Jazz² Resurrection: Open-source Jazz Jackrabbit 2 reimplementation | Hacker News Reader

Jazz² Resurrection: Open-source Jazz Jackrabbit 2 reimplementation

deat.tk

453 pointsgenerichuman114 comments

I have fond memories of playing Jazz Jackrabbit...and Commander Keen, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Secret Agent Man, Jill of the Jungle, and so on. Epic Games and Apogee were the logos I remember seeing most often.

OMG! Jetpack from Adept Software is still available?! https://www.adeptsoftware.com/jetpack/

All of those and gizmos and gadgets. God I spent so much time on that one.

And the lost mind/island of Dr. Brain.

I wish I could still play them!

We were allowed to play Castle of Dr Brain in class, but there was no save feature, so some of us got pretty good at speedrunning the first puzzles to spend the rest of class on the next one.

You can play Island of Dr Brain on archive.org! https://archive.org/details/msdos_Island_of_Dr._Brain_1992

They have Lost Mind as well, but not emulated because it's a Windows game. I wouldn't be surprised if it still runs, though.

Wine is suprising me more and more with running these early windows games.

All old games are available.

Specifically, here: https://www.retro-exo.com/exodos.html

Island of Dr. Brain works well in ScummVM!

I kind of want to install The Incredible Machine now. I just have to find a can opener, a rocket and a baseball. Hmm..

The creator of The Incredible Machine made an HD remake called Contraption Maker:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/241240/Contraption_Maker

It's extremely faithful to the original in terms of "feeling", to the point where it satisfies my TIM nostalgia

Such a simple but awesome game. The level editor was hours of fun. And the best part, it worked on all my friends computers, no matter how cheap or old they were!

I played so much of that game with my friend - he made some really good maps with the editor!

Apogee had some great games for their time. Some of the full versions and many of the free/share ware versions are available at the various DOS game archive sites.

Ah yes, we almost finished Death Rally with a Sentinel (best car in the shareware version).

Sometimes I hang out with my little brothers on Discord, with one of us playing DR (or a similar game), the rest watches the stream. We have some snacks and pretend we travelled back in time to the era when we shared the same PC and had a (very elaborate) hot-seat queueing/watching and commenting system.

"streaming" as watching your buddy play in the same room beats Twitch for me every time!

Recently I had fun with The Curse of Monkey Island and Microsoft Bob experienced in the same way. Although the latter is more like bringing your friends home for a Tommy Wiseau movie night.

Recently, thanks to linux gaming support, I was able to run Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (using proton). Nothing beats fun nostalgia. So happy it lives forever on open source now.

Gods and Abuse were also staples of my early VGA days.

Abuse had that crazy scriptable level editor, I must have spent more time in it than actually playing.

Don’t forget Crystal Caves, my favorite of that era

Tip of my tongue request.

Looking up images of DOS platformers like Secret Agent and Crystal Caves reminds me of a game that was loaded on some elementary school computers in 1998. I don't recall if they were Mac or DOS, but they certainly weren't the cutting edge G3. I think the game had a character in a trench coat and they were maybe a sleuth of some kind. The color palette was dark but there were yellow-ish lights coming from above in a conical shape.

I know memories are usually warped and wrong, but hopefully this is enough of a description to jog someone's memory. I have been able to rediscover all of the games I played as kid. Most I never revisited, but it feels satisfying to learn what they were. Big ones that bugged me for ages are Tyrian and Descent.

Could it be Secret Agent by Apogee Software?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/358350/Secret_Agent/

The mention of Secret Agent above reminded me heavily of it, but I remember the character being about twice as tall on the screen.

I think it is likely an Apogee game or by someone inspired by their art. I haven't found a solid hit of what's in my memory after looking through their catalog and a quick glance through a wider list. It may just be busted memories and it is Secret Agent. It's unsatisfactory though because every other vague memory has turned out to be more accurate than not.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/from:1990/genre:2d-scrolling/...

The detective character you're describing sounds a lot like the character from the Super Solvers: Gizmos & Gadgets series. I've linked a video but not sure if it's the exact game you're thinking of

https://youtu.be/OzXHI22IOSA?t=113

edit: This DOS game might be the one you're thinking of

https://youtu.be/Wei0C21LBNM?t=28

I think this might be it!

