Public Commander Keen Forum

I remember Tom saying that he had the source probably buried on a old SyQuest disk. Guess he finally found it. This is big for Commander Keen!

If it ends up coming to pass that id decide to be a bunch of jerks and charge some one-time fee for releasing the rights to Tom, I will totally donate a couple hundred bucks toward that.

ckguy wrote:If it ends up coming to pass that id decide to be a bunch of jerks and charge some one-time fee for releasing the rights to Tom, I will totally donate a couple hundred bucks toward that.

I'll donate too, but I don't see this coming.

And why exactly would they do that?

For the same reason they still sell it on steam.

Because they have a personal vendetta against you, your family and your small town. They're like the bad guys in a 1990s children's movie.

What does selling a commercial game have to do with selling the source code? :\

The majority of old DOS games are still being sold commercially through steam, gog and related services, I don't see why id should be blamed for doing what pretty much everyone else is also doing. Especially when unlike others they actually supplied the source code for their other games.

Levellass wrote:Because they have a personal vendetta against you, your family and your small town. They're like the bad guys in a 1990s children's movie.

Exactly. They hate the Keen community and Tom Hall with the same passion that they love counting gold and laughing at orphans. They're going to steal the source code from Tom, shut down all the websites hosting Keen mods, and then steal Christmas if they still have time. We're all going to have to team together and believe in ourselves if we're gonna stop mean ol' id Software from taking our games, man!

Hi everyone,

I am "the Keith person" that dumped the Keen code. It was stored on a SyQuest 88MB magneto-optical cartridge formatted with the NeXTStep variant of the UFS filesystem, likely on Carmack's NeXT cube at id in 1992. Tom and I had been talking off and on for the past couple of months about finding the cart and transferring its contents, since mentioning to him I have a working SyQuest 88 drive.

The cartridge contained only one file-- "keen4-6.compressed"-- but I renamed it "keen4-6.tar.Z" since that's what the NeXT .compressed format is and the ".compressed" extension would probably not be obvious to most people nowadays. I then put it on a USB stick and gave the tarball and the cartridge back to Tom. Other than that, I did not mess with it at all.

I successfully used dd to create an 88MB raw dump of the cartridge. Funny thing-- I had planned to dump the cartridge twice, just in case, but during the second pass, I kept getting errors around the 2 meg mark. Didn't know whether it was the cart or my drive acting up, but figured it better not to jeopardize the cart, so I just went with what I had.

The code itself is very similar to that of Wolfenstein 3D, even using some of the same files. I spoke with Tom yesterday and he believes it was built using a Borland compiler at the time (Turbo C? Some batch files reference td386.exe). The archive contains the code, some of the source assets, and some tools/utilities for building Keen 4-6, however it is very disorganized. There are multiple copies of the source, zipped and unzipped, scattered across various directories, and it will take a good programmer some time to sort it all out. I'm hoping Tom can have this cleaned up a bit before it's released somewhere.

The screenshot I posted on my Twitter account is of my MacBook Pro desktop, tarball freshly extracted, showing one of several directories full of code. I briefly skimmed it but haven't really delved deep quite yet. Tom most definitely wants to release it soon, but is still waiting for a response from id.

blitter wrote:Hi everyone,

I am "the Keith person" that dumped the Keen code. It was stored on a SyQuest 88MB magneto-optical cartridge formatted with the NeXTStep variant of the UFS filesystem, likely on Carmack's NeXT cube at id in 1992. Tom and I had been talking off and on for the past couple of months about finding the cart and transferring its contents, since mentioning to him I have a working SyQuest 88 drive.

The cartridge contained only one file-- "keen4-6.compressed"-- but I renamed it "keen4-6.tar.Z" since that's what the NeXT .compressed format is and the ".compressed" extension would probably not be obvious to most people nowadays. I then put it on a USB stick and gave the tarball and the cartridge back to Tom. Other than that, I did not mess with it at all.

