Guest Book

Added by Marcos on Mon Dec 18 14:20:37 2023

I also played this game to death 30 years ago on my 286 12MHz, 512Kb of RAM, slow VGA card, 14 inch monitor bith big black bars, and internal speaker. I was 10 years old or so back then. But I finished it! I cant imagine how many times I tried.

By the time, I was spending hours programming on Quick Basic and trying to understand assembly and DOS interrupts. I remember reading the assembly code at the credits and thinking "woah that must be a clever way of programming the video card so refresh rate is faster". Today I discovered it would just restart the computer, it was a hacker prank!

Not so long ago I discovered, using PCEm emulator, that the game is unplayable on 486 machines, due to some cache optimization. Never noticed back in the day as I jumped straight from the 286 to a Pentium. Then I also discovered it had music!

I still have the 286 at my parents house, and I recently overpowered it with a Sound Blaster 16, another 512KB of RAM and a faster ISA VGA. Now plays Prehistorik 2 as I wish it could back in the day!

For the last 30 years I've been eagering to run this game on DosBox with the silky smooth scrolling and panning effects of the difficulty level selection screen and scrolling map introduction. Finally I got it to do so with a 70Hz video mode (I use an old CRT on a XP build for retro gaming) and DosBox-ECE (probably vanilla DosBox would also be able) configured to 10000 cycles (about a 40MHz 386).

I absolutely love this game, and love to see others still remember it. Thank you for maintaining this site alive with all this cool information. Greetings from Spain!