I thought this story might be of interest to some of the visitors to our site. Steve and I spent a lot of time playing DOS games in the 90’s and also our share of time writing a few of our own. In this article (originally in he April 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine),  tells the very interesting tale of porting the game Death Rally from DOS to Windows.

The developer’s name is only given as “Sol” but his story is very interesting. It gives some very useful insight into the difficulties of taking a game that had direct access to the entire machine’s hardware (the DOS version) and attempting to do the same magic tricks in an environment where the developer is removed from direct hardware access and much interact through layers of API.

This ported classic version of the game is available from Remedy for free.

(8bitjeff is Jeff D. Fulton)