I successfully used dd to create an 88MB raw dump of the cartridge. Funny thing-- I had planned to dump the cartridge twice, just in case, but during the second pass, I kept getting errors around the 2 meg mark. Didn't know whether it was the cart or my drive acting up, but figured it better not to jeopardize the cart, so I just went with what I had.

The code itself is very similar to that of Wolfenstein 3D, even using some of the same files. I spoke with Tom yesterday and he believes it was built using a Borland compiler at the time (Turbo C? Some batch files reference td386.exe). The archive contains the code, some of the source assets, and some tools/utilities for building Keen 4-6, however it is very disorganized. There are multiple copies of the source, zipped and unzipped, scattered across various directories, and it will take a good programmer some time to sort it all out. I'm hoping Tom can have this cleaned up a bit before it's released somewhere.

The screenshot I posted on my Twitter account is of my MacBook Pro desktop, tarball freshly extracted, showing one of several directories full of code. I briefly skimmed it but haven't really delved deep quite yet. Tom most definitely wants to release it soon, but is still waiting for a response from id.

haha Great! I knew it was stored on a old SyQuest disk! Well thanks for all the info on this so far. This is amazing.

blitter wrote:
The code itself is very similar to that of Wolfenstein 3D, even using some of the same files. I spoke with Tom yesterday and he believes it was built using a Borland compiler at the time (Turbo C? Some batch files reference td386.exe). The archive contains the code, some of the source assets, and some tools/utilities for building Keen 4-6, however it is very disorganized. There are multiple copies of the source, zipped and unzipped, scattered across various directories, and it will take a good programmer some time to sort it all out. I'm hoping Tom can have this cleaned up a bit before it's released somewhere.

If that's the case, I would imagine the old Borland C++ 3.1 compiler should work. Good thing I've got a copy of it on my hard drive. Should the source code be released, I'll post a link for the compiler...save everyone some time from searching for it if they don't have it.

It should not be a surprise that it is a great honor for members of the PCKF (and more) to see you posting here! The same applies to earlier visits of Tom Hall and possibly others, obviously. (Apologizes in case I have omitted anybody!)

blitter wrote:The code itself is very similar to that of Wolfenstein 3D, even using some of the same files. I spoke with Tom yesterday and he believes it was built using a Borland compiler at the time (Turbo C? Some batch files reference td386.exe). The archive contains the code, some of the source assets, and some tools/utilities for building Keen 4-6, however it is very disorganized. There are multiple copies of the source, zipped and unzipped, scattered across various directories, and it will take a good programmer some time to sort it all out. I'm hoping Tom can have this cleaned up a bit before it's released somewhere.

An opinion of mine on the subject: Assuming Id gives the "ok" to that, it may still be worthy to have at least some parts of the archive in their original forms, even if it is disorganized. A few reasons for that:
1. The general idea of preservation.
2. A more specific example: Modification time stamps. (Say, the screenshot has a few mentions of the year 1992.)
3. Someone can probably make something useful, even out of a bit of some mess. (Think of a modern source port more than a DOS build constructed with the Turbo C compiler.)

Thanks for your post, as well as contributing useful information!

_mr_m_ wrote: If that's the case, I would imagine the old Borland C++ 3.1 compiler should work. Good thing I've got a copy of it on my hard drive.

Well, you - and every Wolf3D modder in the world, heh Me including.

There are download links to it on many sites.

http://www.brlowe.co.uk/bc31.zip

IIRC 3.1 was the version they used for Keen galaxy (as evidenced by the disassembly).

Borland 5.0.2 should work for compiling, too, and I think it's the last edition of Borland C++ that can build 16-bit DOS. If you have Win32 on a computer or on a virtual box of some sort, you should be able to use it with no problems. It has a nice IDE with some useful features.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zgf6fvzv13nqt ... indows.zip

So it is settled. Today is the beginning of the end of patching.