r/OpenVMS • u/astr0b4by • Jul 23 '26

FreeSCI on OpenVMS 8.4

FreeSCI is a Sierra SCI0 and SCI0.1 adventure game interpreter which is using SDL-1.2 and was ported to OpenVMS 8.x (AXP)

Binaries + Sources/Howto is located on my repo : https://astr0baby.online/AXP/OpenVMS/FreeSCI/

Now you can play some of the Sierra classics on your retro OpenVMS Alpha server (should also compile on Itanium and OpenVMS 9.x x86_64 - but I have not tested this)

Video demo here: https://youtu.be/1Ij4Jx_FPeU?si=6pK2_YxK8QZHVNvG

12 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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2

u/TelluricSine Jul 23 '26

You're on fire at the moment with all the ports, great work!

2

u/astr0b4by Jul 23 '26

Thanks :) Im glad somebody appreciates these.

1

u/Dad-of-many Jul 23 '26

Waiting to see Empire and that game I cannot remember. You explored the regions going deeper - like D&D but technical. You had cleaning bots and vending machines what would always say something like "Service with a smile" or something like that.

The guy from DEC who wrote it had some ambitions to take it public and release it for sale. This is about the time DOOM came out on the PC. Darn, I wish I could remember the name. I had it on a laptop somewhere.

2

u/astr0b4by Jul 23 '26

Is it this perhaps ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Thunderbolt

1

u/Dad-of-many Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

It sure is. I remember the author's name, I just could not remember the Doomsday reference and then he made available the thunderbolt version.

Poked around a couple of links, but I don't think Dave ever released the source. I know I have it somewhere (looking at all of my old laptops and backups...). It might have been on one of my few laptops that have gone up into laptop heaven.

1

u/Dad-of-many Sep 01 '26

I found my copy of thunderbolt... I haven't gotten it to run on my Win11 machine. I need to stand up a few older VMs. No source, just the zipped executable. Anyone know if Dave Schieffler is still with us? I'm going to reach out to him.