A while ago I’d mentioned that as part of a large MS-DOS gaming upload to archive.org the old SSI ‘gold box’ games were online, including CotAB. What is more interesting is that while digging around for Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures, I found Simeon Pilgrim’s work on decompiling the old MS-DOS EXE, and converting it to run in .NET!
Yes, that’s right it’s all in C# You can find the project & downloads over on github.
This is nothing short of amazing!
The engine suffers many limitations from supporting 8bit machines, although they did uplift the graphics, music and sound although they didn’t increase the overall sizes. And the engine on the PC side was written in PASCAL of all things. I mean it was the hip language of the era, and well C is just too portable and reliable. The later SSI games were C++ apparently.
That said, for MS-DOS purists and those wanting to be legit, the old SSI AD&D games are on sale over on GOG, broken up into a few collections.
With collection 2 being the gold box editions, featuring:
- POOL OF RADIANCE
- CURSE OF THE AZURE BONDS
- HILLSFAR
- SECRET OF THE SILVER BLADES
- POOLS OF DARKNESS
- GATEWAY TO THE SAVAGE FRONTIER
- TREASURES OF THE SAVAGE FRONTIER
- FORGOTTEN REALMS UNLIMITED ADVENTURES
Which is a bargain at $3.39 USD!
I don’t know why I’m finding so much fun things on GOG, but here we are. In other news I got a new $99 USD dual Xeon board, although it seems to have some weird mystery issues including a ’99’ power issue, and when it does boot even the install media for Windows 10 bluescreens. Sad.