The BEST Early 3D DOS Games (1981-1990) 

Loved Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator as a wee lad "You really bought the farm!"

Helicopter simulator was the first game we had on our Tandy 1000, and for what it was trying to do on a computer that low end compared to the later models of computers in 1990's it was actually really impressive and really immersive as well

Excellent shots of real CRTs here; it really helps evaluate the performance of these games when running on real hardware.

I was fascinated with games that played digitized sound through the PC speaker in the 80's. Mach 3 is one that comes to mind.

That F19 title screen, back when 7 segment displays were high tech!

Beautiful pioneering times. I love those early games, but today it's hard to believe that it was common to play at 3-5FPS :)

Awesome seeing these playing in the real thing! Check out Die Hard from 1989, it's actually a third person shooter on DOS! Also Test Drive 3 from 1990, it's my favorite early 3D game cause it has a huge world rich in detail

Some other early 3D DOS games I find intriguing are the games made for the *Freescape engine* that were originally for the Amstrad CPC- and Commodore 64-series of computers, namely Driller, Dark Side, Total Eclipse and Castle Master. The DOS versions were the first 16-bit conversions of these games and are a curious mix of first-person shooter and adventure/puzzle games with an emphasis on completing a “main quest” or mission of sorts in a fairly open-ended world. Total Eclipse also uses the PC Speaker to play back digitized sound effects. Midwinter (supposedly 1989 for Atari ST and 1990 for DOS) is even more open-ended and feels a lot like a prototypical “open-world” shooter like your typical Far Cry game, albeit with a lot more strategy and multi-character co-ordination involved. It’s also quite possibly the first “FPS” game with scope-based sniping in it. Very ambitious batch of games in my humble opinion.

Perfect timing! I got the last of the custom peripherals for my barebone PC1512 working today. Time for some CGA gaming!

Good old pwm audio 👍😉 Awesome video thanks, good info Love the memories

That voice actor in Echelon sounds to me like the same guy who says "Looks like he hit the tree, Jim" in World Class Leader Board (also Access Software). "Oooh, can't be too happy about that one!"

Silpheed was interesting. I only knew the Sega/MegaCD version, which I loved, and the graphics were incredible

Stellar 7 on VGA 386 was pretty spectacular:) But to favourite true early 3D - Stunts was my favourite.

Stellar 7 is an early game with Sound Blaster support. It has the IRQ hardcoded to 7. Which is how early Sound Blasters were configured out-of-the-box. Later models used IRQ 5 instead, and this would lock up, as the game never gets an interrupt from the card. Perhaps that's your issue?

What corruption do you mean in Echelon? Echelon had a "pirate cipher", which is what those scribbles at the bottom of the screen were. The picture above would be more or less complete depending on which artifacts you collected (iirc). For Stellar 7, I think it works only when the Sound Blaster is set to IRQ 7, and it freezes on IRQ 5 (or vice versa)

Funny, I started my "PC journey" from 286 and now, 35 years later, I'm looking for games playable on my 5150 :-)

The first PC that I owned was a 12-MHz '286. Although I worked on some that had EGA, I got Hercules (monochrome) graphics because the sharper text was better for text-based use, like programming. Also, good amber monitors were affordable, while good color monitors were much more expensive. However, the Hercules graphics made many games suffer. The Sierra games like Chuck Yeagar used an automatic translator layer, so it did the CGA graphics on the B&W screen; but they were also squished and was especially poor for such games. It would be interesting if you could show that.

It would be interesting to see how well the DOS port of Stunt Car Racer performs on this hardware, considering that the original C64 version could already hit around 5-7 FPS.

nice many games I did not know from back In the day when we had a 286 and later 386 at home. As a 8 year old I so hated this 4 fps flight games though, ...

I played that Star Wars game on Amstrad 1512 and I remember blowing up the death star. So I guess it needs 8086@8Mhz at least.

Really interesting and well made video! Early 3d games are highly interesting for me. The 3d-games i liked most, was X-Wing on a 386 early 90's (1993 i got my fist PC). Interphase, F16 Combat Pilot and Starwars were also made for the Atari ST that time. Would also be interesting how they compared with the IBM versions.

DragonStrike [1990] is a very enjoyable early 3D game that nobody seems to mention..

The latest game has a cool design. Thanks for the review.

Remember the Diamond Speedster card.

F-19 had pretty great sound on a Tandy (and probably a PC Jr?). I wonder how many hours I had racked up in that game :D

have to check those on my A2286/8 ET4K :)

if there was ever a reason to upgrade to a 286 its this video :-)

Also threre was very nice game of 286 era - in 3d "Dragonstrike" - "simulator" of a dragon rider)

That intro to Echelon reminds me of an old module player I had which ran on MS-DOS and played output over the PC speaker. I've never been able to find out what the program was called though.

