Have I mentioned lately how much DOSBox rocks? If not, let me state for the record one more time. DOSBox is cool with whipped cream on top. It's basically a DOS emulator, allowing you to play some fairly antique games on modern hardware. What is truly amazing (to me) is how many games work with DOSBox. I mean, those of us from the bad ol' days of 386's remember how hard it was to get these games to run properly on the systems they were INTENDED for.

Now, if you don't have a back-library of old DOS games, DOSBox might not be of much value to you. If you are feeling gutsy, you can go out to The Home of the Underdogs and see what kind of abandonware you can pick up. Unfortunately, most of the games from back then were... well, just as crappy as most of the games out now. But with even worse graphics.

Having lived through that era (and having been an avid gamer and reader of Computer Gaming World), I do have a fairly sizeable collection of DOS games that are theoretically still playable. I kept them around for all these years, "Just in case." The trick is getting them to install. I've purposefully installed 3.5" floppy drives in all of my computers over the years for just that purpose (though it doesn't help for the handful of games that are on 5.25" floppies).

Oh, and the copy protection for those old games are disgusting. Okay, not StarForce "We will wreck your property to protect our clients' property" disgusting, but still pretty painful. Awful things like manual look-ups, or code wheels, or whatnot. Fortunately, in this day and age, most of those can be found on the Internet if you can't find all your original docs. Much to my wife's chagrin, I still have most of those old manuals, code-wheels, maps, and sundry other bits of junk needed to play these old games.

One of my favorite games from this era was Epic Pinball. Produced by Digital Extremes and published by Epic Megagames (now Epic Games) in 1993 - the guys that now bring us the very fun Unreal Tournament games - Epic Pinball was one of the last significant, commercial games written entirely in Assembly language. For those not familiar with assembly language, it's an extremely low-level programming language. The only significant differences between assembly language and actual machine code (we're talking 1's and 0's here) is that assembly language provided labels and variables (of a sort). The last time I had to do any assembly language programming professionally was in 2000, to do a very small bit of pipeline optimization on the Sega Dreamcast. Which was only something like 1/1000th of the size of the rest of the game. To write an entire game like this in assembly is impressive. Even back in 1993.

Technical feats aside, Epic Pinball was incredibly fun. In fact, it was my model for "fun" when I was first trying to get into the videogames industry. It trailed only behind the top first-person-shooters of the "golden age" of shareware for top-selling shareware game. It was simple, stylishly designed, and nearly flawlessly executed. And, in my opinion, it has aged very well. Other than the fact that it doesn't run well under Windows. The graphics aren't cutting edge, but they don't need to be.

Somehow, I managed to keep Epic Pinball on my hard drives over the years. I kept archiving it up as I upgraded, and moving it onto the new systems. While this saved me from a potentially tricky installation with the old 3.5" floppies (which may or may no longer be in readable state), it also preserved my high scores. High scores which are now approximately 12 years old. Possibly predating the birth of my eldest daughter.

So going back to play Epic Pinball with DOSBox, I was delighted to find that I still remembered some of the moves and timing. I remembered what moments to bump the table, or the timing of flips to nail certain targets repeatedly. Not bad! But even with my old, remembered skills, it wasn't quite enough to threaten my old high scores from 1994 or so. The ghost of my younger self is still dominating the 3-slot leaderboards for each table. Durn him. On a couple of tables I've been able to approach the third-place score, but not closely enough to threaten it.

But I really don't feel like clearing them off. I'm kinda proud of those old records, even though I know they weren't really THAT great. But just seeing them hits me with nostalgia. I may have earned them while taking a break during cramming for finals my senior year in college. Or maybe while I was trying to figure out how to make my game demo "fun." Quite possibly one of them was earned late at night as I was trying to take a break from the sweltering heat of the summer of '94, in our tiny house without air conditioning. One of those scores on the "Magic" table might have been earned in the winter of '95, when my teeny little daughter responded to music for the first time one day, happily making cooing and singing noises when she heard the music from that game on the computer. It didn't last very long, and she never did it again, but I played the game quite a bit after that to see if she'd do it again.

But that doesn't stop the competitive side of me from trying my hardest to beat 'em and blow them off the screen.

If you missed the old Epic Pinball game 13 years ago when it was first released, thanks to DOSBox you can enjoy it now. The screen resolution might be a little painful for those of us used to thinking of 640 x 480 as "low resolution." But it's definitely worth a try. As a shareware game, the "demo version" was a single table ("Android", later re-christened "Super Android") that offered free, unlimited play. While it's a little hard to find these days, I managed to track it down and put it up for download here.

You may be able to get it running without DOSBox, but I found that the sound didn't work and that it ran very, very slowly under Windows XP. I had to crank up the CPU rate on DOSBox, but after I did, it ran fine on my laptop. Unfortunately, as a child of the DOS era, the pinball demo isn't a snap to install (or uninstall). Neither is DOSbox. But neither are very hard to wrangle, and I personally think the results are well worth it if you aren't afraid of copying the contents of a ZIP file around.

Download the Super Android Pinball Game

Download DOSBox to run the pinball game.

Incidentally, if you are counting, my high score on Super Android is 441,475,000. Yeah, over 440 million! Yeesh!

Oh, well. Have Fun!