Public Commander Keen Forum

You probably remember Commander Keen being advertised in Apogee's on-disk catalogs. Apogee had mainly the blue background catalog with white text like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSVl2LltXFY . Then in the mid-90s they had 16-color catalogs like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbgKlE-WSzk

Commander Keen might have had a much better logo for each game. I have recreated the catalog products in a Word Document (including the cancelled Universe is Toast title), so they look like these:






Would be neat if they could be programmed in TXT2COM. I'm pretty pleased with the ASCII art I put near the logos.

great advertisement experiment. gives me an immediate 90's flashback.

I could do the TXT2COM conversion, but only for TXT2COM (early 90's catalog and help files). The later versions of the catalog and help files were created with Simply Docs and I don't have any tools for that. But you might be able to use a shareware copy of Simply Docs 2.1 or Simply Docs 3.0.

Also, that marketing blabla about 40 frames per second is a LIE! Keen:Vorticons (I checked version 1.1 and version 1.31) cannot go any faster than 24 fps and Keen:Galaxy is limited to 35 fps. I don't blame you, I know you probably just copied that text from some of the old catalogs.

Yep, the information was copied from old catalogs. I'm not very familiar with the code used for TXT2COM. If I had some source code from the catalogs to work with, I could probably do it. I'm more familiar with the C# language on windows applications.

I think some of the real early TXT2COM catalog files from Apogee were using colored text, but I guess it's better if I just tell you about the syntax:

TXT2COM expects a plain text file. The tilde character (~) is used as a color change marker and must be followed by two hexadecimal digits. The first digit is the background color, the second digit is the text color. The text uses the default EGA palette.

One thing to keep in mind is that you usually cannot use the bright colors 8 to 15 (8 to F in hex) as background colors, since the highest bit of the background color value is used to make the text blink. So when you try to use "~E0" for black text on yellow background, you'll get blinking black text on brown background instead. That means some of your designs that have two different "bright" colors on top of each other might not work.

That TUIT icon looks almost identical to some TUIT fanart I made in the 90s for some weird reason.