Very cool. Seems that C and Assembly were very common options to write a game. Assembly was specially necessary to squeeze out more performance from the hardware at the time.

Making a high-performance game without at least a little assembly was next to impossible. High level languages introduce so much overhead that only now, with more modern, faster systems and code being highly optimized by compilers, is it possible to make something decent without having to have a single line of assembly, but even then, you'll find assembly code used in many of the engines themselves (or the libraries they're built off of) for accessing high-performance CPU functions.

We're long overdue for a Catacomb 3D source port, so I imagine someone will take up the reigns to do that very soon. :)

That is true, knowing assembly was essential. I remember reading a Chris Roberts interview where he talked about the necessity of re writing some parts of Wing Commander code to assembly. However, assembly used to be a problem concerning portability, x86 assembly is different from PPC or 68000 assembly or others for that matter. Nowadays its not a problem at all, major gaming platforms use x86 architecture processors.

It is very true that modern compilers do a great job. People who are starting at assembly are overwhelmed as their simple programs run faster on a higher level compiled language than on their own assembly code. With the constant intruduction of newer, wider and more complex instruction sets only makes assembly more difficult and extense to learn.

It's definitely very cool that people can poke around the source code of these old games. I hope more follow the example.

I was hoping that they would open-source the game data for once as well, as these are extremely old games that I doubt most people would pay money for. Unfortunately, they only open-sourced the engines. 🙁

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I was hoping that they would open-source the game data for once as well, as these are extremely old games that I doubt most people would pay money for. Unfortunately, they only open-sourced the engines. :(

That's more a matter of copyright than anything else. I imagine Id Software might have plans for some of their older properties and don't want to give them out for free TOO easily. That, or considering they don't own the copyrights (at least, not entirely) to the older Softdisk-released stuff which is actively being sold by Flat Rock Software, they can't make the decision to do that.

GPL license doesn't stop anyone from making a from-scratch media project htough.......... if anyone's willing to make EGA first person shooters totally Free 😀

Apogee/3D Realms still distributes the Keens they published.

It's cool if these have some assembly. I don't see anything wrong with assembly. I think that's why Sega consoles are good. Nintendo, Sony, and even Microsoft use hardware that's swept under the rug and dead; if you learn whatever CPU is from them, it won't benefit you. Despite Sega consoles being old, there's still lots of devices using 68000, z80, ARM, and SHx (calculators, phones, routers, machines, etc). I think also that Sega stopped in the hardware business, because they were gambling with Motorola, Hitachi and Yamaha; instead of buying dead stuff like Sony and Nintendo. It's funny how the Sega Master system is so old, but its hardware is still not dead.

Did the Keen source finally turn up?
https://twitter.com/ThatTomHall/status/447865434008596480

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I was hoping that they would open-source the game data for once as well, as these are extremely old games that I doubt most people would pay money for. Unfortunately, they only open-sourced the engines. 🙁

Several of them are being actively sold on GOG.com, actually.

leileilol wrote:

GPL license doesn't stop anyone from making a from-scratch media project htough.......... if anyone's willing to make EGA first person shooters totally Free 😀

They could charge money for it too, GPL allows it.

Gemini000 wrote:

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I was hoping that they would open-source the game data for once as well, as these are extremely old games that I doubt most people would pay money for. Unfortunately, they only open-sourced the engines. 🙁

That's more a matter of copyright than anything else. I imagine Id Software might have plans for some of their older properties and don't want to give them out for free TOO easily. That, or considering they don't own the copyrights (at least, not entirely) to the older Softdisk-released stuff which is actively being sold by Flat Rock Software, they can't make the decision to do that.

Those games were not made by id software, but by would-be employees of future id software. The game were owned by Softdisk and now are owned by Flat Rock, which still sells them. I think the thread title should reflect it.

You could still use the original data files if you own the games 😉