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1. Aaron Giles (aaronsgiles@corteximplant.com)'s status on Thursday, 02-Nov-2023 23:39:07 UTC Aaron Giles

   The last of the DOS game support added this past week was 1990's Night Shift. This game was totally new to me.

   Graphically, it has support for MCGA, VGA, EGA, and Tandy modes. Though interestingly, only the EGA and VGA modes support the full status display at the bottom (via split screen techniques), while the MCGA and Tandy modes just overlay a couple of key elements at the bottom of the screen and scroll the whole screen area. The Tandy colors are very wrong.

   Musically we finally get some nice options here. Not just PC speaker, but also 3-voice Tandy sound, CMS/GameBlaster audio, and AdLib FM are all available. I love me a good CMS soundtrack, so this makes me happy.

   Copy protection wise, this is the closest to the Monkey Island code wheel. It has mixed head/body combinations that you have to line up, along with a color to select an entry on the wheel. As with the Monkey games, it can be quite challenging to match the onscreen graphics with the code wheel, so I'm always relieved when I get the screen scraping working in DREAMM so I don't have to worry about it anymore.

   Gameplay here is a vertically scrolling platformer, with conveyer belts and lots of jumping. Goal is to keep the factory churning out Lucas merchandise, which is rather on the nose. Haven't played it enough to get very far but it runs nicely.