MrFlibble

Looks like this is heavily inspired by Dune of all things. And, uh... StarCraft? Looks sort of nice.

I haven't visited here in a while, but recently I reworked the entire list towards a hopefully more informative and intuitive format, and have just updated the first post accordingly.

Prince of Persia and Warcraft II

Here's a little hotfix for Aleona's Tales sprites: tales-quick-fix.zip It repairs some extra transparency in Peasant, Fawn, Knight and Gryphon sprites, and adds shadows to Footman and Archer sprites. Additionally, I replaced Footman and under attack voice with higher quality alternatives by David Slimp which I found in the old CVS repo, plus I attempted to repair some other speech and sounds with clicks and noise using Audacity.

Updated the Aleona's Tales fix: aleonas-tales-2.4.3-fix-r2.zip

Recently I discovered that the latest version of Aleona's Tales (bundled with Wargus 2.4.3) does no work out of the box - in fact, no 2.4.x release does. I figured out that this is caused by errors with PNG files, which I was able to correct and threw together a fix for the latest version: tales-2.4.3-fix.zip To use, first install the 2.4.3 release from GitHub, then unzip the contents of the fix archive, overwriting the files.

It's not clear because the game eventually fell into obscurity. I think about trying to contact him and ask, it would be fun to have the source code and the extra mission--building tools. The game looks like a nice counterpart to Freecraft/Aleona's Tales (you know, I've come to appreciate Aleona's Tales art lately, I just can't run the latest Windows build that comes with Wargus 2.4.x).

Recently I found, via the Wayback Machine, this little and apparently highly obscure gem: Future Conflict. It's a free (technically shareware) DOS RTS game, lovingly copied almost verbatim from Command & Conquer and Red Alert (and not in the least ashamed of that mind you!) by Chris Jones, better known for being the author of the Adventure Game Studio toolkit. If you look past the "programmer art" level graphics (that aren't very bad, actually), it's a fully-fledged game with a single-player campaign (only one side though), skirmish mode against up to three AI opponents, and functional multiplayer mode. There's even an equivalent of Red Alert's rules.ini. The author accepted registrations, which would endow the user with a mission builder, a unit editor and a campaign editor (no idea if anyone registered). But otherwise the unregistered game is fully featured and has no limitations. Oh, and it fits on a single 3.5" floppy disk too. It's a bit tricky to get it work with sounds in DOSBox though, but a pre-installed version is available here. Make sure you use the current SVN build of DOSBox, not the latest stable version (0.74-3) from the DOSBox website.

Syndicate Plus, Syndicate Wars and both Ultima Underworld games are available for free off GOG and I believe Origin until 3 September.

Did a major update/overhaul of the first post. I decided to focus on accurate recreations of non-free games, and ditched those free projects that can be thought of as an Ersatz of several games in a certain genre, but aren't specifically emulating any particular title (like Cube, MegaGlest or Annex: Conquer the World). Note that direct unauthorised/unofficial remakes which use proprietary data or other content are not included in the lists. The games are now grouped based on completely different principles that hopefully reflect the field in a more meaningful way than before. I corrected some classification errors too -- previously some games that were not engine recreations with free data were labelled as such (e.g. Dave Gnukem -- it does not use original Duke Nukem 1 data). I updated links where necessary, and added Wayback Machine links if project pages are no longer available. Abandoned projects that have not reached any meaningful stage of development are no longer features in the lists.

Here's a nice game: Robot Redemption. It's based on the source code of Hovertank 3D and plays rather similarly. And The Vigilance of Nephthys is fairly similar to / inspired by Catacomb 3D games.

This is fun, I'm getting a Cars vibe here, very cool.

Thanks! However this mode does not seem to do any aspect ratio correction, it just draws the same 1:1 square pixels over an area of 640x480 instead of 640x400. I was kinda hoping for something like this:

Apologies for the noobish question, I'm trying to configure the game to run in 4:3 aspect ratio as shown in the screenshots on the site, but so far without success. I haven't played C&C in a long while admittedly, and never used CnC-DDraw before. Any advice on how to to it? I'm using the portable version and picked the ddraw.ini which said "full screen aspect ratio with shaders", and set the correct resolution, but it does not render the image at 640x480 but at 640x400. Or is it not possible at all?

Have we finally got a spiritual successor to Emperor of the Fading Suns? (I just watched the video a bit and this is my first impression)