Nice!

It's definitely it. I think the overhead light I'm remembering is from Mission T.H.I.N.K., but I do remember the Gizmos & Gadgets levels. Thanks for finally quashing this curiosity. I can die in peace now.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6-vMxPcgnjo&t=4m

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_T.H.I.N.K.

Huzzah, you got your answer! I was hoping one of the intrepid users of this site would solve your mystery.

Reminds me of Moktar. It wasn't amazing compared to other platformers, but still a pretty solid game. I really liked the graphics, music and sound.

https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/OpenMoktar_Vita

Another one that fits the dark palette, conical lights and sort of trench coat wearing character[1] is Blues Brothers by Titus[2].

[1] https://www.lemon64.com/assets/images/games/screens/blues_br...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blues_Brothers:_Jukebox_Ad...

Oh man I had forgotten about Jetpack and how you can make your own levels, thanks for the reminder!

> OMG! Jetpack from Adept Software is still available?! https://www.adeptsoftware.com/jetpack/

I love that game!

Oh, wait! There is a sequel!

Can we all appreciate the fact that this game was developed/produced by Tim Sweeney, who is still very active in Video Game development.

I don't know of anyone else who's tenure in the industry is 30+ years.

The games you get today they might be very flash, but they will never beat the thrill of getting through Jetpack.

That kind of magic is hard to find

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts96J7HhO28

It made a generation who can code!

As a kid, my family got a new PC and it came with the full version of Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Both the campaign and the local multiplayer were a lot of fun, but quite often the multiplayer crashed. I also read about the game having a level editor called the Jazz Creation Station, but my copy absolutely didn't come with it. I looked though the game files and all that. I loved level editors so I was really disappointed.

We had a closer look at the disc and it was a mysterious "OEM Version" (I know what that means now, but none of us did back then). But it said version 1.0 so surely it was meant to have everything? We contacted Gateway, like "is there any way we can upgrade to the actual final version of the game?" And the answer was no.

They were bundling an unfinished version of the game!

----

> OEM Versions

> These beta versions were originally distributed alongside Intel's manufactured hardware, as a result of a partnership between Epic and Intel. While most people who acquired these versions assumed they were the same as the retail release, they were actually builds from halfway through the game's development.

> Two OEM versions exist: 1.00g, which is the most common, and 1.00h. These versions have quite a lot of differences compared to the final release, such as different file formats, many levels use different tilesets or are in different orders, many sound effects weren't coded yet into the game, different screens for loading and menus and different and/or glitchy physics for weapons and objects.[0]

[0] https://jazzjackrabbit.fandom.com/wiki/Jazz_Jackrabbit_2/Dev...

Same here. I have a vague memory of the level editor being included in the OEM version but not being able to get it working. But I could be mistaken.

Was very confused at the time that we appeared to have the full version but it was missing features. Still spent many hours playing it.

Edit: Also some motorbike racing game that came with the same (probably Gateway) PC. Can't remember much about it, but many hours wasted.

If your game bundle was the same as mine, it was Redline Racer!

Amazing! That's the one.

Funny, I'm in New Zealand and I'm guessing you probably aren't, which means Gateway must have done the same game bundle around the world. Did yours also come with an exceptionally crappy two-button gamepad by any chance?

Redline Racer felt really smooth with great graphics for the time. I loved how eventually you started unlocking ridiculous gimmick bikes like a hover bike and a dinosaur. I don't think I ever quite unlocked all of them.

Yep I grew up in NZ too. Now that you mention it I do remember that gamepad, but don’t think we used it much.

Ah I do remember the crazy bikes now! I need to find a copy of it. Just found a few YouTube videos.

Half life (1998) also had an OEM version called "Day one" containing the first half of the game along with some slightly last minute changes missing from it, compared to the released version (different handgun ammo count etc).

Wondering why oem versions were dumbed down pre-releases

First quarter likely as it had first 4 chapters only.

Probably due to deadlines for inclusion, while for normal release they had more time.

