opposite of a spell-checker.
This converts text into really bad mispellings.
|
| SourceGen 1.0
|
A random pascal source-code generator. The generated code actually
compiles under Turbo Pascal 6.0, but the programs tend to end up
in infinite loops.
|
| My Gags 2.2
|
A collection of DOS gag programs, most of which are various TSRs
for playing tricks on people with their keyboard LEDs and the like.
|
| HD-Poof
|
An evil little DOS-based gag program, this fakes a
system failure, reboot, and hard-drive format. Not
terribly elegant, but to those not in-the-know, it
could be rather scary. :)
|
| Screen Poof
|
Pretends to be a DOS prompt, and then suddenly goes to a
snowy screen. Can really fake people out. :)
|
| Virus Farm 1.0
|
A text-based BBS-door/DOS game. In it, the players pretend to be
viruses trying to take over the system, and compete against one
another to infect files and spread across the hard drive.
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For my more recent/current games, check out the NecroBones Software Page.
Back to NecroBones Headquarters Index.
(Copyright 1997, All Rights Reserved)
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