Desert Strike for DOS: July 1994 demo (beta)

Описание: Game - Desert Strike (Return to the Gulf) for DOS, July 1994 demo (beta)
Music and non-digitized sound effects - FM synthesis via Nuked OPL3
Day of recording - Jun 30 2025

https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/downl...

This is a July 1994 demo for DOS of Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf.

An earlier June 1994 demo was also prepared. Both of these demos appear to use external files for contents, including game data and executables, rather than .DAT archive files and simple loader .EXE files as used later.

You should be able to play for some time, until gameplay is halted in the middle due to being a demo.

It may be noticed that digitized sound effects play faster than usual in the July 1994 demo. These are Creative Voice (.VOC) files, consisting of a single sound data block (plus a 1-byte terminator) per file.

Here's a list of these files: CHAINGUN, EXPLO1, EXPLO2, EXPLO3, HELFIRE, HELIBANG, HYDRA, MISSION, RIFLE, WINCH.

The sound data block is configured with a rate value of 197 (C5h in hex). Assuming the formula 256-(1000000/rate) with truncating division, it should match the sampling rates of 16950-17241Hz. That said, it was apparently the case the sounds were really meant to be played at a rate of 8000Hz (or close enough).

That seemed to be fixed in later versions by changing the code to ignore the embedded rate and assume a rate of about 8000Hz; The sound files themselves had not changed at all in these versions. For instance, you may use the unpacker utility from an OpenStrike git repository in order to extract the contents of .DAT files from demo versions of Jungle Strike; These include the exact same digitized sounds.

By the way, the menu shown here has a small feature found in an Amiga port, but seemingly unavailable in later DOS versions.

On a side-note, the executable might have code from which the overscan border color may be changed, but it's not clear to me if such code may lead to a clear visible difference on vintage hardware, outside of instances like fatal errors.

0:00 About
2:04 Going to start
2:24 Title screen(s)
3:16 Story
5:04 Menu, including one small feature apparently removed later
6:07 Mission briefing
7:15 About to start mission, checking information
8:11 Following gameplay
13:15 End of demo