RGB Classic Games Forum

I was toying around with a retro gaming PC setup and whipped up some launchers for episodic Apogee games since I thought it was a waste that some games would use up to 4 buttons from the launcher menu. Couldn't find anything similar online so I thought in case someone else is also toying with similar setups they might find these handy.

I tried to make them feel more "official" by not just having a simple text menu and using (official when available) ANSI art. Needless to say there are quite big differences in the amount of time I spent on them and as such their looks vary quite a lot. Very old games tend to have a more simplistic design.

It's a shame Apogee Software never made any official launchers, unlike Epic MegaGames who started including such launchers later on.

Each episodic Apogee game ever released should be supported, including lesser-known packs from ways back in the day. All the launchers are simple .BAT files which are fully compatible with DOSBox and easy to modify. They will probably have some problems running with CMD.EXE since they make use of ANSI.SYS and the CHOICE command.

Download the launchers from here.

A few screenshots below:

This is awesome! ^_^ I love the ASCII art logos.

Very cool! Can I (and should I) use them for the in-browser games on this site?

Feel free to do whatever you want with them including modifications if needed.

Wow these are *really* good! Job well done there. They should stick these in the official downloads for the games!

Malvineous wrote:They should stick these in the official downloads for the games!

Absolutely. Perhaps Frederik Schreiber will do something about that?

I was wondering if something like this could be done with choice other games like Jill of the Jungle? (not Apogee I know)

Epic MegaGames already provided launchers for their titles in the later years which were quite good, so I don't see the point.

Since the download file is no longer available, I contacted @Litude, and he told me that the launchers are now available from GitHub:
https://github.com/Litude/apogee-launchers

The old BAT-only ones are in the oldbat directory. The newer ones need to be compiled with OpenWatcom.