Category Archives: games

Zork on the IBM Mainframe (VM/370 CMS) it lives!

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There we have it, after a LOT of fighting the emulators, missing bits, LOTS of help the hercules-os380 mailing list, and the EXCEPTIONAL of one Paul Edwards, and it’s running.

It seems to be Dungeon version 1.2C

read news
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
01-MAR-81 Late Dungeon Edition
This is a version of Zork on VM/370

The problems with it are:
-Lack of an endgame.
-Simple parser (no compound sentences).
-Numerous bugs and spelling errors.
But so what.

If you encounter problems or find logic, spelling, or usage bugs,
keep them to yourself.

>

It’s a little odd playing zork on a mainframe…

Quake1 & MS-DOS

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And because I had a request for it, here is a 7zip containing a makefile, and source suitable for building quake under MS-DOS.

I sourced it from the Doom makefile, and cross built it under OS X… It builds in under 5 seconds using all 4 cpu’s on my OS X box with my OS X to MSDOS DJGPP cross compiler…. I had forgotten that the gpl’d source included MS-DOS support.. I had taken the video part from Chi Hoang’s DOS port of DOOM and gotten it to run until I remembered.. Oh well a few hours wasted.

So there it is, Quake1 built on a mac, and running on DOSBox on a PC.....

And speaking of Quake, it’s on sale too!

But just for today, on steam…..

Doom for MS-DOS

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Today while checking out eets on steam ( yeah I know… ) I came across this sale… It’s Doom, Doom II, and Doom III all together, with all the expansion sets for $8.74 USD!

Well needless to say I couldn’t resist the offer, so I bought it. While playing around with Doom, I was wondering what was the first port of the Linux X11 doom back to MS-DOS. A bit of googling brought me to the doom wiki, and from there it seems that “DOSDoom” version is the first source port returning DOOM back to MS-DOS.

As mentioned in Chi Hoang’s notes, it took him 4-5 hours to do the initial port. So I figured it’d be worth re-creating the 0.1 version of his work, under DOSBOX with DJGPP.

I did find out the hard way that there is a single assembly clause that breaks under newer versions of DJGPP, and there is a small issue with the HOME environment variable that if it’s not set it’ll crash DOOM. So I ‘fixed’ that to use the current directory.

To install this legacy version of DJGPP, I found the needed files..

*bnu27b.zip
*csdpmi7b.zip
*djdev201.zip
*gcc2721b.zip
*gdb418b.zip
*mak3791b.zip
*pat253b.zip

Simply unzip all of this into a directory that your DOSBox mounts, and alter your dosbox.conf something like this:

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.

mount c c:\dos
c:
set PATH=C:\DJGPP\BIN;z:\
set DJGPP=C:\DJGPP\DJGPP.ENV

Then you should be able to extract the doom source that I’ve patched up, and run make to re-build the exe. I’ve included a shareware wad file that won’t explode on missing demos…

So the end result is the following:

DOSDoom 0.1

DOSDoom 0.1

Which… has no networking support, no audio, but it does work! This port is overall minimally invasive to the code, and I’d suspect it’d make it a very easy starting point for yet even more ports of doom… I think there is over 40 out there.

That’s the one great thing about making the source available, is that the product lives on and on!

Nethack for Windows CE (x86)

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So after struggling like CRAZY on trying to build nethack for Windows CE, it came down to two posts out there….

Thanks to some people in Russia, and Google translate, I found some explicit instructions on building Nethack…

Which spelt out that you need Visual C++ 6.0 to create the dependancies, then use embedded Visual C++ 3.0 to build, which the snag there, is that I was foolishly using 4.0 service packed to level 4, which stripped out support for the SH4 cpu…!

Thankfully, the site hpcfactor, maintains a download for embedded VC 3.0, and I was able to churn out an exe for the emulator. Then tearing it appart, I was able to replicate the build using Platform Builder 2.11 to create a native x86 executable.

So after all that work, here it is!

NetHack for WindowsCE x86

NetHack for WindowsCE x86

 

For those people on x86 machines, or using the CEPC platform, here is the exe, datafile, and finally the source code.

