Abuse (Xenoveritas)

About

Abuse is a run-and-gun game developed by Crack dot Com and published by Electronic Arts (Origin Systems in Europe), released for MS-DOS on February 29, 1996, with a Mac OS port by Bungie following in 1997; its source code and some shareware content have been in the public domain since the late 1990s. This is a fork of the original Abuse SDL port from abuse.zoy.org that switches the build system to CMake and ports the codebase from SDL to SDL2, adding fullscreen display, arbitrary window scaling, support for higher color depths, stereo sound with panning, mouse-wheel weapon switching, and customizable keys. It targets Linux, Windows, and macOS, and its listed development status is active.

How it differs from the original

This fork removes the fRaBs bonus content and the sound/music files that shipped with the abuse.zoy.org release because their licensing was unclear, so those files must be obtained separately and copied into the sfx and music directories to restore sound and music.

Getting started

After building and installing, running the `abuse` command starts the game; command-line switches let you enable fullscreen mode, anti-aliasing, editor mode, or load a specific map file. A configuration file is created automatically in the user's home directory the first time the game runs, letting these options be set permanently.

Known issues & limitations

• The README notes that display scaling is still experimental and not very fast.

Media