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ArchiveRL ver 1.1 released Sept 2019
The latest version (1.1) adds many previously unavailable games and this year's 7DRL entries (~240 new archives altogether).
Download the changelog for v1.1
1. About this collection
2. How you can help & contribute
3. ArchiveRL structure
3.1 Main Directories
3.2 Individual game archives
3.3 Naming convention and tags
4. Docs
5. Credits
7. Game list (without sources)
1. ABOUT THIS COLLECTION
ArchiveRL is a project aiming to build the ultimate classic roguelike archive, with emphasis on preservation and historical accuracy and accompanied by as much documentation as possible. It was inspired by TOSEC and other retro-gaming archival projects. Its main focus is on so-called Classic Roguelikes, released before 2015. Version 1.1 is its sixth release: it includes the majority of non-commercial games contained in the International Roguelike Database and also gathered from other sources. Complete list of games available can be found at the bottom of this page
STATS: 2167 archives - 25.6 Gigabytes - 1656 games - ~500(?) sources
Presently it includes games classified as ALPHA / BETA+STABLE / VARIANT / MISC / SOURCE / PLATFORM / XDRL
At the moment only DOS/Windows games are available (sources can sometimes be compiled on other platforms)plus games exclusive to other platforms. The game version included is almost always the latest available (as of Aug 2019 for this edition)
Historical context and accuracy is a crucial part of this project: every game included was treated as individual case and at least some research conducted. Extra care has been put into obtaining correct files and version numbers. Every individual archive includes a separate DOC directory containing available info regarding the game (with exception of the XDRL section).
ArchiveRL is hosted at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/ArchiveRL.7z
Contact the author: akeley at arkhammanor dot com
2. HOW YOU CAN HELP & CONTRIBUTE
Until now this project has been mostly an individual effort, only announced on Roguetemple forums and plagued by slow pace due to IRL debuffs. However, it now has reached a major completion stage, where it makes sense to publicize it more widely and ask for roguelike community's assistance.
Here's what would be most appreciated:
-simple “bug reporting” - despite thorough examination there are bound to be mistakes: spelling errors, archive/files/directory problems, doc-file mismatches and so on. Please report any such instances. The only exception are the “Comments” in the docs – these are “unofficial” and to be edited in the future.
-trying to find & rescue games from the MISSING doc: please note that some of the entries are not actually missing, just need clarification, or regard particular version, or perhaps source is available but needs compiling – please read the notes in the doc, which is included in the main archive and also available for download here
-test the games: I've personally tried quite lot of them – but not all, and mostly on x64 Windows
-any historical and informational error corrections and contributions: there are many people out there with vast knowledge, regarding mostly the older games, some of which have a really obscure and tangled history. Any contributions regarding this angle would be invaluable.
-add more games/sources/docs: so far this project has concentrated on IRLDB and the traditional RL ecosystem. With the internet explosion and the genre's rising popularity, it has become decentralised and now modern RL games can found in numerous places (itch.io for example). Any additions are welcome.
Any kind of contributions to the Doc directory would be also invaluable – this includes web pages, wikis, reviews, articles and any other sort of material connected to these games.
-compile sources: some of the games are only in source form and need compiling into Windows binaries, wherever possible. I' also appreciate feedback regarding these sources themselves – as a kind of ID game: I was not always sure which platform particular source is actually for.
-if you feel brave you can attempt to build either Linux or Mac side of this archive. Personally I have experience only with Windows and I'm also far too busy with real life – and burned out by working on this project for a long time – to ever attempt this. It wouldn't be as big a project as the Windows side – the methods, structure and lots of resources are already in place, also the scale would be smaller. But, it's still quite an undertaking.
-provide feedback regarding structure and methodology of this project: a lot of thought has been put into its current form and there are reasons behind decisions responsible for it. However these are not set in stone, there already have been significant changes since the first release and I may consider future ones (eg less directories, sources combined with individual archives or adding year tags).
3. ArchiveRL STRUCTURE
This collection is organised using directories and tags, with a unified naming system. This is based mostly on IRLDB categories. It allows for easy reshaping and flexible searches. It's also an attempt to somewhat organize the otherwise daunting mass of content– reflecting various development stages, game types and also their “roguelikeness” (by using the [NT] – Non-Traditional – tag) This will hopefully help people (especially newcomers to the genre) to navigate the archive and perhaps when deciding which game to play.
