cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6426902

i am too lazy to remove the quote bits btw

ay mates lelkins here. today i will make a proper post for once about something i like. free and open source software, more notably the games in there. i am not good at this lemmy stuff so please let me know if this is fine or not!

i do not know how to name this thing but it’s going to be about foss* games.

asterisk was added because of one thing: some of the games i will mention are not free for distribution, as they either require paid asset files or contain assets based on copyrighted material. so stuff like openmw, openra, openrct2 are considered foss for me due to the skull and crossbones flag that my country loves oh so much, along with the fact that those engines are licensed under the gpl or something similar. sonic robo blast 2, while it’s based on a franchise owned by a company, is still considered foss to me (gpl licensed).

okay, time to talk about the thing in the picture. what the fuck is that little guy doing there in “elementary”? what the fuck is this game called? i forgot what the title was-

the ballad of chip

this is chip’s challenge, a real-time sokoban-style puzzle game made by chuck sommerville in 1989 for the atari lynx, and published by epyx. you play as a nerd named chip mccallahan and you have to beat like 141 levels to join a nerdy nerd nerd club i don’t fucking care just give me the puzzlers

i didn’t exist that time, how the fuck do i know about this game? from a tf2 gmod video where the heavy gets a nasty virus based on sam and max and had to remove the virus malwere. he played it on a windows 95 machine.

speaking of windows (ew), a more known port for windows 3.1 showed up much later in the “best of windows entertainment pack”, without the lynx version’s smooth movement and animated tiles. i am using the 3.1 tileset btw. for simplicity sake, it’ll be called “mscc”, like how the community calls it.

here’s mscc in all its different-looking glory. i find it charming honestly

the game was so good that chuck’s at-the-time girlfriend kept playing it to the point of consuming every single battery in the house. it was the only reason one would have that portable console.

people who poked in the game files found out about level creation by editing “chips.dat”, and ended up making levels and even their own level editor at some point…

the game was so good to the point of showing up in the microsoft game hall of fame. one would ask: if chip is so challenging, why is there no chip’s challenge 2?

chuck DID work on a sequel for two whole years, but epyx fell off and a christian company named bridgestone multimedia (now known as alpha omega productions) bought the rights to the company for some bible software and kept all the rights to chip’s challenge in a 1 million dollar (or “six figures” as he said in a “3 facts about chip’s challenge” video made by him) license agreement. now where can we go after this? oh yea, the…

tile world

in the year 2000, a programmer named brian raiter found out about the game and thought “cool, i want to play this on linux. time to reverse engineer the game! especially with the whole level dat file thing!”. and after 2 years, the first version of tile world just dropped, linux only. chuck sommerville asked for a windows version so that there’d be a legal way to play his game on modern systems, supporting brian’s project.

original tile world’s page

here is how tile world 1 looked like. the one i have in the image tab is the newer “tile world 2” version maintained by madhav shanbhag and many others. that will be linked again for ease of access dw

it supports the lynx ruleset and the mscc ruleset and is very accurate. the fact that it is open source also allows developers to port it anywhere, the one i know is a psp port which is very neat.

can’t get chips.dat? no problem, most of the “cclp” (chip’s challenge level pack) community packs are available in tile world!

the community calls software like tile world “emulators”, similar to how you can play mario using an nes rom and an nes emulator, you play chippy with a dat file on specific software that knows how to translate that into levels and specific rules.

the last version at the time was made in 2006. at least until the events of chip change… chip’s challenge 2 was released on steam in 2015. new players showed up with great interest towards a sokoban-like puzzler, with new tricks and everything, along with a re-release of the original chip’s challenge, with the mscc assets being added later on by fans requesting it. even got an official level editor!

and before cc2’s official existence, chuck tried making an open source recreation known as “puzzle studio”. not much is known about it except that it was worked on by the community too like any good ol’ foss project. it was also 3d and stuff, wow. lasers too?

one of the two surviving videos showing puzzle studio gameplay. listen to that midi. woahh…

apparently the code is still around in some google site but i am too lazy to look into it, but you can find it in the wiki of course!

all was cool, and we finally got a 2 year project. but can you run it on linux? can you make levels? used to work on wine, but an update screwed everything up for level creation. that would piss me off too, but someone did that for me, and did more than i could. fuck i got lost in th-

the labyrinth. how the fuck do i do transitions or something

some girl known as “eevee” on the internet took notice of that and ended up making a clone of chip’s challenge that works on your web browser known as “lexy’s labyrinth”. as i said, it used to work on wine.

[…] The game was Windows-only, but it was old Windows-only, so Wine handled it perfectly well. I played through a few dozen levels. Passwords were gone, so you were free to skip over levels you just didn’t feel like playing.

And then they patched a level editor into the game, and it completely broke under Wine. Completely. Like, would not even run. It’s only in recent years that it even tries to run, and now it can’t draw the window and crashes if you attempt to do anything.

The funny thing is, apparently it doesn’t draw for some people on Windows, either. It doesn’t for me in a Windows VM. The official sanctioned solution is to… install… wined3d, a Windows port of the Wine implementation of Direct3D.

I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t know what the hell anything. This situation is utterly baffling. What even are computers.

-eevee. link to the blog she wrote all that (she even made an older port of cc2 using qbasic!)

this not only allows you to run cc2 level packs, but also cc1 levels, which means you can play the original levels on your phone or device of choice!. even add your own tilesets if you are not into the “play as a fox and sometimes a goop bunny” thing, along with controller support. it even works on mobile, and that was eevee’s intention too! here’s me playing a level from the original cc1 on my phone, with the graphics to boot!

link to the actual game.

lexy’s labyrinth couldn’t be done without the existence of tile world and the fans of cc1 and cc2 making level packs together. and without tile world, not many people would have access to chip’s challenge as a whole, making it more obscure than it already is.

half assed ending

with all that babbling about, a question might be on your heads.

is it a good game? yea! it pretty much is!

i enjoy it, easy to pick up, simple-ish to understand but wow is it hard. very good puzzle game. the reason why i can actually play this on modern devices is because of these developers and fans that are passionate about a little game that was made in 10 weeks with the reasoning of “i want to make a game i want to play, not a game based on what marketing wants to play”. that mentality oozed into the fans as well, making these “emulators” exist, forever immortalizing this “chip’s challenge”.

most old games can’t be played without heavy tweaking or using a specific old operating system, but with the help of open source software, you can play this little puzzle game on almost anything, even a wii (link is for the open shop channel btw). even on the psp. even on haiku. even on fucking haiku, you can get it through the package manager and have a fun time pushing blocks and running from teeth.

links of the main foss games mentioned:

https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tworld/ (tile world 1. available on the aur as tile-world, consider this more as a stable version i guess? also tile world 2 is still worked on!)

https://tw2.bitbusters.club/ (tile world 2. mac port below) https://github.com/mjfwalsh/tworld (tile world 2 but compatible with macs for the mac users out there. looks different too. think of this as an extra.)

https://c.eev.ee/lexys-labyrinth/ (lexy’s labyrinth for mobile and other devices)

as i said sometimes…

foss sweep.