MrFlibble

Gamers.Org has several old FTP file archives on their site:

OK, thanks!

Look, you do understand this game is still sold, don't you? Please remove the warez link.

Browsing through the archives of cd.textfiles.com, I found a demo of Tridonis on a Polish gaming magazine cover disk: http://cd.textfiles.com/cdaction/cdaction40/TRIDONIS/ Also found the official site of the game (in Polish): http://www.aliensystem.com/mirrors/tridonis/ Here are more screenies from the game:

You mean a Tib Harvester from C&C? Nope, I can't find it...

What really bothers me is the corrupted barrel sprite near the Tesla Coil in this pic, and the snow tiles near the cliff just below. This screenshot certainly has been doctored, although I think there's little doubt that initially, this was a real pre-release screenshot of the game. Or did the guys at Westwood just slap an image as such together manually from the game's resources? BTW, the rear part of the Ore Truck visible near the sidebar is also truncated at the top, probably by the "snow and gems" tile above. Whoever did that was very sloppy about making their fake screenshot

Closely following the previous release, the OpenDUNE team gives us v0.6. TrueBrain says:

JPEG compression aside, there still is a certain difference between a scaled-down pre-rendered model (made by Eric Gooch, no doubt) and its recreation from a slightly altered image. Even with 256 colours, the original sprites generally seem to have some smoothing on the edges, while your version appears to be more contrastive. If you ask my opinion, what really catches my attention are the gaps between the rings of the coil, or, rather, the hull of the tank visible through those gaps. There should be some kind of shadow effect there I suppose. And yeah, the dots on the edges, too, don't make it look smoother.

I think this might be because XMS is not enabled (you need it for digitized sound effects and speech). Open DUNE2.EXE properties, go to the memory tab and check if XMS is enabled. I think setting it to a fixed amount (4096 Kb should be fine) should help. Turning on EMS, on the other hand, seems to lead to undesired results.

OpenDUNE v0.5 has been released yesterday. This is what the dev team member TrueBrain has to say on this:

TrueBrain mentioned immunity to deviation in his post, what else is there that we did not figure out? I haven't looked into the files yet.

Those who have ever tried running Dune 2 from Windows are most likely familiar with this problem that digitized sounds and speech will seemingly randomly disappear and reappear as the game gets progressively unstable. Well, it turns out it's not due to a programming bug or faulty drivers, but some speech files for the in-game Mentat announcements are simply corrupt. Whenever such sound file is played, all further sound playback is halted until you go to the Mentat or options screen, but, more importantly, these files screw up memory, ultimately leading to crashed. There are only few of them for the Harkonnens and the Ordos, but a whole lot of frequently used files for the Atreides. Here's the list: AATRE.VOC AFREMEN.VOC AHARK.VOC AORDOS.VOC ARADAR.VOC* HSABOT.VOC HWARNING.VOC OFREMEN.VOC OHARK.VOC *This is most likely the real cause of the "radar bug" that was supposedly fixed in v1.07 Fortunately, the corrupt files weren't hard to fix, so I repackaged the PAK archives with speech sets for each House. This should remedy any problems with sound hat might arise when running Dune 2 under Windows. DOSBox users aren't likely to notice the difference, as for whatever reason the problem with speech files does not affect game performance at all when run in DOSBox. Download Dune 2 Speech Fix from Nyerguds' Website dune2_speech_fix.rar

Nice, although I'd say the coil rings look a bit differently from the original (I know it was downsized, but still). They do not blend with the rest of the thing as well as those on the original image I think.

Dune Legacy v0.96.2 has been released yesterday. The big news is that multiplayer over LAN and Internet has been added, which makes the new version the first release of this branch of the project to support multiplayer. The full list of features is as follows: Added LAN multiplayer mode Internet multiplayer mode with metaserver (Beta!) Use scale2x for scaling Make game scalable ingame (Zoomlevel x1, Zoomlevel x2 and Zoomlevel x3) Add mentat help Scroll build list with mouse wheel Loading maps is more fault tolerant and shows only warnings in most cases Loading maps now checks for non-standard features (see Section "Features" in the Dune II Format Specification) Confirm window for game restart and game exit Added 13 maps by Rippsblack New options "Structures Degrade On Concrete", "Start with Explored Map" and "Instant Build" Earthquake ("Window shaking") on large explosions (e.g. death hand explosion) French translation (incomplete and only a machine translation) Bugfix: Loading SCENH008.INI of Dune II V1.0 failed Bugfix: Dune Legacy.log was not used on Windows Bugfix: Support non-ascii characters in paths and filenames on Windows Bugfix: Infantry units could not trigger spice blooms Bugfix: When playing as the Sardaukar, the announcer still says "Harkonnen", e.g. "Harkonnen harvester deployed" Bugfix: Sardaukar Reinforcements did not work Refactoring: Drop Visual Studio 6.0 support completely and start using C++0x features Dune Legacy v0.96.2 Download Page Supported platforms are Ubuntu / Debian, Fedora / Mandriva / SuSE, Gentoo, Windows, Mac OS X and MorphOS.

