OpenTyrian

About

Tyrian is a vertically scrolling shooter developed by Eclipse Software and published by Epic MegaGames for MS-DOS in 1995; it was re-released as freeware in 2004. OpenTyrian is an open-source port of the DOS game Tyrian, covering its story mode, one- and two-player arcade modes and networked multiplayer. It is written in C99 using SDL2, with release builds for Windows, macOS and Linux.

How it differs from the original

Network play has no arena or matchmaking: both players must start the game from the command line at the same time, though UDP hole punching usually avoids opening ports.

Getting started

Download the release build for your platform, extract it and run it; the builds include the freeware Tyrian 2.1 data files. To build it yourself, you need a C99 compiler, GNU make, pkg-config and SDL2 (SDL2_net for network play), and the Tyrian 2.1 data downloaded separately.

Additional notes

Christmas mode

The game includes a Christmas mode, which can be disabled with a command-line option.

Macos

The macOS app is not notarized, so Gatekeeper may require right-clicking it and choosing Open the first time.