Catacomb 3D series and Keen Dreams - DOS based games coming over to the Amiga

From 1991 and onwards ID Software with publishing rights by Softdisk Publishing released the first person shooter game Catacomb 3-D : The Descent as a prototype of the Wolfenstein 3D engine. It was released as an EGA title for PC DOS as a dark fantasy style game, with the player controlling a Wizard named as ' Petton Everhail ' on a quest to defeat the evil lich Nemesis through a number of catacomb's. Although it was regarded as a landmark title for its time for first person graphics, it is now being ported over to the Amiga with a number of other games also in the pipeline such as the lost episode of classic platformer Commander Keen ' Keen Dreams '.

First mentioned on the EAB forums way back in 2015 with talk about the open version of Catacomb 3D going open source the year previous, was set a challenge to port it over to the Amiga as it only used 16 colour graphics. Thus fast forward to 2016 and BSzili is now working on porting Reflection Keen, which is a merger of Catacomb 3D and Keen Dream engines, and includes downloads for Catacomb Abyss, Catacomb Armageddon and Catacomb Apocalypse with Amiga requirements for each game decreasing with each new version. Also to note with the video above, Ares Computers is also working on an Amiga CD32 version as well as for the indieGO.

In regards to Commander Keen and Keen Dreams, Way back in the early 90's id Software and publishers Apogee Software released Commander Keen for computers that used DOS. It was an incredibly fun platformer using EGA as a pioneer for the graphics at the time and shareware distribution. In Commander Keen you play as Billy Blaze, a young boy who travels through space and assumes the secret identity of "Commander Keen" while fighting the menacing alien race of Vorticons.  An all time classic game that also appeared as a prototype in Keen Dreams, in which according to the wiki page "As part of a settlement for using company resources to make their own game, the group agreed to make several games for Softdisk's Gamer's Edge subscription service. As a part of fulfilling this obligation, id made Keen Dreams as a prototype to develop ideas for their next major Keen game"

And there you have it regarding what is available and what games these releases came from, but as for requirements BSzili recommends a fast 020 and 2MB ram to run them, with two of the games having shareware versions and the rest can be purchased as part of the Catacombs Pack. He has also said a Catacomb's 3D port may be worked in the future, and a stock A1200 could be a realistic target.

Hopefully that all makes sense to you the reader as the information regarding these latest versions has been spread across multiple posts, but can be viewed via the EAB forums which is linked below. I for one am very excited as the Keen series were one of the best DOS EGA platformers I've ever played.

Links : 1) Old Discussion 2) Latest Updates 3) Commodore Amiga Thread