Hello.

In 2012 I made a short Quake 2D game and many compared it to Abuse, a game by Crack dot Com released in 1996. It was released for free and is available on Desura, so I wanted to check it out.

Playing in DOSBox at 320x200 wasn't fun. I read about a high resolution mode in the readme of the shareware version and searching for a fix to make it work in the full version I found out the source code was released and several ports were made during the years, but mostly for Linux. Then I finally found an abandoned working Linux, Mac and Windows version on GitHub and one thing lead to another, and I ended up messing around with the code instead of playing the game.

Here is the final result in motion and the list of updates I made (the video gets loud):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q0SbdDfnFI

Abuse SDL 0.9a:
- Enabled custom resolutions and enabled lights on high resolutions
- Re-enabled OpenGL rendering to enable vsync
- Game screen scaling in window and fullscreen mode using F11 and F12
- Enabled some high resolution images from the 1997 Mac OS release
- Fixed level music not being played correctly, added "victory" music in the end game screen
- Fixed the health power image, fixed mouse image when choosing initial gamma
- Added or re-enabled various settings in the config file (borderless window, grab input, editor mode, high resolution images...)
- Local save game files and configuration files
- Quick load using F9, quick save using F5 on save consoles
- Added cheats via chat console: bullettime, god, giveall, flypower, sneakypower, fastpower, healthpower, nopower
- XBox360 controller support with rebindable buttons
- Updated abuse-tool so it can extract the images in Abuse SPEC files to modern image formats as individual images, tilemaps or a texture atlas with information about image, tile and animation frame sizes and positions

If anything, AFAIK this is the only version where the music has finally been fixed. I tested it on my old and new PC on Windows 7 32bit and 64bit. I would like to know if it works, and how does playing with the Xbox controller feel, because I want to use the same controls for my own engine. Please read the README for more info. You can download the Windows version here, or on moddb:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/pgos1074d3dnmka/Abuse_1996_v0.9a_win32.rar
http://www.moddb.com/games/abuse/downloads/abuse-sdl-09a-windows

I also extracted the textures and converted the HMI music to MIDI. If you want you can get those on my blog:
http://antonior-software.blogspot.hr/2016/05/abuse-1996-sdl-port-09a.html

The source code and the binaries are also on my GitHub page. The game physics are locked at 15 FPS and the rendering is a bit slow, since it is all done by pushing around bytes of data on the CPU. I would like that to be improved. I only compiled it for Windows, but it should also compile for Linux and Mac if I didn't mess something up. If someone compiles it for Mac and Linux I will link to them too:
http://github.com/antrad/Abuse_1996

Looks good, thanks for pointing it out. Have you thought about putting it up on ModDB, or one of those sites, you would get some good coverage then.

Thank you for game.
It does look promising.
As fellow member suggested, Get it to ModDB or IndieDB.

Nice, I'll give it a try and likes everyone suggested get it to ModDB.

May I ask the difference between what you make with this version?
http://abuse.zoy.org/

I think this is the one that's always available on linux

Thanks for the replies. I never uploaded anything to moddb before and I am not sure how things work there, even though I have an account. There is a Abuse "section" and I planned to "add download", but first I need few people to test it out. So far no luck, but I only first shared this few hours ago. There is already a full list of changes in the first post. A guy named Xenoveritas picked that Linux version and ported it to SDL2 and made it build on Windows and Mac, but stopped working on it in 2014. I updated that version. All these versions are just an updated SDL port from 2001. It is all documented in the included readme, changelog and in the files on GitHub.

So this is updated version of what's been available all this time.
Good to know. Thanks.

If I could add a single freeware game to the gog catalog, it would be Abuse. You've done a really great job here! Thanks for coming out of nowhere and sharing this with other DOS fans.

I played it for an hour.
So far game looks and feels good.
Controls and Save system are working fine.
I played Normal mode.
And there is a cheat option aswell.
Press C, Type GOD and press enter. God mode enabled!!! :)
If a game is tiny then I play it anyway.

Thank you for game.
I hope you will add few levels on it's 25th Anniversary!!!

Thanks. People have been working on this since 2001 and I thought it deserves to be updated and shared :) The original game had multiplayer, but unfortunately it never got fixed and that one is way out of my league. Glad to hear, you are the first one to report back :) Yeah, I added several cheats, because I thought it would be fun, and the game gets pretty hard after level 8, and it would be a shame if people get frustrated and quit. In the original game you could "cheat" by going to the save console and save and reload the game which would give you 100 health if you are not playing on "extreme". It should still work, but not with quick save/load, it would make it too easy. Also some doors open when you press "down/use" on the save console, so you should know that, F5 will not.

As for the bonus levels, there was already Free Abuse (Frabs) project. It works with this version, but it misses some images. I have to play the whole thing to see if there are any problems more with it, then I will upload it. If you open the "levels" folder you will see, there are levels called "frabs".

And of course, the game has an built-in editor that still works. Just open config.txt and set editor=1.

If I change sprite a bit.
I can (try to) make it some Star Wars/ Star Trek spin-off.
Like Krik / Bobba Fett / Stormtrooper raiding a abandon ship.
Sounds great (in my thought :P)!!!

You could do that, but I haven't tried it myself. You will need to open abuse-tool using the Windows command console to get the PCX images from the SPEC file, then change them with GIMP or something, and then again use abuse-tool to put them back in.

If you open the editor you can find someone already added Aliens(the movie) textures and enemies, but I couldn't find any levels using those. It may have been forever lost. Maybe someone here has some old mods from the 1990s lying around on their old PCs somewhere.

How exactly do you change resolutions in this?

It is all explained in the readme. Open the folder "user" and the file "config.txt". Set screen_width and screen height. But do note, that is just for the in game area that will be rendered. You can also set scale (default is 2), so 1 pixel will be rendered as 2x2,3x3, etc. which will increase the game window size. You can also scale up or down using F11 or F12 while the game is running. F10 toggles fullscreen and window mode.

To scale the game properly on 1920x1080 screens in fullscreen I recommend these values which I used to record the video:
- 640x360 with scale 3
- 960x540 with scale 2

I guess some kind of game launcher would make all this more user friendly.

Thanks.