I wish Jazz had been more popular. I loved Jazz Jackrabbit 1 and 2, and I believe there were plans to make a third, but they decided it wouldn’t sell enough copies. If anyone here can recommend platformers similar to Jazz that run on a Mac, I’d love to play them. I never got into shooters or 3D games, but always enjoyed platformers like Mario and Contra, and Jazz felt perfect for me.

I thought it was popular. Nearly all my childhood friends played it.

My friends at the time all played it, copies pirated from BBSes though. None paid for a copy AFAIK.

a good chunk of the third exists and is playable

it's not very good though (except the music, Alexander Brandon is still amazing)

Oh, thanks for that, I didn't know it existed. Found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gckYADZp0A

Yeah, it's interesting, but I think it's not a huge loss. Early 3D games have aged very badly, while many from the 2D era are still perfectly playable. So a higher res 2D followup might have actually been better.

For anyone who doesn't know, this is the same guy who did the Deus Ex soundtrack. He is a phenomenal electronic composer.

I would check out Celeste or Shovel Knight. Neither is exactly the run and gun style of Contra or Jazz. However, Celeste is extraordinarily polished with best-in-class controls and movement, and Shovel Knight borrows heavily from classics like Mega Man while ditching the stuff that didn't age as well.

Both best in class, but two quite different classes from JJ.

Mega Drive and SNES emulator, then you can play an entire library of the golden age of platformers.

Cave Story+, Rogue Legacy 1, Spelunky, Broforce, Spiritfarer and/or Fez may be to your liking.

Can recommend Spiritfarer, its a really chill platformer!

Broforce is great, and fun if you play with buddies. Up to 4 players.

With a DS emulator: Henry Hatsworth in the puzzling adventure.

That game is the dark souls of platformers though.

Hollow Knight is great, officially it's a Metroid-style game but it's got great platforming bits as well.

Perhaps you'd be interested in the genre of Metroidvanias?

Hollow Knight, Ori, Celeste.

For multiplayer, Towerfall.

FYI, the original game can be purchased for few dollars and runs fine on Windows with coop and all - tested not so long ago and had a blast playing it

I haven't tried coop, but it actually works reasonably well on PlayOnMac as well, at least for single-player.

It's worth mentioning that there's a dedicated online community over at https://www.jazz2online.com/ and the linked discord, which maintains a community patch called JJ2+ (https://docs.jj2.plus/) which does amazing things with the game, including online coop.

Although I never played Jazz Jackrabbit, I remember in our town there was this guy (I think he was a picture frame-maker) and I think my dad was friends with him.

I remember going downstairs into the work area and I remember he was playing Jazz Jackrabbit on his old computer, and I remember thinking that this game must be epic.

Anyway, random story. It just evokes that memory for some reason.

Technically you were right, the game is Epic ;)

I loved this game when I was a kid. I created a huge map with the editor and I hosted a multiplayer server with this map and people would join and we would be running around this huge map with some players and have fun. People were impressed by the map and I was super exited about it. It was the first time something I created that was used by random people on the internet. I've long since lost that map of course, but still have good memories ^^

I have great memories of playing Jazz Jackrabbit 2 online multiplayer, if I'm not mistaken at some point the official game servers were killed and to still play online we had to patch it to connect to a server hosted by someone I only remember as being called Nimrod (I didn't remember that I knew this until I started writing my memories). I think he was from the UK.

I met a friend by being in a "clan" in JJ2 who kind of introduced me to caring about music, and I went to my first concert with. We are no longer in touch, but I do have one pen pal friend from that "clan" from another country who I still exchange birthday/christmas cards and gifts with for over 23 years now (and occasional messages throughout the year).

Having said all that, I haven't played the game in years though. I remember the excitement over Jazz Jackrabbit 3D that I believe never saw the day of light, or well I vaguely remember there being a playable demo. Not sure, I could probably quickly search for it online but I'll leave that to you, the reader.

One of my favorite games growing up! In high school, one of my earliest programming projects was a VB6 program that could unlock locked Jazz2 levels. I can't remember whether those levels were locked because you had to achieve something or if you had to buy them. In any case, I somehow figured out how to manipulate those files to make them playable. There wasn't any encryption or anything. It was just a matter of finding the right byte and changing it to something else.

