Stargunner

Stargunner is a fairly good shmup but had the bad luck of being released at a time when MS-DOS was dying. It was released as freeware in 2005.

This was also the very last title released under the "Apogee" brand, as 3D Realms would become their main identity going forward.

Debug Mode#

Start a new game, then hit F8 during play. Quit the game, then restart it using the same pilot selected previously. After that, the player can press F8 to toggle invincibility while in the game. Pressing 5 on the numeric keypad while in the shop gives the player 5000 credits. Note that this only works with the registered version of the game. In addition, ⇧ Shift + N nukes all the enemies on screen without using a nuke and ⇧ Shift + F1 immediately ends a level.

Unused/Undocumented Commands#

To do: See what the rest of these commands do.

On top of the commands seen by entering stargun /?, many other command line options were programmed into the game. These can be entered in the command line like the documented commands (ex.: stargun /money /dm0de /mono).

Revisional Differences#

To do: Add a source.

The game was updated to v1.1 on February 11th, 1997.

• LFB (liner frame buffer) now defaults to OFF to avoid problems with the buggy SDD 5.3 in VESA mode.
• Updated the credits screen.
• Corrected a save problem that appears at the end of the asteriod field which causes the game to scroll forever.
• Corrected a configuration problem: If Stargunner is run before setup, then setup is run, it fails to autodetect the sound card.
• Support for SEGA & SNES joysticks has been removed due to lack of support by the author of the adapter interface needed to use these joysticks.
• Fixed 'sprites active' bug if user presses F10 at the end of a stage while stage stats are being displayed.

References#