Reconstructed Commander Keen 1-3 Source Code

I really love that a phpBB board like this still exists outside the dominant social media hellscape of the internet.

Very nice!

This is released under GPL.

I wonder, who is K1n9_Duk3? Does he have the rights to actually release this, and put it under GPL?

What does "reconstructed" mean? Is this disassembled? And if so, is it really ok to put this under GPL then?

> I had to find names that would allow the variables to appear in the correct order. So after some trial and error, I wrote a small throw-away program that generated a bunch of variables with random names and ran that list of variables through the Turbo C++ compiler. Disassembling the generated .OBJ file showed me which order these variable names would produce

Nice puzzle!

Is the ordering the only thing that can be recovered from the binary? If the hash is available anywhere, it should be possible to brute force the exact original names.

> They used the same routines they wrote for their day jobs at Softdisk in the Keen code. [...] Most of the IDLIB.C code must have come directly from the PC version of Dangerous Dave. [...] there is some extremely strong evidence showing that the id founders used Softdisk's code in their own game. Sure, it's not the code responsible for the smooth scrolling, but it is code they probably didn't have the rights to use.

Huh, this is interesting. Is someone able to provide more detail?

The pace at which Id produced games has always been an inspiration for me. Large amounts of code reuse seems like an important clue as to how they were able to do that.[1] But how were they able to reuse code effectively to such a degree?

[1]: The other clues I have so far are Romero's legendary tool-making abilities, and Carmack's tendency to produce code that gets computers to do things they couldn't before.

These games ran so well on IBM XT computers. Honestly, seeing these games made me realise PC’s could be used for gaming.

Carmack was a genius.

Can it help the progress of https://gitlab.com/Dringgstein/Commander-Genius ?

Keeping commander keen alive should be a priority project for humanity!

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