JauntTrooper series: Niche of niche!

[getter77]

Wrangler saw fit to tell me this was a worthwhile shot in the dark to try, so here we go folks.

Have you all any knowledge, or know people that would on here, regarding the JauntTrooper series of 3 games, acquiring such games, interest in them, emulators for the esoteric hardware all 3 originally ran on, etc. HOTU apparently had the PC and MAC ports, respectively, of the first 2 games in the series at some point but they are kinda deadish nowadays.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment. ... per_series

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_2000_(video_game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Eq ... orporation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Thunderbolt

The above are all I've really been able to track down thus far. I'm also in the midst of a longshot attempt to get into contact with one of the original developers to see what's what and what can be.

A resurgence nowadays for these games, with the PC gaming audience now having many more oppourtunities to prove receptive and genuinely captivated...not to mention if some OpenSourcing and such can be wrangled to breathe new life into the series---this feels like one of the most bizarrely hardcore CRPG trappings I've ever found myself involved in and may well be the oddest out there.

I can't really explain just how this whole thing has stuck such a chord within me---it just has. The notion of something so....substantial....being on the edge of oblivion and so horribly not getting the exposure it merits is just terrible.

Hopefully this stikes some chords as, in a very roundabout way, some of the discussions and links from everybody through the times in here kinda led me to this strange destination. I'm trying for leads in a few other places as well so hopefully I can manage to raise the issue in the right place at the right time. Thanks for reading!

[Philosophical Gamer]

This game looks interesting. It looks like there were DOS versions released for at least one of the games in the series. I can't find screenshots anywhere and doing a search for "Jaunt Trooper" on Google only comes up with 10-20 results.

I always find games like this interesting, games that are good but are little known or near extinction, but still very good games. Deathlord for the Apple //e is an example of one, after a year or two of searching I finally found a site which had it. It was pretty much an Ultima clone in an oriental theme, very unique game.

I'd like to try out Jaunt Trooper, I will be looking into it as well. A copy of the games may be buried somewhere in a DOS archive, but unreachable with Google search. I would think that games archives with disk images would be a good place to start searching.

[getter77]

There's no record of DOS being out there for these games near as I can tell. Thunderbolt got a Windows port...and both Thunderbolt and Firestorm got a MAC port. All 3 games, including the unported Quicksilver, originated on DEC Mainframes.

Home of the Underdogs used to have the Windows version of Thunderbolt and the MAC version of Firestorm available for download....but they've been in disarray for quite awhile now but hopefully they get mirrored or something then at least that'll be something.

The holy grail of this is to find, and somehow make work, the original 3 DEC Mainframe version games, ie, Doomsday 2000. This is because it is kinda encouraged to import your clear character from each game into the next not terribly unlike in the Quest for Glory series...and since Quicksilver was never ported, well, I think you can see what I mean. Meh ending would be the MAC ports of part one and 2 so there can at least be a 2/3 of the experience enjoyed...roughly.

I've not had a chance lately to delve much deeper into my searching and so far nobody else has come up with results or time to help otherwise with it all. Hopefully some stuff can be manifested soon though

[Philosophical Gamer]

My mistake, I misread DEC as DOS on the wikipedia pages for the games.

It's an interesting notion and it could work out, there are coders out there who would enjoy working on a project like this. People in the Linux scene might be more likely to be interested. The DEC was a pretty early computer so it could be possible to emulate it more easily than say an NES or DOS, but I don't really know. Contacting the original programmer does sound like a good way to go about it.

So it essentially was one of the first roguelikes? Are there screenshots for it available anywhere? The more that people could see about the game the more likely they'd want to work on restoring it again.

The internet is a great thing, if there's like-minded people out there you'd be able to find them here. It's worth a shot.

[getter77]

My mistake, I misread DEC as DOS on the wikipedia pages for the games.

It's an interesting notion and it could work out, there are coders out there who would enjoy working on a project like this. People in the Linux scene might be more likely to be interested. The DEC was a pretty early computer so it could be possible to emulate it more easily than say an NES or DOS, but I don't really know. Contacting the original programmer does sound like a good way to go about it.

So it essentially was one of the first roguelikes? Are there screenshots for it available anywhere? The more that people could see about the game the more likely they'd want to work on restoring it again.

The internet is a great thing, if there's like-minded people out there you'd be able to find them here. It's worth a shot.

No worries on the mixup, I'm glad for some discussion on it. I don't know of any Linux folk, so I'd appreciate it if you could float the gist of this around to them. I've also got a thread going over at www.roguetemple.com which might be a touch more coherent.

