About
Ken's Labyrinth is a first-person shooter for MS-DOS published in 1993 by Epic MegaGames and programmed by Ken Silverman, who later designed the Build engine used in Duke Nukem 3D. The player controls a faceless protagonist trying to rescue their dog, Sparky, from a labyrinth, across three episodes (the first released as shareware). Lab3dGLES (built on the LAB3D/SDL codebase) is a port of Ken's Labyrinth to modern systems using OpenGL, with OpenGLES support and hardware support for the Wiz and Caanoo handhelds added on top of LAB3D/SDL, which itself has been actively developed since 2002 through many versions supporting Windows, Linux, SunOS, and FreeBSD.
How it differs from the original
Compared to the original DOS release, the port adds OpenGL-accelerated, anti-aliased, true-color graphics, big-endian CPU support, multiple simultaneous sound effects, improved General MIDI music alongside Adlib emulation, adjustable resolutions and a windowed mode, and numerous bug fixes accumulated across its version history.
Getting started
It requires the original Ken's Labyrinth game data files and supports several original releases (the Advanced Systems v1.0/v1.1 shareware and registered versions, and the Epic MegaGames v2.0 shareware version); resolution, sound, and music settings can be adjusted via command-line options or an in-game setup menu.
History
The LAB3D/SDL port this project is based on was created by Jan Lönnberg starting from Ken Silverman's original 1992–93 DOS source release, and was updated through more than a dozen versions between 2002 and 2004, progressively adding endianness fixes, wider aspect-ratio support, and other compatibility improvements.
Additional notes
- License
- Ken Silverman's original source-license terms, carried over here, allow free modification and internet-only redistribution, forbid any commercial use, and require his copyright notice to be included in any distribution.