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Old Softdisk Source Code Released

Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2014 11:42 pm
by Tchernobog
Softdisk was the company where John Carmack, John Romero, and Adrian Carmack met and developed games originally before founding id Software. Those original Softdisk game titles are now being open-sourced under the GPL. The original Softdisk games created by the id Software founders are now owned by Flat Rock Software. Flat Rock Software has decided to go ahead and open-source these old classics. Among the games with their sources out there are TheCatacomb, Catacomb3D, Catacomb, and Hovertank3D ... The engine is open-sourced under the GPLv2 but the game data still requires having a licensed copy of the content. The original Catacomb was written in Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5 while at least Hovertank3D and the newer Catacombs are written in C++.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... px=MTcxMjM

Re: Old Softdisk Source Code Released

Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2014 07:29 am
by BEAST
Excellent! I've taken an interest in the Catacomb games since I first checked it out. It always looked like Commander Keen from a first-person perspective to me then. Despite it's repetitive theme song (which I do like to jam to), and limitations, I liked what they pulled off. Even the later Catacomb games after the id team left had some unique qualities to them.

I've been wanting to do a cyberpunk Tolkien-inspired game with the graphical look of Catacomb-3D, so it's just perfect that the source code has been released. Don't know if I could actually pull it off with this old technology, but it would be worth it to try.

Re: Old Softdisk Source Code Released

Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2014 05:44 pm
by Tchernobog
If anyone is interested, User:Gideon has gone and listed a great deal of similarities between the Catacomb series and the Blood series on the Blood Wiki:
http://www.blood-wiki.org/index.php/Blo ... _Media#Pre

Probably one of the most frivolous articles we have, but undeniably one of the most popular. 8)