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A Blast from the Past: Tyrian

June 7, 2007 at 1:04 pm · Filed under oldbrew

Years ago, in the good ol’ days of DOS, i remember playing this rather addictive arcade-style vertical shooter called Tyrian. Sadly, i never grabbed a copy of the full version, instead playing through the shareware version numerous times. It was very re-playable, considering you could upgrade your little ship with various power sources, shields, and weapons.

Tyrian Title

Unfortunately, Tyrian only runs on DOS (although i recall there was a Windows version too), which pretty much leaves me in the dark as i currently use a mac. Of course i could just run it in DOSBox, but it tends to be a bit choppy which pretty much spoils the whole experience.

Luckily, i recently came across OpenTyrian. As the name suggests it is an Open Source version of Tyrian, more specifically a port of the original code (written in Pascal) to bog standard C. In addition, it runs on top of SDL, meaning it should be easy to port and run anywhere… including my mac!

Sadly, OpenTyrian is still under development. Regardless, I decided to try it out and see how much of it works. After making a new XCode project, putting in the OpenTyrian sources, and hitting build i ended up with a cool looking OpenTyrian.app file.

Rather than leave it to your imagination as to what happened when i ran it, i made a rather quick video run-through of it:

Safe to say, its not production-ready yet (its doesn’t even get to the title screen on my PPC mac). Still, it looks very promising and i really hope the developers can churn out a more stable working release soon.

Viewing 2 Comments

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    Casey,

    PPC is big-endian, so i pretty much expected opentyrian not to work at all - though i was pleasantly suprised when the intro screen's worked. It might not look that much, but then again one can only begin to imagine how much Pascal spaghetti code you've had to unravel to even get that far. :)

    I look forward to seeing OpenTyrian running a copy of Tyrian 2.1 in the future from start to finish. Its great that you guy's are taking your time to port everything across correctly.

    Thanks for taking the time to post, i appreciate it! :)
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    The PPC is big-endian, correct? Yeah, that's why. :( Will be fixed but not top priority. The whole core dev team (all three of us, heh) uses Linux on x86, so other platforms aren't guaranteed to work at any given point. Little-endian *nix systems, including Intel-based Macs, should be fine though.

    For the record, what you have there in the video represents about 3-4 months of work and we're possibly over half done (though it may not look like it). So expect completed playable with Tyrian 2.1 data files in October or so, and hopefully bugfixes, like the big-endian issue, sorted out by the end of the year. Or something thereabouts, depending on work and school schedules for the developers.

    Anyhow, glad to see there really is interest in opentyrian from anybody besides us--it seems there's quite a few people out there with fond memories of this game!
 

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