Due to non-scientific nature of the medium and occasional lack of data some ambiguous decisions have been made by the author of this collection and as such may by prone to errors or prove controversial to some (especially regarding classification of particular games). Feedback regarding these issues and mistake corrections are always welcome.
3.1 MAIN DIRECTORIES
All directories apart from the SOURCE include mostly games which should be instantly playable in Windows. There should be a note in those rare instances this is not the case. Other exception are games with the [src] tag found in directories other than SOURCE – this mean that there's no binary/executable available for this particular game. Their appearance in main directories may hopefully encourage somebody to compile them and also make them less obscure.
DOC – contains Open Office doc files mirroring contents of respective directories. DOS section is an exception – due to limited content it only contains “DOS” and “DOS SOURCE” docs. There is a more in-depth description of these documents further on.
ALPHA – all the games described as “alpha” by IRLDB but also adjusted for other sources, with game author's description (if available) taking precedence. Can be used as indicator of game completeness or playability. From Wikipedia: “Alpha software can be unstable and could cause crashes or data loss.
Alpha software may not contain all of the features that are planned for the final version.” In general, games found in this section may be less developed/complete than ones in the BETA+STABLE. Some may be barely playable or classify as “pre-alpha” or “tech demo”. However, it is important to note that this is not always the case: two of the most complex and playable games in this collection - CDDA and Dwarf Fortress - are classified as Alpha by their devs. In the future editions of ARL some form of further clarification (tag?) or a descriptive doc regarding actual playability may be included.
BETA+STABLE - all the games described as either “beta” or “stable” by IRLDB but also adjusted for other sources, with the game author's description (if available) taking precedence. Can be used as indicator of game completeness or playability. From Wikipedia: “Beta phase generally begins when the software is feature complete but likely to contain a number of known or unknown bugs. Software in the beta phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, as well as speed/performance issues and may still cause crashes or data loss”. This, similarly as with Alpha section has to be taken as a rough indicator seeing as these descriptions are submitted by the devs and are fairly relative. Some betas are less developed/playable than some alphas.
“Stable” releases can be generally considered as “complete”, though perhaps in the roguelike world this differs from “normal” games definition, in the sense that a “stable” game may be further developed for many years and numerous features added and changes effected. It can be assumed however that such game should be winnable, have most major features implemented and be and relatively crash-free. Compared to alpha & beta the caveat here is that it does not mean that a “stable” game is automatically of better quality than an “alpha” one – at least regarding design and gameplay – again, it's only meant as an indicator of the development stage.
DOS – this directory is a bigger subsection dedicated to the games for the legacy MS-DOS platform. It's technically a separate entity. However, given the fact Windows started as GUI for DOS, then for some time continued to be a major part of it and also that DOS games are easily played on even modern Windows (and directly up till XP edition), it is hereby included as “part” of Windows ecosystem.
DOS directory has several sub-directories which mirror the main structure (Alpha / Beta+Stable / Misc / Source / Variant )
MISC – Miscellaneous, games which for various reasons do not fit the main categories, mostly regarding their playability or roguelikeness. Included here are: non-English language games, borg-like zero player ones, games which aren't technically RLs but are included in IRLDB, demos, defunct multiplayer online games and other hard-to-classify projects.
VARIANT - all games classified as variants, forks, hacks and ports. The first three usually describe projects which stem from altering game's source code resulting in changes to gameplay and/or fx.
Sometimes these changes are minor and in other instances very significant. “Ports” are versions of games adapted to another hardware platform or programming method/language – mostly without big changes in gameplay and fx.
There are a few instances in this collection where games which technically qualify as variants (eg: Sil, DCSS, CDDA) have been instead included in the “main” Alpha/Beta/Stable directories. The reason is to reflect their well-recognised status as significantly changed and sort of stand-alone editions. Otherwise, Nethack for example, would have to be classified as a variant of Hack. It is undeniably an ambiguous decision though and one open for further consideration.
This directory includes several subdirectories reflecting the games with most variants and one including assorted “other” ones.
SOURCE – source code for some of the games in this collection. Occasionally they're duplicated in main directories for reasons outlined at the start of this section. Personally I have no experience with coding/compiling therefore mistakes may have been made in this section. Particularly please note that some of the sources may not be meant for the Windows platform and some may be exclusive to Windows, despite the doc stating otherwise. They are also not guaranteed to compile properly. I have no way of checking all this myself and would appreciate any feedback/corrections.