So far no dice on my contact attempts and I doubt that avenue will yield results from this particular source. A working DEC Mainframe emulator would be as necessary as the game files themselves...so that'd be another trick. Ideally, I'd like to see the games themselves hacked into for any bugfixing, polishing, or whatnot barring the appearance of source code or a freeware/open source declaration. By what accounts I can see thus far, the game is on the level of quality and depth of the more modern titans of Roguelikes like Crawl: Stone Soup---as of, what, 20+ years ago now? That's huge that a commercial venture maintained a place in the hierarchy, though forgotten, after all these years and open source work on the various other Roguelikes out there. And that's Thunderbolt! Same impressions cite Firestorm as being even deeper and better...with both having a significant amount of secrets still held as of then and today. Which means, logically, Quicksilver manages to dwarf even those tremendous efforts and accomplishments!

The game series in general was one of the first commercial Roguelikes released period. There are other older, rougher or just different things out there like the Temple of Apshai stuff, Rogue itself, Fargoal, etc....but this was the biggie well ahead of its time and, quite possibly, STILL beating out the modern Roguelikes in terms of some features as per some nods in that direction.

No screens, but check your PM and perhaps you can rectify that on your site and such.

I think we may well get along well man.

[Philosophical Gamer]

Sounds good, what I can do is help spread the word that you're looking to get the word out on the game. I'm interested in quality old school games, especially those which are little known despite being good. I'd be able to post a blog post or two about the game, and possibly let people know that there's an interest in getting these games playable again.

I'll be frank though, this is your baby but programming an emulator takes a lot of work usually so it might be difficult to convince people who are capable of it to do the work, depending on how good a game it is or what kind of historical value it has there may be people who would want to work on it, and I'm only a game player really, who has a blog, so I don't really know anyone who could help, but what I can do is spread the word about the game, as it's an interesting story, exactly what I'd like to include in my blog.

An in-depth roguelike programmed around the age of the first home computers which is no longer known is a good story, and it is a piece of history. I'd definitely be up to posting a blog post or two about it.

Check your PM's, it's night here now and I'm about to crash out, but I'm going to look into the games more tomorrow. Peace

[Philosophical Gamer]

I did a search for "Jaunt Trooper", and found this site, which claims to have DOS copies of both Firestorm and Thunderbolt, apparently you have to be a member of the site to download them, but I wanted to link to it. There were only 33 results when searching for the name of the series, but this is one of the sites that comes up.

I read the reviews of the games and it's cool that it's a scifi roguelike, it's not well known at all either yet it won some awards and got great reviews when it was originally released, I'll make a post about it to help keep the game alive, it might not be for a few days, as I'm generally pretty spur of the moment with things, but I'll add the post to my (large) list of drafts and start building it up.

[getter77]

Yeah, I saw that site and a few others in my earlier searches but I have a habit of being wary of download sites that want registration due to it not being uncommon that they then want some money out of it. I'm pretty sure they are just counting "old pc gaming" as MSDOS for the sake of visibility and that there's no cool "old Windows stuff" icon out there that'd be recognizable.

Still, I may yet try that site somewhere down the line here if other options don't avail themselves.

An excellent Sci-fi Roguelike foundation...with cool stuff like cutting open floors to attrack something scary on a deeper level you fled from while hoping it isn't also capable of coming back up through the hole----that's the gestalt of JauntTrooper/Doomsday 2000. And just think, that is the first, and least developed game, out of the trio. Imagine what kinds of improvements, if not total conversion stuff, is possible with that combined framework.

Good on ya for adding mentions to the ole backlog ye have there. I get this strange feeling we both have much in our respective piles of to do, to play, to type at folk about, etc. I work 55 hour weeks and these are tumultous times so things can get a bit tricky...

[flaminjapaleno]

I know this is an ancient topic now but id thought id just post this. Jaunt trooper mission firestorm can run on a modern win 7 x64 system. you need to install basilisk, update it to OS 7.5.5 install stuff-it expander5.5 onto your emulated mac, then install droppit 5.5 onto the emulated mac as well. Once done the emulated mac will recognise the jaunt trooper.SIT file, and will be able to successfully unpack the file. once unpacked it is just a simple matter of clicking on the correct icon and playing! however to display colours correctly and hear sounds some configuration of the emulator setting will be required. i have done this so I know this works! If anyone needs a complete walkthrough to be able to do this post here and i will start a new thread titled Jaunt-trooper Install.