I wouldn't call them the best early 3d DOS games. My list looks more like this: - F-19 ( i agree with that one) - M1 Tank Platoon - Battle of Britain Their finest hour (the aircrafts are sprites only, but the background is 3d) - Wing Commander (here everything is made of sprites, but i would still consider that as some sort of semi 3d game)

3d gamers today: 60fps is the absolute minimum 3d gamers back then: 6fps is the absolute maximum

One i remember that looks like it makes the date cut off is Stunts: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game) We had this installed on the cad pc's in school. Its not PC but the first '3d' games i recall playing were the microprose c64 simulations like gunship, f15 strike eagle.

Flight Sim came with my first PC, Amstrad PC1512. F19 came with my first Amiga. Played those two a lot.

LHX was an early attack helicopter sim that I liked very much. It ran with EGA and PC speaker, but I think I played it on a 386.

I think the corruptions are there, because your EGA card has probably less memory than required. Original EGA had initially 64KB of ram, but later cards supported 256KB RAM. The games are trying to access RAM beyond the 64KB and just getting garbage data.

Deep Space: Operation Copernicus - I recall having a copy of this for my C64 (or maybe I borrowed a copy), and liking it. I remember being able to play it pretty well. Now of course, copies can be downloaded off the net, but I still haven't found copies of all the maps that came with the game, of the manual, so I'm a little lost trying to play it today. Stellar 7 - This is an updated version of a game of the same name that came out for the C64 and Apple II in 1983. I played the Amiga version of this and I thought it was pretty poorly programmed. It would slow to a crawl even with just a couple enemies on the screen and the digitized audio was so garbled, I could never understand what it was saying. I didn't think much of the sequel, Nova 9 either. They probably would have run better on an accelerated machine, but there were other Amiga games with more complex 3D that ran much better than those games. BTW, between the original Stellar 7 and this game, was Arcticfox, another 3D tank game by the same programmer. While the original Stellar 7 was mostly a Battle Zone clone with a few extra features, Arctifox was a more complex game. The updated Stellar 7 went back to more arcade-like gameplay, but kept some of the advanced features of Arcticfox.

Thank you for your awesome Video, one question .. whats the name of the game in the right lower corner? (Regulus Sector) .. this is the first game i ever played as a kid.. had no idea what was going on there and i also dont remember the name, but i would like to know :) THANK YOU!

Do you own a Roland MT-32? Many games you show here have MT-32 support and sound great.

Yes in response to a previous comment: “back in the day” I was used to 3-5fps in 3d games. So my FAVORITE was Knights of the Sky and Red Baron. I still play knights of the sky today. Back in the day I played it for HOURS/days in 4 color cga on a 286 at 8mhz. All time fav. Elite/elite plus and gunship 2000 are close behind. Pcretrotech Id be interested to know if the ega games demoed glitched out on IBM ega cards? Or even knowing the chipsets that were glitching. Very curious thanks!

Anyone remember this old fighter jet game, which you easily crash in early start of the game? And some cartoon of scientists in it...

My first 3D dos game I think was mechwarrior, nothing else was really 3D until duke nukem and quake. That I knew of. Didn’t sound like this though. Glad I skipped this stuff 😊

I like seeing 3d games in 4 colors. Guess I'm a weirdo ;P

Wow F-19 Stealth Fighter sound is pretty bad on the IBM PC. I had that game but we had a PCJr and it sounded much better.

is with an 8086+8087 better?

Best 3D game hands-down for the 8088 is F29 Retaliator.

Tau Ceti deserves to be on the list

You really need an MT32 to enjoy Silpheed...

Is this is a vector graphics or polygonal 3D with flat shading?

Silpheed isn't pre-rendered. The Sega-CD version is but not the original.

What about Starglider and Starglider 2? Looks a bit similar like Interphase, but bettter 🙂

Faltó Dark Side, el juego de abajo a la izquiera al principio del video.

No mention of Lightspeed :( It was mostly playable on the original PC, though as usual a 286 was recommended. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_q-TgFdVQF4.html Mechwarrior was fun though. Note that it does have an ending, but you have to follow clues to suss it out.

TempleOS vibes

Deathtrack is the best

Every single EGA game has corruption here. Have you tried swapping out the RAM chips on your card?

sil feed / sylph eed / see roo feed oh / Silpheed

Check out Tomahawk

A lot of those games would use sound cards.... they were much better.

The performance difference is surprising. The 286 isn't that fast. Did EGA have a lot more memory bandwidth than CGA? I'm guessing that write speed was a big limiting factor on 8086/CGA.

CGA made my eyes bleed.