About
Duke Nukem II is a 1993 side-scrolling platform game developed and published by Apogee Software, the sequel to 1991's Duke Nukem and predecessor to Duke Nukem 3D. RigelEngine is a from-scratch, reverse-engineered reimplementation of Duke Nukem II written in modern C++. It acts as a drop-in replacement that reads the original game's data files and runs natively on Windows, Linux, and macOS, plus a WebAssembly build and a third-party PS Vita port. The project is stable and feature-complete, with all four episodes fully playable, and is now in maintenance mode with bug fixes but no planned new features.
How it differs from the original
Compared to the original, RigelEngine adds a widescreen mode, smooth scrolling at higher frame rates, quick-saving, better game controller support, and extended modding features; no source code for the original game was ever released, so RigelEngine was built entirely from disassembly of the original binaries.
Getting started
You need either the free shareware version (downloadable from archive.org) or the registered full version (purchasable from Zoom Platform) of Duke Nukem II's data files; on first launch RigelEngine shows a file browser to locate that install, and it can import existing saves, high scores, and settings from it automatically.
Additional notes
- Trivia
- The engine is lightweight enough to run on a single-core ARMv6 CPU at 700MHz, such as a Raspberry Pi 1, using less than 64MB of RAM.