Posts Tagged ‘Revival’
Revisiting ‘Star Wars: Dark Forces’ with DarkXL
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Retro Games
The original Star Wars: Dark Forces was released back in 1995. The game is a FPS that takes place in the universe created by the Star Wars saga. It had long levels and impressive cinematic sequences for its time, good graphics and also featured awesome music and sound effects. In short, it has a great replay value, so after almost 16 years, why not play it (again)? Since this is a DOS game, you will need to use a emulator to play it, such as DOSBox. The game works fine with the emulator.
Running the game at an emulated environment is not exactly a bad thing, but what if you could execute Dark Forces natively on Windows, at higher resolutions and with other improvements? That’s why there is DarkXL, an application that does exactly that, created by the talented Lucius. As explained on the DarkXL website: (more…)
TA3D: Total Annihilation in 3D
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Retro Games
Total Annihilation is a strategy game released back in 1997. It is one of those games that can make you forget about the time, even if played today. The original version is fun and complete, but what if you want to play it with 3D graphics? That’s why there is TA3D, (Total Annihilation 3D) which is a source port of the original game.
TA3D, as you might have guessed, makes it possible to play Total Annihilation with 3D graphics and some other improvements. For comparison, here are two screenshots, one is from the original game, and the other is from TA3D:
How to add shaders to Ocarina of Time
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Featured, Retro Games
This post explains how to add shaders to 1964, a Nintendo 64 emulator, meaning that it is possible to emulate N64 games with effects like bloom, HDR, or even sepia. It can be done without high resolution texture packs, but if you want to learn how to replace the original game’s texture for better results, check out this post: How to play Ocarina of Time with high resolution textures.
The first step is to download the 1964 emulator. By the time this post had been written, the latest version was the 1.1.0, found at: 1964 Download Page.
The 1964_11.rar file comes with the emulator executable and source code. The emulator executable is at the bin/release folder. Extract all contents of the Release folder to some place you can find later.
How to play Ocarina of Time with high resolution textures
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Retro Games
This post will explain the necessary steps to run The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or any other N64 with high resolution textures. It’s easy to find tutorials explaining how to get the new textures working with the Project64 emulator, but here you will find information on how to get these textures working with the 1964 (nineteen64) emulator. The process described here will be the same for other emulators, since the video plug-in is the actual responsible for swapping textures, so, the instructions contained in this post should also work with Project64.
The following images are an example of what the game will look like after the addition of high resolution textures:
Original Game Textures.
OOT with high resolution textures applied.
DukePlus – EDuke32 with added features
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Retro Games
DukePlus is an EDuke32 MOD. Those who aren’t familiar with EDuke32, check out this post: Revisiting Duke Nukem 3D with EDuke32.
DukePlus adds new features to EDuke32, like new graphical elements such as: transparent water, transparent glass, water splashes, weather effects, a great number of HUDs improvements… the list is extensive, so check it out here. DukePlus also works with HRP (High Resolution Pack), after all, DukePlus is EDuke32 with more options. But what is really impressive are the number of gameplay features that comes with DukePlus.
These gameplay features include the possibility to play mirrored game levels, add cooperative bots to aid you, display health bars over the characters, spawn monsters with random attributes, add more enemies and ammo to each level, use a new and enhanced enemy A.I., the list is huge. There are also new actions for Duke Nukem, like dashing (double tap walk key), ledge grabbing, pushing and pulling objects, a new kick, wield two pistols at once, etc.
The sound had been modified in DukePlus. New sound effects for gunshots and explosions will replace the original ones.