The PC MS-DOS version of Tau Ceti was coded by Derek Baker at Comtec and published by CRL Group (Thunder Mountain in North America) in 1987.

It features gaudy, four-colour, CGA graphics, but is otherwise the Tau Ceti we know and love.

Playing the game in DOSBox now PC Tau Ceti runs way too fast, but it is possible to slow the game down to an acceptable speed by changing the ‘cycles’ setting to “cycles=fixed 1000” in the config file.

Once Tau Ceti becomes playable, the same great city-jumping, flying saucer-blasting, reactor-stopping gameplay becomes available. And it is just as good as all the other classic versions of the game out there.

While I wouldn’t direct anyone to play the DOS version of Tau Ceti if they were playing it for the first time (I’d recommend either the Atari ST version, or the ZX Spectrum or C64 versions as the first port of call), I do still think this an excellent conversion of a great game, in spite of the horrible colours*.

*= I just pretend the game is monochrome. 😉

More: Tau Ceti on Wikipedia