A brief history
Lords of Midnight was an epic adventure game written for the ZX Spectrum microcomputer (amongst others) in the early 1980's. It differed from other games due to the technique known as landscaping which allowed a the player to view the world, panoramically, from any location. Also, the player could control multiple characters, allowing for complex strategies with radically different, open-ended scenarios. Using his landscaping technique, Mike Singleton was able to develop a game which offered no less than 31,232 views, from about 3904 locations, which was no mean feat on a computer with only 48 K RAM. The game was also highly playable, leading to rave reviews throughout the gaming world, and soon it achieved cult status, thousands of computer owners losing countless nights in an attempt to destroy Doomdark and his armies.
The sequel, Doomdark's Revenge, was no less stunning. With even more locations (6144) and views (49,152), and a massive 128 characters from 8 races to recruit from and battle with, Doomdark's Revenge was a worthy sequel, despite some minor bugs (allegedly due to tight publishing deadlines). However, the promised third part of the trilogy, The Eye of the Moon, never appeared on the shelves, leaving many fans disappointed and hungering for more. As the 1980's drew to an end, 8-bit microcomputers such as the ZX Spectrum became obsolete and Mike Singleton's epic games passed into legend.
In 1995 Mike Singleton returned to the fray with Lords of Midnight: The Citadel, which attempted to pick up where Doomdark's Revenge left off. The animated game engine, however, proved cumbersome, making for poor playability and was slated by press and gamers alike. Fans were left, largely, disappointed, but many were pleased to find that hidden on the CD were versions of the original Spectrum classics, ported to the PC by Chris Wild. To these, countless nights were, once again, lost.
Since then, there have been several updates to the PC ports, and a new Windows version is under development, complete with improved graphics and the ability to edit new scenarios. If I get the time I will be working on a Linux/Unix port, possibly using Wine.
The Dosemu version
Chris Wild's site houses the PC ports of Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge, which you can download for free.
Some time ago I discovered, to my pleasant surprise, that Chris's ports would run under Dosemu for Linux. For anyone that is interested in trying the games under Linux, I have prepared dexe's based on version 1.8 of both. They appear to work flawlessly, though they are somewhat larger that Chris' DOS version when decompressed, as I have had to include space for save files.
To install, download, extract using tar zxvf xxx.tar.gz and copy the dexe files to /var/lib/dosemu. Two versions of each are included. Midnight.dexe and Revenge.dexe are true to the originals. Midnight2.dexe and revenge2.dexe use the numerical keypad for movement, and in addition, revenge2.dexe has been updated to use more the more realistic racial movement rules which were accidentally left out of the original 8-bit games, and includes two alternative scenarios created by Jan Kapala stored under saves G and L.
The archive also includes maps, instructions and the introductory stories for each game. Don't hesitate to contact me if you have suggestions, need help installing, or have limited bandwidth and want me to e-mail just the dexe's to you. I'm interested in hearing from anyone that uses them. Have fun!
Running dexe's under Linux
The second has been made possible by the revent addition of the binfmt_misc binary wrapper to the kernel(2.1.43+). This "provides the ability to register additional binary formats to the Kernel without compiling an additional module/kernel". To check whether dexe support is enabled, do:
cat /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/registerIf there is no entry like :DEXE:M::\x0eDEX::/usr/bin/dosexec:, simply run
echo ':DEXE:M::\x0eDEX::/usr/bin/dosexec:' >> /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/registerremembering to replace /usr/bin/dosexec with wherever your version of dosexec is held, and from now on, dexe's are auto-recognised, regardless of filename extension, i.e. you can rename them from, for example, revenge.dexe to just revenge, and place them in one of your binary directories (e.g. /usr/games).
Finally, if you have Linux Mandrake 7.2 or a compatible distribution of Linux, you can download and install the RPM below, and then you can run either of the games by typing midnight.dexe or revenge.dexe from the command line. I'm interested to hear from anyone that does this, especially if you are using a different distribution or operating system.
Any way, if you have Dosemu installed correctly, the game should pop up in a neat little X-Window. Enjoy!
Resources
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Lords of Midnight for Linux/Dosemu |