Running old Verge games

Hatchet

Thank you so much for posting this! I am definitely game for helping contribute to an archive. It would be nice to have games listed in a much better way than currently, organized with descriptions, screenshots, authors / team members, any special instructions to get it to run, etc. Multiple versions if applicable for sure.

I have also worked on getting some ika games into a runnable state once again. Even though ika is more Verge adjacent, it’s definitely worth preserving as well.

seth

Thanks for posting this! I was pretty easily able to get Saga of the Stars running on DOSBox on Linux with your instructions.

bengrue

(…Oh no)

seth

Oh yes!!

Overkill

Just started a Github page to archive some the source code. Big thanks to aen, andy, zeromus, and rainwarrior who all helped out with providing some zips.

https://github.com/verge-rpg

Not everything source is on the archive yet, still taking time to sort through stuff. But so far, winverge, v1 + vcc, v2chr, and winv2unpack tools are up. Going to try to get v2.5, 2.6, winv2, and others on there.

Also, zeromus made a modern branch to winverge at https://github.com/verge-rpg/winverge that makes it work on Visual Studio 2019 and run in Windows 10 with GDI (master contains the original DirectDraw 320x200x256-color code), I wonder if we could make a zip release on the GH?

Still need to figure out a solution for hosting and organizing the games, but archiving the engine source code so the old code isn’t lost goes a long way.

Overkill

I think most of the source is now backed up, thanks to the archives that people sent me! Check the page here (as linked before): https://github.com/verge-rpg

Now we have source for Verge 1’s June 1998 release, WinVerge, v2chr (distributed as zip-only, per request), Verge 2.01a, Verge 2.5, Winv2, Verge 2.5j / v2k+j, and a few revisions of 2.6. Also the Verge 3 source code was moved to the verge-rpg Github organization – I kept a fork at my github account to preserve any existing outgoing links, however.

However, we’re still missing source code to official Verge 2.5’s VCC, and the source we currently have of WinV2 appears to be from unstable build, not a release version. It seems like Verge 2.6 revision 9 might be able to do a lot of the same things that 2.5 could do + some extensions added later.

If you have any copies of these missing source files, let me know and I can put them on the github repo. Also, if you made any tools for Verge-related stuff and want us to host it, let me know and please let me know any licensing/terms for distribution! For now the GH is for preserving the engine source code, we still need to figure out a different solution for demos and games.

If someone has a good idea for hosting our own organized file directory, maybe we can figure something out! For now we have the vrpg archives, but they’re incomplete, and it would be nice to recover and preserve what we can in a collective effort.

Also, Andy (implicit_cast / thespeedbump) has been working on a WASM web player port of V1, and it’s open to bug reports and contributions: https://github.com/andyfriesen/v1wasm – it can sort of run parts of Sully so far, so that’s exciting news!

loretian

Do you want the source code to the old verge online server? I don’t know what happened to the client code

bengrue

Definitely yes!

loretian

I tried to transfer the repo over to “verge-rpg” and I got a permissions error. No idea what’s up with that. I’ll look at it later.

bengrue

Is it public? Worst case we could fork.

loretian

Can I just email you or Overkill the zip? Who’s hosting it? you or Overkill?

bengrue

Overkill

loretian

OK well, can someone get me their email address? Do you still have my old email address? Nobody likes posting their email address on the web

Overkill

Hey! Just saw this post, I sent you a message! (I don’t really know how this particular forum software works hahah, but I hit the ‘Chat’ button on your profile, which looked like the thing to do private messages on here.) Feel free to email me at the address I sent! We can definitely put the Verge Online code up.

loretian

Sorry I just saw this. I emailed the source to Ben yesterday. He should have it.

loretian

Also, I can’t figure this software out either. I don’t see any chat/private messages from you. Sorry - not intentionally ignoring it/you. I’m just not seeing it.

Hatchet

Loretian! You should join the discord, would be the easiest way to chat, and share files, hah! Invite link is https://discord.gg/5EVb3w7