Return of the Triad is a fan recreation of Apogee' FPS classic, Rise of the Triad that runs on the Doom engine (more accurately, the ZDoom port). It uses the original resources (graphics, sounds and music), and tries to keep close to the original game while utilizing the features of more advanced engine to the game's advantage. The current release, v1.5, has 11 single-player levels which are completely new, and 6 multiplayer maps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfWmN0D7zPE#ws Return of the Triad Home Site (has download links) Return of the Triad at ModDB

Hardcore Gaming 101 A dedicated old-gaming site with a huge database of detailed articles about PC and console games and game series. El Zee's Amulets & Armor Forum A fan forum for discussing Amulets and Armor, a first-person action/RPG game that runs on the Doom engine. [Edit] Updated the link to the A&A forum.

Just noticed that the official Descent II soundtrack downloads from Interplay's website aren't working, but the official soundtrack MP3 pack can be downloaded from Planet Descent. Rise of the Triad Headquarters As the name suggests, this is a site dedicated to Apogee's Rise of the Triad, and it contains extensive information about the game and everything related to it. The downloads section offers source ports, the shareware version, and various extras. There's also a forum.

In a bit belated news, TrueBrain of the OpenDUNE development team has posted in the OpenDUNE Developer's Blog that the current stage of project development is nearing completion: The next public release of OpenDUNE is scheduled for August the 1st.

I remember reading some interview with her sometime ago. What was especially remarkable was the part about her future husband, who was a C&C fan, who asked her to say "Ion cannon ready" in her C&C voice, immediately after which he proposed to her :laugh:

Hades 2 is a pretty obscure FPS from a Brazilian studio, Espaco Informatica, which was released somewhere around 1999-2000. In 2009, the developers have released it for free to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the game. Essentially, it's a 2.5D FPS with high-res sprites, digitized actors (dev team members actually ) and a sci-fi/horror theme, and a very dynamic interactive world. Also, it has reminded me of the Marathon games a bit. The game was obviously quite dated already when it was released, so it is no wonder it had gone largely unnoticed (although it is said to have been quite popular in its home country). However, it has an excellent retro look to it, and it has an overall good, quality design. Hades 2 gameplay video at YouTube Hades 2 Wikipedia article Hades 2 official site Hades 2 screenshots Hades 2 official full download Download Hades 2 Demo Download Hades 2 Demo video add-on

There's some controversy about this project in the Duke3D community though. To quote MusicallyInspired (the guy who made the high-quality music pack for Duke Nukem 3D):

Leliork's Site The site features a rather extensive list of old FPS games, organized by year of release, and contains screenshots and download links for demo/shareware/freeware releases of each game (if applicable). The content seems to exclude vehicle FPS games though, but it has quite a few rare titles so it's worth looking into.

Cool Those purple-robed priests in the first screenie are from MK2, aren't they? :laugh:

Have you guys heard of this? It's a very promising (still WIP) non-commercial project aimed at remaking the original Duke Nukem 3D in high-quality true 3D, using the Unreal Engine 3. This project has been officially sanctioned by the current copyright holders of the Duke Nukem franchise, and it is going to be a freeware stand-alone game. The primary objective of the development team for now is to recreate the original episodes of Duke Nukem 3D with both single- and multiplayer capability. A multiplayer-only beta demo is expected to be released in the near future. Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded Official Website Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded Official FAQ Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded Developers' Blog at the Official Forums Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded Wikipedia article Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded at ModDB

RA1 is a bit more picky with data inside/outside mixfiles, C&C is far more liberal in this respect.