Duke4’s forum member ‘NukeYKT’ has released NBlood; a Blood port that is based on EDuke32. NBlood comes with support for multiplayer (though it’s not stable yet), features software and OpenGL (polymost) renderers, CD audio, accurate FM OPL3(SB/AdLib) emulation and support for DEF/HRP.
It will be interesting to see whether this free offering – it requires the original Blood files so you won’t be able to play the game by simply downloading this port – will be better than the official remaster version of Blood that is currently under development.
All you have to do in order to install NBlood is extract its content (that you can download from here) to a new directory and copy the following files from Blood 1.21 to NBlood folder:
- BLOOD.INI
- BLOOD.RFF
- BLOOD000.DEM-BLOOD003.DEM
- GUI.RFF
- SOUNDS.RFF
- SURFACE.DAT
- TILES000.ART-TILES017.ART
- VOXEL.DAT
You can then launch the game and if you want to use CD audio tracks instead of MIDI, you can provide FLAC/OGG recordings in following format: bloodXX.flac/ogg, where XX is track number. Make also sure to enable Redbook audio option in sound menu.
And… well… that’s it. Now imagine if someone could release an ESRGAN AI-enhanced texture pack for it. Oh boy, that would be awesome so here is hoping that someone out there reads it and starts working on such a project!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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A heads-up to anyone interested BloodGDX (reported on DSO Gaming in the past) is another port that uses Java, though I have to say I do prefer this port since it has the classic software renderer. If the official port doesn’t have that then I’d recommend NBlood over that since it’s more accurate to how the game originally looked on DOS.
dude why would you want the game to have awful software render on a hd monitor?
Because it renders the game the same way as it did on DOS. While I do also play Blood and other older games using modern APIs when available, I also like to experience games how they looked when they were first released.
The remaster reverse engineers the game into the KEX engine. Kaiser, the developer, has produced very accurate results for all the games he’s worked on, such as Turok 1 & 2, Forsaken, DOOM 64 EX, Powerslave EX, etc. Also all assets are taken directly from the original game. DirectX and Vulkan are the supported API’s.
I would fully expect the remaster to be the best version.
I have hight hopes as well from the NightDive remaster
I just tried the NightDive “remaster”(Fresh Supply). I’m afraid they’re way too late. It feels way behind BuildGDX or Nblood.