BioMenace decompilation (WIP)

This is a work in progress decompilation/source code reconstruction of the game BioMenace, released by Apogee Software in 1993 for MS-DOS.

Based on K1n9_Duk3's reconstruction of Commander Keen 4 source code. BioMenace is based on the same engine and thus shares a lot of code with the 2nd Keen trilogy. It's far from identical though - almost all of the game logic is completely unique to this game, and many other parts of the code have also been modified.

To my knowledge, this is the first publicly released code reconstruction of the game's first episode. In the meantime, K1n9_Duk3 has also released a code reconstruction which covers all 3 episodes and some extra versions:

• Announcement post
• Download

Current state

This code produces a 100% identical binary to BMENACE1.EXE from the freeware release of the game (SHA-256 b91ed9c1e8a7a47cff209401f50aa7bc2eca9b42738d7f6aa5e6b55ed35fae7a). The shareware version v1.1 (SHA-256 c47d1114263b8cf3f27b776c8a858b4f89dc59d1a2cccfdddffc194277adc008) can also be perfectly reproduced. Episodes 2 and 3 are not currently covered.

Compiling the code

A copy of Borland C++ 2.0 is required, and a DOS environment to run it in (real or emulated). The compiler is expected to be installed at C:\BCC_20 by default. The BIN subdirectory of the installation should be in the PATH.

Within the DOS environment, cd into the directory containing the code and run make. This creates a file called BMENACE1.EXE, but it still needs to be compressed before it matches the original version. Run LZEXE\LZEXE.EXE BMENACE1.EXE to do so, and a perfectly matching file should be produced.

To build the shareware version, uncomment the corresponding #define near the top of ID_HEADS.H, and comment out the FREEWARE #define.

In order to play the game using an EXE built from this code, the game data from the original release is required - this repository doesn't contain any data files.