PLATFORM – games not available on Windows/DOS. In most cases these can be either emulated or ran in Virtual Machine environments.
XDRL – this directory contains "competition" roguelikes - games written under a time/size constraint or according to some other rules. The majority of games are from the 7DRL challenge but there are also some others.
Due to a huge number of games vs my chronic lack of time, this release is provided "as is" and differs from the organised structure of the rest of ArchiveRL. The games have not been repacked, their names were only adjusted so as to allow for searches, there are no tags, there is only one main Doc directory, sources (if available) were packed with the main game. Dealing with these details would delay this release ad infinitum, but it might be corrected in the future updates.
Quite a few of these games started as competition releases but then evolved into long term projects. If a game was updated a year or more after the original compo release, then it's probably included in one of the other ARL directories as well as the XDRL. Games which were updated shortly after the compo finish are packed with the initial release (whenever available) in the XDRL directory. Some games were only playable online as Flash, HTML, Unity or other formats - the links are available in the docs. Any help with archiving those would be appreciated, I don't really know how to "rip" them.
3.2 INDIVIDUAL GAME ARCHIVES
All the games in this collection are contained and named in a unified fashion. A game archive consist of a directory compressed with 7z packer. This directory contains:
-a DOC sub-directory: added by me and not originally part of the original game archive. Two spaces in front of “ DOC” ensure this directory is always at the top of the tree and differs from normal “doc/Doc” directories which may have been originally included with the game. This way it is also easy to conduct bulk search and removal, producing an “original” game archive (as obtained from a source). It contains various documents – mostly web pages in .mht format – providing information regarding the game, and sometimes extra files. It is a crucial part of this collection and is motivated by my experience of trawling through TRS-80 TOSEC archive with absolutely no data regarding any of the games, quite often historically lost forever. The decision to put it directly into the game directory - as opposed to some external location aims to increase its survival chance and thus availability to future users.
-original game directories & files, as found in the original package. These have never in any way been altered by the author of this collection, also are presented “as found” - meaning they have not been unpacked, tried and then packed again, since this often produces local configs/score files and such. This may have happened in other places though – seeing as the games do not always come directly form the devs, but various other sources.
Exception here are files in the SOURCE directory – these archives have been packed into 7z packages “as is” to minimize any possible interference to the “source” structure. As I said above, I have no experience with coding/compiling and would rather not delve into assorted tar/gz files.
3.3 NAMING CONVENTION & TAGS
Apart from addition of the DOC directory to the files, the names are the only thing altered from original game packages. These follow a unified naming convention to make advanced searches and file sorting possible, plus allow for building your own directory structures. They also contain vital info about a particular game archive at a glance.Format is as follows:
Game name {language} (vversion)[main directory tag][extra tags]
eg: “Deep Deadly Dungeons (v1.0)[stable][fx]”
Game name – this is exactly as found at respective sources, with the name seen in-game taking precedence. Common problems here are: conflicting spelling, multiple names, abbreviations, inconsistency at various sources. Extra care has been put into researching this, mistakes are inevitable though. Also, my own interpretations could be in particular cases somewhat still inconsistent and should be revised in further editions (see Help Section for more info). One particular problem is how to present titles which use colons since these are not allowed in file names.
{language} – language used in-game, English is the default one and has no tag
(vversion) – describes the game's version. ( ) brackets differentiate this one from other “constant” tags marked with square [ ] brackets. Letter “v” is always at the beginning (so, (vbeta 6) is possible). In cases where establishing the version name was not possible the tag looks like this: (v)
As with naming, extra care has been put in establishing version name and its correctness – and yet again, it may be prone to mistakes.
[main directory tag] – this is always either [alpha] / [beta] / [stable] / [misc] / [var] - reflecting the main classification.
[extra tags] – these add extra info to the main part of the name. The types are:
[src] – source files. Used in all games in SOURCE directory and also those in main directories which are only available as source (not binaries)
[DOS] – all the games in DOS section have it, helps to define them once taken out of the section
[x32] / [x64] – type of Windows edition (32 bit or 64 bit) that the game is meant for. If there's only one tag then this version is exclusive to either 32/64 (though it may still work) and if there's a + then both versions are included.
[language/platform name] – these describe various platforms or programming languages such as Java / Love / Python etc. At the moment these tags may not always be very consistent and need further tightening up.
[fx] – this tag means that there's an extra game version included in the archive. The fx version will have either added/improved audio and /or graphics. The non-fx versions in a [fx]-tagged archive are usually in ASCII and have no sound.
