Back to the origins

#Beginning

MS-DOS 4 got open-sourced a few months ago, and this reminded me that I wanted to try to run something very special (old?) on my BSD machine. Vintage stuff like OpenTTD and Diablo is pretty dope, but not vintage enough. And I never really got a chance to finish Another World—debugging pirated Red Hat CDs was an exceptionally time-consuming hobby. It is not like I finished Diablo (the console does not count since it does not feel the same), and there is definitely no way for anyone to get even close to finishing Transport Tycoon.

#Build

It turned out there is a FreeBSD port for rawgl (commit 2aad632), which is an engine re-implementation written in C++. Although it is not available via pkg, I did not observe any issues while building the port on FBSD 14.3-RELEASE-p2. I know that you can pull the game from the Steam store with linux-steam-utils. But I am not a big fan of emulators on this topic—if I want to play a game, I would use a proper machine (or should I say console).

#Game

rawgl --datapath=/tmp/aw-data

I used the DOS data from 1992. One could run the game with OpenGL, but this kind of ruins it for me.

It feels very strange to play this after reading Dune. I never really enjoyed the books, even though I had the best possible environment of the (murdering) desert to read them. The first two and the last one were alright, but it felt like work most of the time.

Strong and subtle cyberpunk, nothing like modern overwhelming games.

Such an epic scene.

So glad that I got a chance to run this with rawgl being marked as deprecated since June, so the Steam emulators might be the only way from now on.