Commander Keen

With this project, if you compile the source code using the right tools from that era, you get executables that are 100% identical to the originals. Identical down to the bit when compressed with LZEXE or PKLITE. And that, my friends, means that K1n9_Duk3 has succeeded in reconstructing exactly what John Carmack and his team coded in 1990, solely from the analysis of the binaries. Original code available here. He talks about it!

I will spare you the technical details here (which you can find elsewhere), but to compile these sources in their historical form, it is essential to use Turbo C++ 1.00 — and especially not version 1.01, which generates slightly different code — as well as Turbo Assembler 2.0 or higher.

For my part, I went further: I ported this code to modern compilers and environments so that it can be compiled and executed today, particularly on Windows 11. This porting preserves the code and makes it accessible to current machines, while remaining as faithful as possible to the original behaviour and logic.

The latest sources are available on my GitHub, along with a script that allows you to compile the project correctly. All that's missing now are the collision tests, so take the opportunity to play at "walking through walls" 😉