TechniBuzz.com

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.

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.