Stardate 20030421.2011

(On Screen via long range sensors): Oh, man! A long lost friend returns. For all of its warts, the one big reason I've always regretted moving away from Win98 to Win2K was that I couldn't play some of my favorite old DOS games. Somehow the new ones just don't work for me the way that such games as Master of Orion always did.

And no DOS game ever grabbed and held me more than Duke Nukem 3D. In fact, no game since then has, either. I pretty much stopped playing computer games about three years ago.

But somehow there was always the longing to go alien-hunting with the Duke. In fact, recently I was seriously considering buying a copy of Virtual PC to install on my workstation, in hopes that I'd then be able to install Win98 on a simulated PC and run Duke Nukem on that.

And now comes news that 3D Realms just released the source to the game, along with the glorious news that someone has already done a port of it to Windows. You still have to have a copy of the Duke CD in your drive to run it (ideally the Platinum Pak) but I still have my copy.

There's a zip file to download, which I found through this page. There's three files you need to copy into the Duke3D installation directory. And then you have to make sure that Duke thinks it is using some sort of sound card. It turns out that it doesn't matter which, or what settings are used; that signals the port code to use DirectSound to make noises.

And it works!!! It really works!!! On my dual-Xeon workstation in 1024*768 resolution it's cranking 110 frames per second in the initial screen of the first map, which should allow plenty of leeway for when the calculation gets more complicated.

Even better, the sound is back in stereo. The last computer I owned which was even capable of running Duke3D at all (and which is now totally dead) had a sound card in it which only had a half-assed simulation of one of the sound cards that Duke3D knew about, and as a result the midi-music was in stereo but the sound was mono. That kind of made it hard to know where you were being shot from if it was outside your vision; it was a major problem. Now 3D sound is back!

Only problem is that I can't get it to pay any attention to my mouse! I suck playing Duke using only the keyboard. I can't aim for jack! (Waah!)