Something I liked about Jazz2 was how performant it was on my lousy Intel Celeron PC I had at the time. Strangely, I remember the menus and stuff being kind of laggy, but the game itself always worked really well.

Jazz Jackrabbit is like if Sonic The Hedgehog was on acid had a gun! I never understood why the game wasn't more popular. Epic Megagames really underappreciated what they had.

I have fond memories of three player coop on a single keyboard - possible as long as at most one player was running.

The music was always a strong point, especially that it was typically at most four voices at once due to the file format used.

I loved this game, the feeling of zooming through levels while blasting turtles and collecting gems? was incredibly fun and no other game gave me this send sense of being on the edge of your seat fun gameplay.

Both Jazz's have been ported to macOS at https://macsourceports.com

https://macsourceports.com/game/jazzjackrabbit2

https://macsourceports.com/game/jazzjackrabbit

Oh that site is a treasure. Lots of opportunity to "backfill my childhood" - playing games I never played back then.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230820203915/http://deat.tk/ja...

Unrelated blast from the past, it looks like Fragile Allegiance is getting a spiritual successor: https://www.fragilecontinuum.com/

I always thought there was an opportunity to make this game for the original Microsoft Surface (the touchscreen-in-table one).

Ok, now I just need Earthworm Jim, Commander Keen, Raptor Call of the Shadows, and Uncharted Waters and my childhood will be successfully recreated.

Raptor is getting a remaster by the original author. It's taking him a while as it seems to be a side hustle.

Link to Rapter Remix project: https://www.mking.com/RaptorRemixed.html

You would think current advances in game engines would make it a lot faster these days.. getting it just right like the old game is probably the most difficult part.

https://deat.tk/jazz2/wasm/

I loved this game growing up, I'm definitely going to give this a try.

As a minor observation, I'm pretty (pleasantly) surprised that the project provides a NixOS package for the application. As somebody who tends to flit between Arch, Fedora, and NixOS, seeing packages for NixOS before Fedora availability is a very surprising signal in terms of Linux distribution popularity.

One of my exes loved this game. I swear, it’s been so long but I’ve never had such an urge to share something with her.

I love this game, especially because of the memories of her it brings back. We were just not a good fit (and I was too much of a child anyway).

Amazing open-source work!

In this vein, worth checking out similar source ports / reimplementations here: https://macsourceports.com

Fun fact - the creator of Lori is none other than Dean Dodrill, who would later develop Dust: An Elysian Tail.

Wow. I remember the mid-90s as a brief blip in time where game music was out of this world and really added to the experience. Jazz Jackrabbit (Alex Brandon), Crusader: No Remorse (Andrew Sega), Earthworm Jim (Tommy Tallarico), and Top Gear (Barry Leitch) were the soundtracks to way more than just their respective games for me for upwards of two decades until Hotline Miami and Horizon Chase came along, and Allen Simpson crossed my radar with FNAF's "DJ Music Man."

There are some really, really good remixes of Jazz's soundtrack on YouTube. I recommend SIDNIFY's "Laboratory Level" (https://youtu.be/UY-T6I0PxZs) and Allan Zax's "Tubelectic" (https://youtu.be/3UTTduiX5bw).

This is wild. It used to take hours to download this game's deno, and now I can fire it up in a webpage.

Anyone tried running it on SteamDeck?

Regular Jazz 2 runs great on the steamdeck btw :-)

I love projects like this. Personally i am beholden to Dungeon keeper (https://keeperfx.net/) and Red Alert (https://www.openra.net/) and Populous (https://www.popre.net/).

Neat, but doesn't work in mobile Safari on iPad. Screen will show initially, but then the screen is dark once you start.

Apache server isn't able to handle it.

Apache is what's serving the error page. It's whatever is behind Apache that is failing

I've had an Apache server running on a decade old laptop on the HN front page, serving a custom PHP+Mariadb blog without caching, works just fine. It's big projects like WordPress that reliably go down from more than a handful of visitors per minute with bursts to a few in one second, if you don't have a caching layer that turns it into the equivalent of a static page generator

Tried this for recent DosGameClub and it's not quite perfect yet, though a huge step up from the original if you cannot stand how zoomed in the vanilla game looks.

