Fan-made versions of ancient games

[Famous Mortimer]

Inspired by the "Retro-Blast 90s" thread, I realised all the games I thought of for inclusion were older than that. I looked up "Mercenary":



And re-remembered that someone had made a version of it, then fell into a bit of a rabbit hole (there's a "port" of the Amiga version of "Damocles", the sequel, which has VR support, for example).

So my weekend is sorted, as I'll see if I can complete Mercenary for the second time, thirty-odd years after the first. I also know there are lots of other things like this - old games programmed to work in browsers, all sorts. Any good ones? Any very bad ones?

[Lemming]

If the early-mid 90s count as ancient:
GZDoom is an easy recommendation, you can run Doom, Heretic, Hexen and others at modern resolutions with any control scheme you like and all kinds of groovy features.

Another really cool one is OpenLara, the PS1 version of Tomb Raider 1 running in a browser. Screen resolution, much higher framerate than the original, plus you can press R to go into slowmo and show off your Moves.

Also not sure if it counts as a full fan-made version, but the Gold Box Companion is really cool, you can play the old 80s/early 90s Pool of Radiance/Krynn/etc games with a fanmade companion program that has an automap and keeps track of other things for you.

[Sonny_Jim]

I'd kinda missed it at the time, but there was another sequel to Elite called 'Frontier: First Encounters', which released in '95 and was apparently a buggy mess.  There's a couple of modern ports that fix most of the bugs and I found fun to play for a bit:

EDIT: It has some top notch early video game acting:

[samadriel]

Whatever happened to that project to remake Action 52 as fifty-two good games?

[earl_sleek]

A remake of classic 4X game Master of Orion Remnants of the Precursors came out a few years ago, and is just as capable of absorbing hours of my time as the original.

[ErnestTakadichi]

Love these.

https://phoboslab.org/wipegame/ - Wip(3? E? e?)Out - wipeout in a browser.