mutantstargoat / eradicate

Futuristic arcade racing game for DOS

Eradicate

Futuristic arcade racing game for DOS. Written for the MS-DOS game jam: https://itch.io/jam/dos-game-jam-2

Minimum requirements:

• Pentium MMX 166MHz
• 32MB RAM
• SVGA video card supporting 16bit color
• Any ISA sound card

Recommended hardware:

• Pentium2 350MHz
• 32MB RAM
• SVGA video card supporting 16bit color, and VBE 2.0+
• Any ISA sound card
• Any gameport-compatible gamepad (TODO)

Eradicate attempts to auto-detect the installed sound card, and only asks the user for manual sound card configuration if the auto-detection fails. If for some reason your sound card is not detected correctly, or if you wish to change the current settings, start the game with the -setup option. You will only need to do this once; your choices are automatically saved, and will be used every time you start the game in the future.

The cross-platform build uses OpenGL to display and scale the frame buffer, either in a window, or fullscreen. To toggle between windowed and fullscreen modes, simply press alt+enter, and the game will remember your choice next time it starts. Note that OpenGL is not used for 3D rendering; rendering is still performed in software, and will be identical to the DOS build.

Controls

• Arrow keys or WASD: accelerate/break and turn
• tab: skip to the next music track
• +/-: change sound volume

Music

Eradicate plays music tracks randomly from two directories:

• data/musgame for in-game music.
• data/musmenu for music to be played while in the game menus.

The release archive contains a selection of music tracks downloaded from modarchive, but you can drop your own music in the jukebox directories. Supported formats are:

• Fast tracker extended modules (.xm).
• Pro tracker 4-channel modules (.mod).
• Scream tracker 3 modules (.s3m).
• Impulse tracker modules (.it).

See https://modarchive.org for a wide selection of compatible music files.

Download

Release v0.3:

• http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/games/eradicate/releases/eradicate-0.3.tar.gz
• http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/games/eradicate/releases/eradicate-0.3.zip
• http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/games/eradicate/releases/erad03.zip

Release v0.2b:

• http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/games/eradicate/releases/eradicate-0.2b.tar.gz
• http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/games/eradicate/releases/eradicate-0.2b.zip
• http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/games/eradicate/releases/erad02b.zip

Release v0.1 (jam release, includes source and binaries for DOS, GNU/Linux and Windows):

• http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/games/eradicate/releases/eradicate-0.1.tar.gz
• http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/games/eradicate/releases/eradicate-0.1.zip
• http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/games/eradicate/releases/erad01.zip

All archives include source code and pre-compiled binaries for DOS, GNU/Linux and Windows.

The third link is a minimal archive with strictly 8.3 filenames for DOS versions without FAT32 long filename support.

Source code repository:

• https://github.com/MutantStargoat/eradicate

Release archives include the data files. If you got the source code from the github repository, either copy the data directory from a release, or get the data from the subversion data repository:

• svn co svn://mutantstargoat.com/datadirs/eradicate data

License

Copyright (C) 2020-2024 John Tsiombikas [email protected]

This program is free software. Feel free to use, modify and/or redistribute it, under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3, or at your option any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. See COPYING for details.

Copyright for music files bundled with the releases belong to their respective authors. This is not a commercial game, it's a free/open source project and will never be sold for profit, but if you own the copyright to some bundled track and would like it removed from future releases, please contact me.

Build DOS version

First copy libmidas.a (DJGPP) and/or midas.lib (Watcom) from data/bin to libs/midas.

• Watcom: change into libs/imago and type wmake, then return to project root, and type wmake.
• DJGPP: type make -f Makefile.dj.

Build cross-platform version

The cross-platform version is the best way to play eradicate on modern computers. It uses OpenGL to present and scale the framebuffer and is very fast and flexible on modern hardware.

To build the cross-platform version, under UNIX or windows with msys2/mingw32, Just type make. Requires GNU make, some version of GCC, and OpenGL.

To build using visual studio, go into the vcbuild directory and execute setupvc2005.bat. This will copy the visual studio 2005 project files to their proper locations throughout the source tree. Change back into the project root directory and open eradicate.sln. If you have a more recent version of visual studio, it should be able to convert the project files automatically the first time.

An experimental version of eradicate using OpenGL for rendering can be compiled by changing the renderer build option at the top of GNUmakefile from software to opengl. This version performs significantly better than the software rendering one, on anything with reasonable 3D rendering hardware and a slow processor, like an SGI O2, or a Pentium1 with a TNT2 graphics card.

Build retro windows version (DirectDraw)

The DirectDraw version is mainly intended for old computers with 2D graphics cards, which are unable to run the cross-platform version with reasonable performance.

Currently the DirectDraw version can only be built using the MSVC 6.0 project files. Enter vcbuild and execute setupvc6.bat. This will copy the vc6 project files to the appropriate places throughout the source tree. Then return to the project root directory and open eradicate.dsw. If you have a more recent version of visual studio, it should be able to convert the project files automatically the first time.

eradicate's Issues

arbitrary update deltas cause handling instability

Badsector reported issues on very fast computers causing instability due to tiny update deltas.

SDL 1.2 sucks

SDL 1.2 served fine as a development tool, but releasing the windows/linux build with SDL doesn't work very well. Non-resizable windows, not going to fullscreen properly, having to emulate vsync... I should port to OpenGL and possibly use SDL2 for sound if mikmod works with it or ditch SDL altogether and use a different mikmod backend.