MrFlibble

Doom 64?

I've checked this with the original (freeware) DOS version too. Body Armour indeed gives you 400 health and this is done via the DEHACKED patch (so it works in MBF without any need for code changes), and picking up Centrophenoxine ups you to 200% health like the regular Soul Sphere. But picking any MicroKits will not increase health beyond 200% -- neither do Health Bonuses in Doom 1.2, where the Soul Sphere actually gives you +100 health to a maximum of 199 (which is cool in a certain way).

Does anyone remember that toy dinosaur wad I mentioned above?

Your credits include id Software, does this mean that some part of the sprite is derived from id's artwork? That would make the entire thing un-free.

Oh yes, most definitely! How could I not? I'm afraid my case was that I wasn't exactly in the back to the 90s nostalgia mood ;)

The reds in Earhbound remind me of Duke Nukem 3D, was that intentional?

Nice! Do you release these under a particular license, or just free to use?

I'm by no means a movie-goer, but this is one of the few films that I watched in the theatre when it was released. We'd just passed out Masters degree entry exams and went to see a cool movie to celebrate. It was indeed very impressive on the big screen and I had some good memories of it, but as I stumbled upon it on TV somewhat recentish, I felt that it was no longer as cool when I knew all the plot twists. The cast delivered some pretty solid performances overall, always nice to see Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine, and also I think it was one of the last roles of Pete Postlethwaite? While the idea of multiple dreams-within-dreams is rather original, I don't feel that the themes in this film are particularly deep or philosophical (something that Nolan seems to get "accused" of pretty often, as far as I can tell). The tone just makes a good contrast with the increasingly intricate action scenes to make the whole premise sound more intellectual than it really is.

I haven't really played Blood, but I have to confess I get bored of probably any FPS after a while, so maybe it's just normal? Personally, I never force myself to play if I got bored or distracted by something else, and if I feel like it, I prefer to revisit the game (sometimes starting completely anew) that I put aside like that after a while. And I certainly never feel bad about that -- it doesn't seem like a good idea for games to become a chore (unless playing them is actually part of your job that is!). I generally enjoy exploration more than combat in FPSs, so I lean heavily towards Build engine games, although Blood seems a bit too dark in design and mood for my liking. However, I don't think that any of the 90s FPS titles were intended to be the "perfect" experience where you enjoy every last bit of it; even though Blood is by no means the first newcomer to the FPS scene, such games on the whole were still very young and growing rapidly as a genre in 1997. To me, nostalgia is the first and foremost selling factor, but of course some games are so badly designed, or simply not my cup of tea altogether that I'd not spend any meaningful amount of time with them. By which I mean, if you don't enjoy the game, it's probably a good idea to put it aside and maybe reflect on your experiences at your leisure. Perhaps you will want to revisit it later and find something new about it that you'd not noticed or put emphasis on. I can share a probably somewhat odd experience of my own. I had not heard about Rise of the Triad in the 90s, and only discovered it in the mid-2000s when steady access to the Internet supplied my curiosity and nostalgia for 90s PC gaming. I played the shareware version in DOSBox and greatly enjoyed it, becoming a dedicated fan of @leejacksonaudio in the process. Later on I purchased the full deal on GOG, and recently I decided to finally give it a spin. The short story is, I kind of halfheartedly got through probably halfway into the first episode, after which my interest sorta petered out. I was really expecting to relive the nostalgic impression that the shareware had left on me back in the mid-2000s, but I guess you can't step into the same river twice. I hope to revisit the game sometime and try something different, like configuring it for the WASD + mouse instead of the arrow keys, and/or maybe pick a different character. The trick with these things is that the enjoyment comes in part from your willingness to enjoy a game, as much as from the game itself. But this willingness is not something you can magically (or purely rationally, for that matter) force yourself to do, like say, I'm gonna play this right now and enjoy it real hard :) Sometimes you need the right mood to come, or maybe just have a few hours of free time with nothing better to do/try.