Similarly OpenJazz allows playing Jazz1. It has even more quirks than Resurrection, and can similarly allow zooming out with higher resolutions

The dev is using nCine as the engine to leverage its porting capabilities (it even has a Nintendo Switch homebre version). nCine itself can use SDL2, QT5 and GLFW as backends

Interesting decision.

It also means this port requires orders of magnitude more resources than the original game.

Looks very cool, fingers crossed multiplayer support gets added at some point (noticed it says 'Multiplayer is temporarily removed in version 1.0.0.' on the website).

Seems like the creator says it would take 300+ hours and they don't have time (on their discord).

Thanks for digging this detail out! I'm a bit disappointed since I was looking forward to playing this with friends again (fond memories), but I can totally understand how the dev might not have the necessary time to implement this.

If you want to play online, I recommend checking JJ2+, jazz2online.com and the discord link there. It's fairly easy to setup. You just need the base game, which is available on GOG and runs perfectly fine one modern Windows computers. Check gog.jj2.plus website for the installation process.

I loved this game as a kid. The bundled level editor was pretty good considering, I think. LAN play was loads of fun also.

This is great! This brings me back to my childhood, I loved this game, really looking forward to trying it out.

This is incredible. Thank you! My brother and I played so much of this. I love this. You're my favourite.

Oh the endless arguments with my little sister on which rabbit is the best one - Jazz or Spazz.

Hell yeah! Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was amazing and I always thought it was sad it became abandonware.

Same. I tried playing it on wine, but it was always a bit unstable for me and crashed. I never knew that there was a FOSS reimplementation.

edit: Looks like this project started in 2017, but it made leaps in the last year.

http://deat.tk/jazz2/release-notes

I’ve always been curious… are there concrete definitions of “abandonware” in the various major jurisdictions? Or is it just a loose concept that remains legally dubious?

I feel like “Adopt an Abandonware” would be a pretty great source of meaningful, educational, and productive projects for devs with extra cycles or looking to refine skills.

There's mention of it in the DMCA if I remember correctly. It says DRM can be cracked if something isn't available to be sold anymore or something similar: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dmca-game-preservation-exemp...

There is no legal definition of abandonware and everyone in the community knows and understands this.

It's just a case of "the lesser evil": preserving games when nobody who owns them cares enough about them to sell them or make sure they can still be run.

But legal? No.

I think few people would say it's a "lesser evil" but something that is morally fine and should be legal (when no money is changing hands).

If you were, say, selling abandonware that's much more of a murky area, but just downloading a copy or giving people a copy of some data that is no longer sold - whoever has ended up with the copyright shouldn't be able to complain if they are not actually making it available for purchase - they shouldn't be able to claim any loss since by not selling it they are not being deprived of any revenue.

Of course, part of this is only a problem because copyright terms became absurdly long - if we had sane copyright terms like strictly 25 or 30 years from publication a lot of this stuff would be public domain by now anyway.

I don't disagree that it's morally fine -- after all, the abandonware community wouldn't make the downloads available otherwise -- but it's still not legal.

Home of the Underdogs used to get tons of aggressive cease and desist emails from ESA (then named IDSA), the group representing game publishers legally, and who supposedly are on the "side" of games. So aggressive in fact they sometimes got it wrong (like sending a C&D for a game which was public domain). And who was willing to take a stance and chance it?

Back then the abandonware community was one of two things, I think: people who just wanted to download games (Warez or abandonware was the same to them) and proper members of the community, who'd rather see these games either commercially supported or made public domain. Both HOTU and Abandonia replaced download links whenever someone found a legal way to buy the games.

Does it count as abandonware if you can buy it on GOG today?

https://www.gog.com/en/game/jazz_jackrabbit_collection

https://www.gog.com/en/game/jazz_jackrabbit_2_collection

Maybe it was abandoned for a time until GOG picked it up.

Though there's the fun twist that Epic has their own competing storefront now and it doesn't include either Jazz Jackrabbit game. What does it say about a company like Epic that their own storefront doesn't include most of their back catalog? It certainly feels abandoned if not abadonware.

Oh man, I totally forgot about this game. Played it a ton.

Looks like their Apache server is struggling

Responds very fast for me! With an error page. I guess something else fell over and Apache is the component that's holding up here ;)

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