About
Catacomb 3-D: The Descent was developed by id Software in 1991; the Catacomb Adventure series that followed it (The Catacomb Abyss, The Catacomb Armageddon and The Catacomb Apocalypse) was developed by Softdisk Publishing in 1992-1993. All were originally MS-DOS games rendered in 16 colors at a 320x200 resolution. CatacombGL is a source port of Catacomb 3-D and the three Catacomb Adventure games, adding OpenGL-based hardware-accelerated rendering with widescreen resolution support, a customizable field of view, an uncapped frame rate, and floating-point precision movement for the player, projectiles and monsters. It runs natively on Windows 7 through 11 and Linux, supports all four games via the GOG.com Catacombs Pack, and also supports the free Catacomb Abyss v1.13 shareware release. As of version 0.5.7 it has no game controller support and cannot load save games from the original DOS releases.
How it differs from the original
CatacombGL replaces the original's 16-color, 320x200 software rendering with OpenGL hardware acceleration and adds features the DOS originals didn't have, such as wall-sliding in narrow corridors, a configurable automap with several display styles (including one modeled on Catacomb 3-D's original debug automap), and its own shared keyboard/mouse configuration that overrides the original games' per-title key remapping. High scores are stored outside the GOG installation folder to avoid file-access issues, rather than in the original location.
Getting started
CatacombGL doesn't run standalone — it needs the original game data. The Catacomb Abyss can be played for free using its 1.13 shareware release (available from sites such as archive.org), while all four games require buying the Catacombs Pack from GOG.com. Running the executable shows a game-selection screen; if the Catacombs Pack was installed via the GOG installer on Windows, its data is auto-detected, otherwise the folder can be selected manually. Command-line flags can skip straight to a specific game, and the automap can also be triggered via a cheat code that reveals the whole map immediately.
Known limitations
- platform: No support for game controllers.
- compatibility: No backwards compatibility with saved games from the original DOS game.
Additional notes
- Credits
- CatacombGL reuses code from other open-source projects, including ReflectionHLE (for music/sound handling) and the Nuked-OPL3-fast OPL3 emulator.