I've just run into a graphical glitch in the first level: I don't know what it's called properly, but basically there is a vertical segment of the screen roughly in the centre where the scenery is distorted and is blinking (you can see that the ceiling lamp is duplicated, for example). I vaguely remember encountering it in the same room a long time ago when I also tried to use the HacX 1.2 IWAD with the vanilla binary -- which discouraged me from further experiments with it.

We had a computer class at school (in the late 1990s) that had a limited selection of pretty old Macs, although I don't remember the model. The bigger class had second-hand 386s, which later got replaced by Pentiums w/ Windows ME (for some reason). Anyway, I spent a very limited time with the Macs, as we were mostly in the big class. I remember they had coloured graphics and this classic MacOS windowed interface, and there were two games: Civilization (which I think was the only time I played that game) and SimLife. I spent most of my time with the latter, designing Zerg lifeforms, as I was mad about StarCraft back then. Anyways, many years later I discovered Spiderweb Software's Exile RPGs, which were originally created for Macs in the shareware scene, and liked them a lot (I played the Windows version on an XP machine, but later I tried out the Mac versions too using Executor. I was never much of an RPG fan, but these Exile games have a certain charm about them, so I spent quite some time and enjoyed them a lot. The setting is very neat. I've never played any Marathon games on an actual Mac, but I tried the first game's demo under Executor, and it kind of worked.

It is my understanding that this could be actually up for debate. If you know RGB Classic Games, you might also know that that site's owner, who also personally negotiated official freeware releases of several old PC titles, is very scrupulous and methodical when it comes to upholding the copyright laws. I have noticed that in cases where multiple releases were associated with a game that became liberated, his rule of thumb seems to be that any prior version should be counted as freeware as well. For example, the site has the registered version of Tyrian 1.1, although IIRC, Epic only released the registered version 2.1 as freeware, and also the registered version of Halloween Harry 1.1, while 3D Realms very certainly only made the registered version of Alien Carnage 1.0 (a later re-release of HH) available as freeware. I think there are other examples with less known games that I don't remember ATM. I was just extrapolating this logic over to Chex Quest. If General Mills are/were okay with CQ3 being freeware, on the surface there seems to be nothing to suggest a different stance towards the original DOS release. On the other hand, CQ3 does not have any license attached to it that explicitly provides for free redistribution either, very much like the DOS version. The endorsement in the form of the link on General Mills' website came years later after CQ3's release, as far as I can tell. As much as I am a fan of FOSS projects, I am inclined to agree here. While there are theoretical benefits of making a fully libre equivalent game, the practical gains from this effort would likely be minimal, unless one imagines some kind of large-scale, wholesale art-creating effort that would actually somehow benefit or be more efficient, the more sprites and textures it was tasked to produce. But since it sounds like a rather improbable scenario, I'll just reiterate what I mentioned above, namely that I think it would be more productive for @ZNukem to focus on the Luke Ken project.

So @Walter confetti reminded me that there's a section for graphics WADs in idgames database, so I took a plunge and found some very interesting content! Among other things, I found a lot of content created by @LilWhiteMouse, who I remembered contributed a few things to the Freed∞m project. And indeed, one of the monsters by this creator is the Head Hunter, which is basically the alternate version of the Technospider. Here's the comparison: From left to right, Head Hunter, Technospider (original version) and Technospider (current touched-up version). I decided to look up more contributions by @LilWhiteMouse, and found a larger sprite made from the same model, included in one version of Hellspawn: I have to note that @LilWhiteMouse has created a lot of very good-looking pre-rendered monsters, all of which seem to be completely original, such as the Hammer Hound, with a larger version found in A New Hellspawn: There are also other characters, some coming in both small and large varieties (and all fully animated): I can only wonder why none of these ever ended up being used in either Freed∞m or Blasphemer (or even Zauberer, for that matter). All these have this early 2000s pre-rendered charm too.

