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Monday, April 14, 2014

Commander Keen 1-3 (Vorticons) source code found

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JOHN ROMERO, one of the developers of popular early 1990s PC game series Commander Keen, says he has found the source code for the Vorticons trilogy and will seek to release it under GPL.

Romero made the announcement in a discussion about four 3.5" floppy disks he had found, which included the compiled versions of Keen Dreams  and Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion.

"I just found the original Commander Keen source code for 1-3. :)," Mr Romero said.

He later added: "I'm sending it off to get GPL'd." 

The Vorticons trilogy consisted of Commander Keen 1-3. The game engine changed significantly for the subsequent Keen Dreams and Keen 4-6.

There are few details on when the code will be released and where it was found.

The source code for Commander Keen 4-6 was found by the game's creator, Tom Hall, last year on a still-readable (just) SyQuest cartridge.

The code for episodes 4 and 5 will be released as open source, but Keen 6 remains tied up in distribution issues. (If you downloaded the Keen pack on Steam you would have noticed it was missing.)

Why is the code important? A small community of fans has been modding the games for years, using patch files to reverse engineer the compiled game files and create entirely new Commander Keen games. The source code will allow those developers to make even more changes more easily and port the game to modern operating systems.

Click here to explore the fan-made Vorticons mods.

Click here to explore fan-made Galaxy (Keen 4-6) mods.

You will probably need DOSBox to run the mods.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Andrew Stockdale releases new material. A whole hour of it...

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... and it's really, really good!

Here's some background:
http://www.fasterlouder.com.au/news/local/35110/Wolfmothers-Andrew-Stockdale-goes-solo

Here's something Andrew Stockdale posted to his website early this afternoon:
http://andrewstockdale.com/post/44758981540/heres-a-new-track-fresh-off-the-press-long-way

And here's the whole damn thing:
https://soundcloud.com/official-wolfmother/sets/record

It seems Stockdale has done this with a lineup that includes one former Wolfmother band member: Dave Atkins.

The strange thing in all this is the audio has been uploaded under the "official wolfmother" name on SoundCloud.

 

Monday, January 21, 2013

Elect who you want ‘cause a pirate is free

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Glen James Takkenberg is a pirate… and he’s throwing a party!

The AEC has just announced the registration of the Pirate Party Australia. Don’t believe me? Check this out: http://www.aec.gov.au/parties_and_representatives/party_registration/registered_parties/pirate.htm

The party correspondence address is in New South Wales, but the Officer of the Party, Mr Takkenberg, is from the ACT.

The ACT has a long history of humorous parties. Although this may not be one of them (I can’t be bothered researching that right now), it’s well worth checking them out.

Examples of joke ACT political parties include:

Most of those parties are now defunct and new laws make it harder to register political parties in the ACT, which was one of the easiest places in Australia to register a political party.

This means fewer joke parties make it past the idea stage, which, in my opinion, is a loss to the character of Australian democracy.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Patrick Stewart's quiet life

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