Ahh, it's really a memory hog. Sorry about that.

Your best bet would be to run it on your Slot 1 machine (in MS-DOS mode, it won't run in 98 since it messes with the system timer), using the -lessmem option.

Edit: fixed the download link in first post to reflect new version (older versions can be found in subsequent posts).

Got it working on my Socket 4 machine (Pentium Overdrive @ 133mhz with an ET6000 PCI video card) by making 581kb memory available and using the -lessmem option.

It have slowdowns when shooting/picking stuff up and it's not as smooth as in your Youtube video. You might need to up the recommended specs 😀

vetz wrote:

It have slowdowns when shooting/picking stuff up and it's not as smooth as in your Youtube video. You might need to up the recommended specs 😀

Yeah, since adding the sprite routines, doors, switches, various other stuff, etc., the framerate has dropped significantly. Hopefully rewriting in QB71 will fix that problem, but I have my doubts. I may end up having to use C or Pascal or something.

In theory, it should work perfectly on any Pentium II/III class machine. Did it crash on your Slot 1 machine?

Edit: You can press F10+D to check your framerate. And F10+E and F10+W work as well, same as in actual Keen.

I see 😀 On the socket 4 machine I get 16 FPS standing still infront of the houses in the first level and it drops to 12 FPS if I start to shoot/pick up stuff

Haven't tested further on my P3 machine, but I suspect freeing up more memory will help.

vetz wrote:

Haven't tested further on my P3 machine, but I suspect freeing up more memory will help.

keenmaster486 wrote:

In theory, it should work perfectly on any Pentium II/III class machine.

I meant to say here: as long as you have enough memory! 😀
You could try booting from a floppy disk with the bare-bones configuration of HIMEM and EMM386. The engine must have EMS memory to run, otherwise it crashes (I need to have an error-handling routine for that one).

Just wondering what the goal in the end is and the priorities? Make a good clone to run on Pentium II/III machines and in DOSBox, or tweak the hell out of it and make it run well on 286/386 machines?

The guy who made Retro Rampage 486 did it more as a programming execise, just to see that he could make the game run smoothly on a 486.

The ultimate goal, yes, is to make it run on a 386 (286 is, unfortunately, out of the question since the libraries I'm using are written in 386 assembly).

At this point I can see, with enough tweaking and rewriting in QB71, making it run on a 486. 386 seems like a pipe dream right now 🤣 But maybe I'll get there eventually.

Another new version, this time probably the last one as I've reached the absolute limit of what QB45 can do and I'm simply not willing to rewrite the entire engine in QB71, which is only marginally faster anyway (I did some tests. It's about 5-10% faster, which is not nearly enough).

There are no new features except for a few new enemies and some more levels converted from Keen 4. The main improvement lies in speed. I've got this thing absolutely as fast as it can possibly be given the fundamental structure of the engine and the fact that it's written in QB45. On levels like Crystalus, though, which has 28 sprites, it really chugs, even at 60000 DOSBox cycles 🤣. Oh well.

Maybe someday I will rewrite this in FreeBasic but I don't see that happening anytime soon as FB doesn't have a screen scrolling routine like DirectQB's. I might rewrite it with unoptimized scrolling for modern systems, but I don't like that because it isn't DOS 😠

I guess at this point I'm devoting what limited development time I have to this: I've an idea: Let's get some game development going

Download link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwrvaawQX60 … SmI2eGxLNV9JbmM