At some point around 2018-2019, the official Chex Quest site run by General Mills contained the link to download Chex Quest 3 from Charles Jacobi's website: https://web.archive.org/web/20190524001342/https://www.chexmix.com/chexquest/ Which I suppose indicated official recognition of the game and its freeware status. However, soon after the release of Chex Quest HD the site has been redesigned to only promote that game instead. From what I remember, the leftover content are just the maps, which Romero has released on his own anyway (even attaching a GPL license or something), plus some graphical stuff (IIRC) that cannot amount to the complete game. While the original DOS version of Chex Quest indeed does not come with its own freeware license, I don't think that its original intent as an advergame makes it automatically commercial. Proprietary, yes indeed, but the gain was more marketing/PR oriented than monetary (they did not up the cereal box price because the game was included, right?). So I guess maybe the ZDoom wiki should be updated on that. Also, while I'm not sure what the Chex brand owners actually thought of kids that would pass the game around after finding the CD in their cereal box, at least the ENDOOM screen says nothing along the lines of "do not distribute!" (which is what the registered version of Doom does), instead directing users to visit the Chex website and download the free additional campaign.

According to my notes, it's 1996. And I mentioned it in my first post.

Actually, that's very cool in its own way! And it's from 1994! Thanks! ^_^ Also I'm dumb, I should have remembered that there is an idgames sub-folder for graphics replacements.

It is, free as in free beer. But it is still proprietary, because Chex is a trademark, and I don't think any of the assets were released under a free license. :D

Can you tell how far it has got? The Freedoom Scoops repo contains this title pic: I'm not sure it's a great idea to have a design this similar to the original Chex Quest. Surely there are other ways to create non-violent enemies than just replicate the look of Flemoids. BTW, the other day I stumbled upon this pretty cool GZDoom game called KLOINKS, which is, incidentally, also food-themed (somewhat). I'm not suggesting to copy that in any way, but it gives you an idea of how one could go around making a libre Chex Quest replacement while staying more original.

I learned about this recently as well, because apparently the same person is making a libre data replacement for Duke Nukem 3D called Luke Ken 3D. However, unlike the Luke Ken project, the Chex Quest one doesn't seem to be anything more than a clone of the Freed∞m repository for now. To be perfectly honest, I don't think it is a very good idea to run multiple projects of this scope at once, and would have much preferred that the project leader concentrated on the Luke Ken one.

What's SteamGridDB?

Any way to contact the devs and ask to freeware the game?

I think that it should be quite possible to implement in the current script. As a word of caution, I actually lack any firm understanding to figure out why it is written that way, but it looks like this change would achieve what you're aiming for (somebody please correct me if it does not): # STARTREDPALS for i in range(8): p = (i + 1) * 0.9 / 7 # was 0.9 / 8 palettes.append(bias_palette_towards(base_pal, (255, 0, 0), p)) # STARTBONUSPALS for i in range(4): p = (i + 1) * 0.5 / 2 # was 0.5 / 4 palettes.append(bias_palette_towards(base_pal, (215, 186, 69), p))

Ahh, right! Cheers!

That's lovely, did you make it from scratch?

I had a brief look at the current playpal script (I'm not experienced with Python but the language does not seem overly complicated). It looks like what it does is implement the changes that are described on the DoomWiki PLAYPAL page. Basically, each colour in the playpal-base lump is gradually shifted towards red, yellow or greed at fixed intervals, like the ones described in DoomWiki. The script does not set each colour individually, unlike what you seem to have done with your versions of the palettes. I think that if the project is to use your palette and colourmap, it would make a lot more sense to ditch the Python scripts altogether and just use your lumps in building the IWADs. Like I said above, the scripts are seemingly only used to generate what is essentially identical to the vanilla palette without actually using it as a file (which would probably not be "clean" enough for FOSS purposes). I'm not sure I fully understood you here, are you suggesting to keep all palette indices at their max values, i. e. the ones you've shown above? (e. g., indices 2 to 8 would all be the same palette?) Wouldn't that make the Berserker pack effect tint the whole screen red in a way similar to the invulnerability powerup, instead of just giving a reddish tint but with otherwise discernible colours of the palette?