This is what I’m hoping I can manipulate for SIMH…

Nethack on CE text

Nethack on CE text

Textmode in graphics…

Net Hack wiki moved

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I just received notice that the NetHack wiki has now moved and the new site is nethackwiki.com.

It’s great when old software just doesn’t revive for a little while then fade back to obscurity, so update your links, or just browse the site and be blown away by all their information on such a great (and difficult) game.

And of course, I have NetHack for the Windows NT 4.0 MIPS, and various 4.X BSD on sourceforge under the package tapes….

VMWare Fusion 3.1 & KOTOR

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Well let me be the first to say this is a little “modern” compared to all of my prior stuff, but anyways I’ve been enjoying life under OS X the last few days (along with crunch time @ work.. .sigh). As part of my day job I do still have to maintain some MS-DOS & Windows stuff, so while I do run Qemu under OS X, I’ve also purchased a copy of VMWare Fusion 3.1 (available online, and as a 30 day eval!). Ok so it’s $89 with the one year support, pretty snazzy stuff.

Now one thing that I find very interesting, is that unlike all the other more expensive versions of VMWare, Fusion for the MAC allows for SOME 3d apps to run!

I’m still kind of amazed at the stuff that does run and how cleanly it does so.

So I’ve installed good old Windows XP in a VM, then tried Fallout 3. No go. For the hell of it I tried Sims 3, and surprisingly it worked.. Even though it’s silly as there is an OS X version available.

So for today (I think it may be over in a few hours….) Steam is selling Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic for $2.50 USD!

Now KOTOR has been kind of finicky about what machines it’ll run on, in the past, but I have to say, much to my surprise the emulated 3d hardware ran KOTOR out of the box, without any modifications or anything!

So here it is, KOTOR in a ‘window’ on Windows XP in a Window on OS X.

KOTOR under XP VMWare Fusion in a window windowed

KOTOR under XP VMWare Fusion in a window windowed

And it’s playable at 1024×786.. and 1280×960, although at higher resolutions I’ve had issues with the mouse tracking.. .perhaps something about hardware/software mice support?

Anyways, emulation has now come to the point where 3d stuff really does run!

Duke 3d & the Build engine

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Well I was looking at some stuff on old games, and naturally everyone always did love Duke Nukem 3D!

Now what is really cool, is that that the guy behind the build engine, Ken Silverman released the source to the ‘build’ engine, but also some of the builds of build as it progressed.

Ken is a big fan of QuickBasic, so to compile his earliest version, you’ll need QuickBasic 4.5, or the QBasic that came with MS-DOS 5.0 and above.

Download picrot4.bas, and run it through basic, and you’ll get this:

Qbasic 'Build'

Qbasic ‘Build’

Under some emulators (Virtual PC) you’ll get a corrupted screen at first, hit any of the arrow keys, and it’ll redraw the screen into what it should look like. Considering the 8kb of basic code includes the engine, and the map it’s pretty snazzy!

You can find the timeline, and other versions of the build engine as it progressed on Ken’s web page.

As the engine improved, and was ported into C, it only got better! Then it was sold and licensed out, which gave rise to great games like 3D Realms Duke Nukem!

Notice the similarities?

Notice the similarities?

After the build engine went open, 3D realms followed up, in releasing their extensive modifications to build which can be found here.

In the off chance you don’t have the game, you can still get the shareware version of it from 3D Realms here, and of course the full version on Good Old Games for $5.99 USD.

With the release of Build & Duke 3D, it’s only natural that they shed their humble MS-DOS beginnings and found their way onto Windows as full Win32 applications taking advantage of the hardware. Thanks to the work of Ken & Jonathon. You can find the results on Jonathon Fowler’s page here.

I suppose later I’ll have to see if it’ll build with the win64 tools… It’s be neat for a 64bit version of Duke!

Doom for UnixWare

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Doom on UnixWare

Doom on UnixWare

I’d never actually built Doom from source before… It was more involved then Quake, or maybe I’ve done Quake too many times? Anyways one thing that stuck out to me, is that you HAD to define NORMALINUX, or it wouldn’t pick up wad files or much of anything…

I guess other then that, I didn’t even try for sound… As a matter of fact, I think I’m pretty much done with UnixWare, but at the same point it’s a little more ‘fun’ then I found it.

UnixWareDoom.tar.gz