The first time I ever ran Raptor was on one of those days in 1994 (probably Aug 28 94). I was like WTF

In the commercial version there are six dates encoded into RAP.EXE at offset 0x37F30
(have to disassemble the 32-bit instructions there for it to make sense):

May 16, 1994
Feb 27, 1996
Oct 02, 1995
Mar 12, 1995
Aug 28, 1995
Apr 24, 1996

You've already mentioned these except for Feb 27 (game says at startup that this is Dave T.'s birthday). Apr 24 is Paul R.'s birthday according to the startup message. The eggs will only go into effect on or after the listed year, and since the game was released in Jan 1994, some of the eggs would take a year or two to start showing up under normal circumstances.

There is also the Easter Egg that causes Battle Cows and Monkeys to appear: on the bottom of the sector selection screen, click the rocker switch multiple times until it turns completely black, then click the three buttons to the right of the switch so their lights turn on. If you do it right, there will be a kind of electrical short sound effect when starting the selected sector.

^ good to know that inside info, Raptor is a beloved classic and unique back then since the good pc shmup choices were so few....

I don't know why, but I never liked Raptor... I'd prefer Xenon II Megablast 😉 or other arcade shmups.

I'll try it sometime again but I doubt it will make any difference.

Very cool! Absolutely one of my favs.

ripsaw8080 wrote:

There is also the Easter Egg that causes Battle Cows and Monkeys to appear: on the bottom of the sector selection screen, click the rocker switch multiple times until it turns completely black, then click the three buttons to the right of the switch so their lights turn on. If you do it right, there will be a kind of electrical short sound effect when starting the selected sector.

I used to do this a lot with Raptor back in the day, it made the game much more interesting to play for me. Time to fire up DOSBox and have some retro gameplay fun 😊

EDIT - Here are Raptor's sound effects I ripped from one of the data files (FILE0000.GLB) and converted to a single wave file 😁 :

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2d34v1d1mhajamy/Raptor.wav?dl=0

kixs wrote:

I don't know why, but I never liked Raptor... I'd prefer Xenon II Megablast 😉 or other arcade shmups.

I never liked Raptor that much either... but no way would I prefer Xenon 2 over it - that has horrible controls and repetitive music 😀
Raptor's got a lot of technical merit though. Nice atmosphere and graphics using lookup table effects while having a steady framerate on a 386 system is nice.

FUN FACT: Cygnus gave id Software their Raptor setup program in 1993 for Doom. This lead to some key description and copyright leftovers regarding Raptor in Doom. and that's not the only overlap (Prince of course, but also Paul Radek for the sound system)

Raptor was also one of my favorites (considering I very rarely like any kind of platform/arcade games, makes this almost unique).

I don't know if I remember correctly but after you get ridiculously rich and having everything you can buy, there start to be some absurd and incredibly powerful guns appearing in the store. Like the ones shooting bananas and hamburgers/hotdogs.

Both were good, but I much preferred Tyrian to Raptor.

I seem to remember there was another raptor cheat/easter egg where you could set an environment variable to 'CASTLE'?

Shareware Raptor came with my 1st PC and was probably the best game pre installed. Its also the first full version game I purchased I think? Definitely top 3.
I worked out the toggle switch thing after starting it on someone's birthday. The combination changes depending on what version you have the Apogee FAQ goes into more detail http://www.rinkworks.com/apogee/s/6.3.2.shtml
it doesn't mention 24 April though and while I did recognise the installer in Doom cool to know Raptor was the first.

Think its Tyrian that has the banana guns, Raptor definitely doesn't.
Completely forgot about the castle variable but your right!
http://messui.the-chronicles.org/cheats/325.txt

And Yes as soon as I saw this I fired up that same PC I got all those years ago and am now playing Raptor, only difference is the screen and now have a SC55 for music 😀