Hey all,

Something really fun this time. In December 2023 the Foray in the Forest development team released a truly first of a kind fan rewrite of a Commander Keen game, from reconstructed and combined source code of the game from Catacomb 3D sources. Most previous mods before that afaik have been based of asset modifications and binary patches.

One of the features of the game was to update Keen to run at 70fps, instead of the sorry frameskipped 35fps version that the original Keen 4-6 games ran at. (similar to juj/KEEN70HZ)

However, due to limitations, Foray in the Forest was not quite running at perfectly locked 70Hz rate, but exhibits every now and then dropped frames due to timing related microstuttering - just like the original Keen 4-6 games.

Well certainly can't have that..

As a technology showcase, I have modded (that is, a mod of a mod?) Foray in the Forest to take advantage of a couple of secret (or read, never got around to writing up documentation about these) hardware features that I developed into CRT Terminator. Namely, it has a frame counter, a scanline counter and a high-precision wallclock timer (and a hardware RNG, although that's not used here).

These features enable improved vsync locking, hardware scrolling, interrupt scheduling and optimized synchronization with Adlib register programming.

With these modifications, the CRT Terminator optimized version of Foray in the Forest runs hard-locked at 70Hz in a way that DOS games have not quite been able to run before, making the experience more console-like, except of course 70hz goes up to eleven compared to 60hz 😁 (or god forbid, 50hz)

You can read more about this technology showcase, and download the modded game at https://github.com/juj/foray_in_the_forest .

Micro-stuttering begone!

(even if you don't have CRT Terminator, and missed this fan mod release in December 2023, it is well worth a peek if you are a Keen fan: this game is a gem <3 )

For the few owners of CRT Terminator, I'd love to hear your results on how well this game mod works on your setups? And especially paired with info on which kinds of PCs you have run it on. I have currently only really tested it on my 80MHz Cyrix 486 PC.