Planet X3, a game developed for MS-DOS in 2018

MS-DOS was a text-based operating system that was released in 1981. Microsoft updated it for the last time in 2000. 18 years later, a programmer named David Murray is developing Planet X3, a game created for MS-DOS.

The old and endearing MS-DOS had a long and prosperous life. It was an efficient and stable system, but all orders had to be entered in text mode, typing them with the keyboard. I did not use a mouse. Microsoft replaced it with Windows in the 90s of the last century. And apparently, there are still people who miss him.

Planet X3 will be an MS-DOS game framed within the strategy genre, with graphics in CGA or VGA to choose, with a resolution of 320×200 pixels and 4 or 256 simultaneous colors. In this video of KickStarter its creator, David Murray, explains the development of the game:

Interestingly Planet X3 is the sequel to a game for Commodore 64 (a computer from the 80s), which Murray himself created … last year.

It is the first time that you program in MS-DOS , so you have encountered many more problems than you expected. Its main obstacle has been the lack of information on the Internet. Or, more specifically, the expired information.

Sometimes I had a doubt and went to googling it , and although I found links that supposedly resolved it, when I went to the web sites, those links no longer worked. Some, even for more than ten years …

Commodore 64 Mini, the new version of the Mito of the 80s

David Murray launched a fundraiser at KickStarter a few days ago to sponsor the game, and in a few hours he got the money he needed. So the publication of Planet X3, an MS-DOS game in 2018,  is confirmed, although we will have to wait a bit to enjoy it. It will be released in May 2019.

MS-DOS

Will it work on our modern Windows 10 computers? In theory, there should be no problem. Modern Windows have long since stopped including MS-DOS in their kernel, but they do maintain an MS-DOS emulator to run MS-DOS games and older programs. You can also use a virtual machine like VirtualBox , to emulate the old system.

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