Descent I
I never was good at this game.
As a matter of fact, I was terrible.
Apparently I get lost in 3d worlds like this, and I get dizzy and need to lie down. Â Something about these kinds of 3d virtual worlds. Â At least it doesn’t pertain to virtual machines.
While browsing around, I came across the source code. Â From their notes they built the thing using:
- Watcom C/C++, version 9.5
- Microsoft Macro Assembler, version 6.1x
- Opus Make, version 6.01
I was unable to find Opus Make, however with a little bit of tweaking, Microsoft nmake can happily read the makefiles. Â The other small snag largely was due to MS-DOS not being able to process massive commandlines, and having to build response files to the librarian and linker in various parts. Â But all in all it was thankfully a trivial amount of work to get a working executable.
I only tested it for a few minutes until I was feeling out of it again. Â I guess it isn’t surprising, I had issues when it was full screen back in 1994, but in a tiny window in 2013 it is unbearable.
For the two or three people who care, here is my VMDK that I used. Â It works fine with Qemu probably other emulators that can read VMDK’s.
These new ports makes the Descent experience way more pleasant :
http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/
And an Xbox 360 controller is handy too, you can map all the axes you’ll need for the game that popularized the ‘6DOF’ genre.
maybe if they controlled it from MS-DOS that’d be interesting. Although all the controllers in the world won’t help me feeling dizzy playing the game.
It’s a shame 6DOF and Flight Sims died out – now that much much more people have controllers (with even more axes) they should be easier