PLATFORM directory contains several tags representing different systems the game runs on. [mix] - several versions for different systems in one archive [apk] - Android [nix] - Unix-like environments or perhaps Linux [zx] - ZX Spectrum [atr] - Atari 400/800 [c64] - Commodore 64 [vms] - VMS mainframes [mac] - Apple Macintosh [cpm] - CP/M OS [spi] - Spin language [ti] - TI 88 [pu] - Pulse Watch [jm2e] - Java for phones [sega] - Sega Master System
[NT] – Non-Traditional. Games tagged with [NT] had their own directory in previous ARL editions, this however changed to simplify the archive. With the use of this tag the distinction between traditional and non-traditional roguelikes – very important to some players – is still possible.
Definitions of a (traditional) roguelike are often sources of big debates and can be quite contentious. I use this distinction in ArchiveRL not as a part of such debate, but purely as a helpful quantifier. There are people who may be interested only in the “trad” RLs and some who'd like to avoid them. I also feel it's important to preserve it for historical reasons, since the original major RLs have defined the genre and introduced a blend of elements crucial to what constitutes roguelike gameplay – something very unique in history of videogames.
The 3 core elements used in differentiate between “traditional” and “non-traditional” roguelikes in ArchiveRL are permadeath, procedural generation and being turn-based. These in my opinion are essential when defining a traditional roguelike and align with most “official” definitions. I also use fourth element: being presented in a 2D grid. This one is however bit more flexible.
This is not to say that “non-traditional” roguelikes are in any way inferior – such proclamations are purely a matter of personal preference and of no interest to this project. Personally I prefer the traditional ones, but play lots of NTs as well and found many of them quite amazing (Spelunky being probably a highlight in this collection). As a side note, many of the NT games found here will be probably more “trad” than the modern wave of so called “roguelites” is – the reason for it is that “roguelite” games are mostly commercial and for this reason could not be represented here.
4. DOCS
This section regards the Open Office documents found in the “ DOC” directory in the main section of the collection. They represent content of the respective directories on 1:1 basis, ie every game in the collection has a corresponding entry in one of these docs. The content of the entries in the docs comes either directly from IRLDB or has been filled by me after some research.Most of the columns should be self-explanatory. Some comments:
-web links from the “Name” section lead by default to an appropriate Roguebasin entry, with exceptions when that was not possible. Links from the “...” column should ideally lead to the game download, this however is not always the case and needs further work.
-while Name & Version columns should be (hopefully) 98% error-free, the Released/Updated, Platform and Developer ones are very likely to contain numerous errors. This is still work in progress and error corrections are most welcome
-the In Dev (in development) column is kind of experimental: games marked as “in dev” are supposed to be actively developed, at least in the time of this editions's release (Feb 2018). Obviously though, this is highly speculative, since we don't really know what their status is – some games stop being developed in the middle of “assured” cycle, and some reemerge after many years of lying dorman. Hence, this column has to be taken with a pinch of binary salt.
-NT & Src columns indicate which games are Non-Traditional and which have source available.
- the Comments column is very much unedited and needs lots of work and cleaning up. Admittedly some of the comments make no sense (even to the author now) – this column is provided entirely “as is” at the moment. Nevertheless, it does contain some useful info, especially games' secondary/full names and other assorted bits and pieces. In these comments comma is mostly not used as in normal sentences, but as a divider between separate, and often unrelated, facts.
-there is also OTHER DOCS archive included: it contains my working docs relating to planned sections of the archive, and others such as WEB or COMMERCIAL games. These are very messy and provided as work-in-progress for the curious only.
-the empty fields in the docs mean lack of info – contributions welcome
5. CREDITS
While so far building this collection has been an individual effort, it would not be possible without:
-people responsible for International Roguelike Database, Roguebasin wiki and Roguetemple forums: Slash, getter77 and no doubt countless others
-Reddit's r/roguelikes mods & posters
-helpful roguetemple/reddit members such as Legend, Gibbon, Avagart, Ancient, Kyzrati, Darren Grey and many others
-people who answered my emails and provided assistance: especially some kind devs and other collectors such as Donnie Russel II, Kevin Harris, Max Blindhack, R.V. Umpiérrez, Ron Heuse and others
Many thanks, and here's hoping this edition will encourage more people to help and contribute.
7. GAME LIST (without sources)
Name - Version - Alternative Titles