I remember how I played Abuse with my brother. I was moving with keyboard and he aiming with mouse. It was better coop game than multiplayer :D

Damn, I had no idea the game was using another format than MIDI. When I wanted to capture the music into MP3 I just renamed the file endings to "mid" and playback as a MIDI file in any media player worked fine, also importing it into Cubase happened without any issues. I was sure they had just renamed the file endings. I have to wonder what features HMI has that are missing from General MIDI, if Abuse was using them at all. But I've had similar experiences with other games which supposedly have custom MIDI-like formats but can curiously be played back (seemingly) perfectly fine as General MIDI (although I presume some effects or something present in the game are missing from the playback, then, although I never noticed).

Lol, I remember playing a game like that with my friend. It was a racing game called Extreme-G 2. I would drive the motorbike, and my friend would shoot the weapons.

You can find information about HMI format here, it seems to be just a MIDI variant. There is also a link to HMI to MIDI converter I used, but it only seems to work on 32bit Windows: http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/HMI

Yeah, I had checked that link already but it doesn't really say anything. The link to the MultimediaWiki turned out to be somewhat useful, though:

"HMI is an uncommon MIDI variant which supports looping and conditional branching"

Seems interesting, will definitely have to take a closer look at these files and how Abuse plays them back.

Anyway, sorry for not commenting on your source port. Being also a musician / SFX guy my mind instantly got stuck on this MIDI thing. Will definitely check out your port soon. :D

Finished Abuse 1996 - 20th anniversary source port
With GOD mode enabled it took me 3 hours.
Game crashed 3-4 times but I was okay as I saved it on every save point and save file didn't got corrupt.
Some places need tricky jump so if Jetpack cheat was available it would have took me less time. :P
So I am positive that it will take 8hrs for sure without cheats.
I will definitely play it again!!! :)

Opss... I got carried away.
I simply downloaded game and start playing it missing the changelog. :P
I used GOD mode after level 14 or 16.
Can't remember red room as I was too busy shooting.
I played it on Windows 7.

Nice! I own Abuse in the original box ordered directly from Crack.com back when it came out. I never did beat it as it becomes kind of repetitive after a few levels, but it is a pretty fun game. Especially screwing around with the included level editor.

The red room is a large secret area in level 14. It is a leftover from the original plot with aliens.

If you liked the game you can always open the "level" folder and rename all the "frabs" levels to "level" and start a new game with those. I haven't tested them yet. You can read about it here:
[url=http://web.archive.org/web/20010126071800/http://www.cs.uidaho.edu/~cass0664/fRaBs/pages/single.html]http://web.archive.org/web/20010126071800/http://www.cs.uidaho.edu/~cass0664/fRaBs/pages/single.html[/url]


That is pretty cool. Mind posting a photo of it, it would be cool to see how the original box looked, since there are many versions on the internet and I don't know what is THE original.
Also, I know there is low chance, but do you maybe have some old mods from that era, many old fan sites from the period are down and a lot of the user made levels are gone.

I uploaded the game to moddb like people here suggested:

http://www.moddb.com/games/abuse/downloads/abuse-sdl-09a-windows

Tell me about it. I always kinda loved and praised the game but the truth is that I always got bored with it long before even the shareware version was over. I never even reached the second world. :P

Turning off music also turns off sound. Too bad because that destroys the atmosphere for me (when you can hear them from afar). Else thanks for your porting work.

That is a weird bug, I wrote about in the readme, sometimes it turns out the sound sometimes it doesn't. If you watch the gameplay video I turned off the music, but the sounds worked fine. You can always simply delete the music folder or rename it, the game will still run normally.

Also lowering music volume lowers the sound volume too, I think that has something to do with the sound library.

I was even thinking of converting the midi music to ogg or mp3 and using my own sound system based on FMOD. That would fix all these problems.

Here ya go! This is what you ordered directly from the company itself. As you can see, pretty no-frills. Later, after they sold the rights to the game for what I heard to be $250k, a retail version came out with a nicer cover with flames behind the main character.

I included the order sheet so you can correlate the dates and prove/debunk any other info you come across.

Enjoy!

I don't have any mods or really anything outside the source code for Abuse, sorry. Like I said, it never seemed to take off like Doom had, so I believe people were on to the next game before Abuse had made even an inkling of an impact.

Good times. I bought the Mac OS version of Abuse way back when it first came out -- it was ported by crackdotcom themselves and published by Bungie Software, and it sported all kinds of improvements like higher-res graphics.

From what I recall, crackdotcom were planning a sequel but they just didn't have the money to see it through to the end. Abuse was a great game, but FPS were pretty much what everyone was buying.