Download and Play Apogee's Raptor (Call of the
Shadows) DOS arcade game on GNU / Linux and BSD* with dosbox / Few
words on Apogee and Shareware
Since its early days
dosbox has elolved a lot. For all those
who haven't heard of dosbox, it is
x86 Free Software Linux /
FreeBSD DOS emulator
DosBox supports, almost all the game classics we used top lay in
oldschool times when DOS (Disk Operating System ) version was
running on top of most personal computer.
The most spread versions of DOS people used to use on their PCs
were Novell (DR-DOS) more rarely used, and MS-DOS (The Microsoft
DOS ver.).
I'm sometimes being sentimental about the past so I remembered for
Raptor -
Call of the Shadows !
Having a bit of experience with
DOSBox to run few DOS games
I've decided to give a try with dosbox.
First I have to dig for this shareware, since this game is part of
the sharewares, nowdays a binary version of it is freely
distributed on the net.
Finding the game however took me about 10 minutes, as most of the
download links for Raptor, were either dead or required some kind
of registration. After a bit of look I found it on an old torrent
with few seeders and succeded downloading.
For the convenience of people who would like to
download run the Raptor arcade classic game check here
Nicely
Raptor works out of the box directly launched with
dosbox emulator.
Dosbox has packages for most Linux distributions.
I personally used it on my Debian Linux so installed via apt:
debian:~# apt-get install dosbox
...
The game works without any dosbox hacks, just download, unarchive
and launch with dosbox:
hipo@debian:~$ wget
http://pc-freak.net/files/Raptor_Call_of_The_Shadows_Apogee_arcade.tar.gz
...
hipo@debian:~$ tar -zxvf
Raptor_Call_of_The_Shadows_Apogee_arcade.tar.gz
...
hipo@debian:~$ cd Raptor/
hipo@debian:/home/hipo/Raptor$ dosbox rap.exe
People like me
who lived in that glorious times when DOS was a
standard for a desktop operating system pretty much like MS Windows
is today, certainly remember the awesome games produced by
Apogee Software a company later known as
3D
Realms
Apogee until this very day remain one of the greatest game
creation companies in history of games.
3D Realms played a
crucial role in development of PC game industry as well as has a
great santimental value to probably million of old school arcade
game addicts.
They can be ben undoubtedly can be praised for having created
some of the most awesome arcade games for all times.
Some of the early hit games they created you probably know, few of
the titles are:
- Duke Nukem I, II
- Arctic Adventure
- Monster Bash
- Stargunner
- Commander Keen series
- Wolfenstein 3D
- Blake Stone
- Terminal Velocity (Terminal Reality)
- Shadow Warrior
- Death Rally
- Blood
Apogee was also notable for being a company to had
established the so spread mostly during the late 80s up to the
early years of the second millenium.
ShareWare model of distribution is an interesting
phenomenon, that co-relates more or less with the ideas of Free
Software.
The idea of
ShareWare games was games are distributed for
Free and the end customer (gamer) is asked to pay for a game only
if he likes it.
Some of the shareware published games was available for free
download and play, however the game was only bundled with only a
number of game levels to unlock the rest of the game levels you had
to play some money.
The shareware games produced were then freely published and shared
via dial up access
BBS nodes (A text based Bulletin Board
System similar to nowdays Forums).
BBS has historically been the major way of sharing knowledge and
exchanging ideas and opinions preceding the massive rise of the
WEB.
Today most computer users would probably even haven't heard about
BBS, if you like to have a general idea on how BBSes seemed to look
dahmer.vistech.net .
ShareWare started to loose speed with the decline of BBS and
the emergence of Free Software.
Anyways some of the conceptual ideas of ShareWare found its way in
"Open Source & Free Software", and commercial companies
like
RedHat and SuSE