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id Software's Original 'Softdisk' Games Open Sourced

Posted by Soulskill on from the free-as-in-antique-fun dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The original games developed by John Carmack, John Romero, and Adrian Carmack at Softdisk, where the legendary programmers originally met and went on to start id Software, have been open-sourced under the GPLv2. The games are now owned by Flat Rock Software and the open-source titles available are Catacomb, The Catacomb, Catacomb 3D, Catacomb Abyss, and Hovertank3D. The oldest of these games are written in Borland Turbo Pascal while the others are in Borland C++. The source-code can be downloaded from GitHub."

9 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. hehehe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Will John Romero make me his bitch for sucking this code down?

    1. Re:hehehe by Dogtanian · · Score: 2

      OP's wasn't that great a joke, but it was a fair reference to the infamous slogans used in pre-release hype for the game Daikatana- "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" and "Suck it down".

      Aside from how this would have come across at the time, it probably backfired even worse when the game was significantly delayed and turned out to be a damp squib when it did arrive, something that must have rendered the apparently arrogant hype- and by extension, Romero- laughable and hard to take seriously, even if it was tongue-in-cheek and Romero later expressed regret at (reluctantly) approving the slogans in the first place.

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  2. Awesome! by DewDude · · Score: 2

    Till now I've been limited to playing them in an Apple II emulator; which some of these were the reason I bought the old Softdisk collection in the first place. These are the true roots of id Software; and some of the games they'd make later clearly had their roots here. Dangerous Dave? I first encountered him on Softdisk! Glad id could acquire whatever rights they needed to.

    1. Re:Awesome! by Desler · · Score: 3, Informative

      Can't tell if trolling. First, the Apple II version was released in 1989 while the DOS port was released in 1990. The in 1991 an Apple IIgs version was released. Also, the Apple II version had 15 levels while the DOS only had 10. I was not wrong about anything.

  3. Re:Wow.. Pascal. by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 2

    http://www.embarcadero.com/pro...

    --

    "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
  4. Re:Wow.. Pascal. by gmuslera · · Score: 2

    Maybe it will compile in fpc (http://www.freepascal.org/). But probably will be tied a lot to DOS to not being able to run outside DOSEmu, probably an old Turbo Pascal version to compile it should be the best choice. Or take out those ties and make it run in modern OSs.

  5. Re:Wow.. Pascal. by Cley+Faye · · Score: 2
    If that's your thing, you can try GNU Pascal. Quoting wikipedia:

    GNU Pascal (GPC) is a Pascal compiler composed of a frontend to GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), similar to the way Fortran and other languages were added to GCC. GNU Pascal is ISO 7185 compatible, and it implements "most" of the ISO 10206 Extended Pascal standard.

  6. Re:Wow.. Pascal. by FlyingGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wow, really?

    It is called analyzing your project and mapping the thing out before you write a single line of code. Programming is a discipline as well as an art and a science.

    I was once talking to a guy and he as complaining the compiler kept erroring out on "symbol table is full". I asked to look at his code and OMG he was declaring variables by the butt load, but the thing of it was they were all subtle variations of the same thing, and lots and lots of structs. So I should him how to make a linked list of a single of structs with variants. I explained that with little effort these would be declared on the heap and that running out of space in the symbol table would be a thing of the past. Also he was no longer limited by the stack and that he had all the memory the machine could muster for variables.

    These days troubleshooting code has become such a chore simply because languages these days let you declare variables anywhere so you have to track down where things declared just to figure out what is happening and dynamically typed languages are the absolute worst thing to come along simply because they only add to the confusion since the compiler or intepreter has to try and determine intent and they all pretty much suck at doing it.

    I have written pascal programs in excess of 100K lines broken up into many modules and I actually find them easier to debug than other so called modern languages simple because the discipline of declaration forces you to really think things through, rather than just popping things in here and there in an ad-hoc manner.

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  7. Re:Wow.. Pascal. by FlyingGuy · · Score: 2

    Remember the old days of 64K code and data AND segment offset, and LIM sepc?

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