BStone

About

Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold and its sequel Planet Strike are early-1990s first-person shooters developed by JAM Productions and published by Apogee Software, built on id Software's Wolfenstein 3D engine. BStone is an actively maintained, unofficial source port of the Blake Stone series (Aliens of Gold and Planet Strike) supporting the shareware and full/retail releases of both games. It adds high-resolution and true 3D rendering (software, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and Vulkan renderers), texture upscaling, customizable controls, positional 3D audio via OpenAL, and support for replacing the game's textures with external files. Since the original game data isn't free, players must supply their own copy of the game.

How it differs from the original

Compared to the original DOS engine, BStone adds modern rendering backends (OpenGL/OpenGL ES/Vulkan) and widescreen, high-resolution display alongside the vanilla software renderer, plus 3D positional audio and external texture replacement — none of which existed in the original DOS release.

Getting started

After placing the port's files alongside a legally-owned copy of the game data (or a GOG/Steam install, which it can detect automatically on Windows), running the port's executable launches the game; add-on content can be loaded by pointing the port at a separate folder holding the add-on's files via a command-line option.

History

BStone has been developed by Boris I. Bendovsky since 2013, building on Apogee's original Blake Stone source code (originally copyrighted 1992-2013 by Apogee Entertainment), with active development continuing through at least 2024 per the project's copyright notice.

Known limitations

• audio: OpenAL runtime v1.9.9 causes a crash in non-MinGW-W64 build; update OpenAL runtime to fix.

Additional notes

Easter egg

A hidden cheat sequence (pressing J, A, M, then Enter) grants all keys, all weapons, and full health while zeroing the score; it's unavailable in the shareware version.