Project goals

RogueForge exists to preserve and maintain classic Rogue and its direct descendants as living, buildable software — not as binary curios in a museum vitrine.

What "restoration" means here

For each version we aim to:

1. Recover the most authoritative source we can locate: original distribution tapes, BSD CSRG discs, archival FTP mirrors, personal correspondence with the original authors, and — when no source survives — reconstruction from preserved binaries via static and dynamic analysis (Ghidra, radare2/rizin, hand annotation).
2. Compile on modern systems. C89 → C99/C11 cleanups, sufficient machdep shims, replacement of disappeared system calls.
3. Save/restore the game state portably. Many originals used architecture-specific core files; we replace that with a portable binary or JSON format that survives across hosts.
4. Document. Manual pages, recovered design notes, a per-game guide, and — where the original authors are reachable — their first-hand recollections.

Non-goals

• We are not building a new roguelike. Where gameplay diverges from the original (notably UltraRogue), that divergence is intentional and inherited from the original author's later work; we are not adding new features of our own.
• We are not maintaining ancient build environments. If the only way to rebuild a version is on a VAX, we'll wrap that in a modern toolchain before declaring it restored.

Migration to GitHub

The original rogueforge.net site ran a CMS Made Simple install on Debian Squeeze (PHP 5.3) since 2004 — both long out of support. Development used a self-hosted Trac / Subversion instance for two decades. In 2026 the project is moving to:

• Code: GitHub, under github.com/rogueforge, one repository per restored game.
• Site: this GitHub Pages site, rebuilt from markdown.
• Issue tracking: GitHub issues, per repo.

See history/sources for where each version was rescued from.