2016-10-13 10:30:36

Many years ago, before the first Iphone was forged, back in the days when twitter just meant what happened when birds got angry, and pod casting still meant hurling large quantities of aquatic mammals at each other, there was an mighty gamesmith called Bsc.

They gave people some amazing experiences, the Jungle adventures of Hunter Jo on his search to recover a lost tribal statue, some particularly explosive plumming in ]Pipe 2, and some galactic battles against Lord Vector's evil hoard .

As is now well known, in March of 2013, Bsc closed their doors forever due to the troubles of supporting the games on different platforms, and after a final sale of the game's unlock key generator, their games were removed from circulation.

Now however, Dan Zingaro has agreed that the games can be made abandonware, and distributed across the net. While you'll probably still need to install a few things to run on modern Windows (Jim Kitchin's games are a good start), it's fantastic news that Bsc's titles will be back again, and around for future generations of gamers to enjoy.

A big thanks to Dan and Justin, both for the amazing work they did developing these games in the first place, and for now allowing everyone who didn't get a chance to play them first time round to see just how much fun being blown to bits by aliens, horribly killed by the warrior Marpu or being electricuted in sewers from a safety inspector's nightmare can be!

Thanks also goes to jack for all the great efforts he's doing in preserving these and other audiogame classics.
So, the Bsc games! coming soon to An audiogames archive near you.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2016-10-13 15:06:31

Wow! Taht's great news! The plumbing game, Pipe 2, especially has my interest, hopefuly it ran on Windows.

2016-10-13 20:32:39

@Figment nope, all Bsc's games are for Windows, the problem they had was support on Windows 10 I believe, though since people have run games written in vb6 on windows 10 including bsc's with the correct dependencies I'm not exactly sure what the precise issue was.

Either way, pipe 2 is pretty cool, one of the best arcade style titles we've had I think. I found the first pipe slightly dull since there wasn't enough going on, (one reason I never bought the game back in the day), but pipe2 definitely doesn't have that problem at all.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2016-10-14 00:01:39

At last! These titles have been brought back from the dead! I will update the archive when i get permission to do Hunter as well. Then db changes can be made once links are ready, which should hopefully be soon.

2016-10-14 02:24:33

Hi this is awesome for those who didn't get to play them.  I did get them.

2016-10-14 04:17:21

Hey,
Could someone make a list of the dependencies needed to run BSC games under windows 10 64 bit? Thanks!

skype name: techluver
Feel free to add me.

2016-10-14 15:32:53

If they are like Jim Kitchen's games, they just need the Visual Basic 6 runtime libraries. I've heard that installing Jim's WinKit will install them as well as the menu for his games and an old version of his Life board game.

I myself just went over to Microsoft's web site and downloaded their Visual Basic run time library redistributables for Visual Basic 6 Service Pack 6.

2016-10-15 02:38:10

Unfortunately, this is only true for Pipe 2, Troopanum 2 and I believe Hunter, as well as all the free titles such as Finger Panic and Deakout. I could never get neither the original Pipe nor the original Troopanum to run under Windows 10, and I hear it can't be done. I hope someone comes up with a solution for that.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2016-10-15 04:28:57

I used to have a zip file containing a manual installer for the windows media audio components. It's the exe that doesn't seem to work under windows 10. Pipe also seems to require a visual basic 5 library. For that, I now have a complete visual basic runtime plus package, that has all versions of vb in one easy-to-install package.

2016-10-15 06:12:51

Ah, I knew it was some rogue dependency that was missing. Would you mind hooking me up with that installer if possible?

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2016-10-15 13:30:37

As soon as I am able to download these titles I will start trying to figure out if they can be run under Wineskin on Mac. Hopefully Mac users won't be left in the dark. I played all of BSC's games back in the day and I can tell you they brought a bored teenage version of me a lot of fun on long, hot summer days. Glad they're being brought back from the grave.

2016-10-16 11:28:59

I will note that from a purely logistical perspective, classic troopanum and pipe are probably the least crytical of Bsc's titles since pretty much all of the gameplay of both exists in their respective sequels, though sounds are different and some gameplay works not quite in the same way, particularly in classic pipe.

Back in 2006 I bought pipe 2 and troop 2 relatively quickly, but after trying the demos decided not to buy either of the prequals because it seemed I wouldn't be getting much new for my money.
So, while it will be an arse if the two original games don't work on windows 10, it's not quite as bad as if blast chamber or hunter didn't.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2016-10-16 13:03:57

hi.i got some audiogames but none work. pipe2 gives me some error's as with troopanum i get some components are missing and i need direct-x weather it's my computer with a bad opperating system or if it's my windows version and i don't no if it's either bee updated or i'm missing something. would love to play troopanum2 though but i can't get it working.

2016-10-16 16:25:36

Most games now, unless they are very old, need DirectX 9, which is included in all versions of Windows newer than XP.

2016-10-16 19:55:52

@Ingrid, try installing Jim Kitchin's games, particularly the winkit file. it comes with a lot of the dependencies needed to run older games written in vb6 like Pipe2 and Hunter.
aprone's games as well such as lunimals and pawprints also come with a "checkup" file that registers needed components to run vb6.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2016-10-17 03:28:12

@Turtlepower: Try this. It's an extended visual basic runtime package. It contains pretty much all the versions of the vb runtime.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/vb6extendedruntime/

2016-10-19 04:26:36

Folks, we've got an update! A while back I contacted Igor about hosting Hunter, since he was basically second lead-programmer of the game, thus Dan couldn't give permission for that one, hence my decision to hold back on hosting the Bsc stuff. Today, I got an email not from him, but from Justin Daubenmire himself! officially stating that it's all good to host the key generator and games. So, up they go, in a matter of days, and up goes the alternative mirror for immediate downloads. A big thanks to Dan and Justin for this, now people can officially relive/try these games. I'll also be hosting the software on the audio games archive, because well why not? There's been no official central host of these titles since their closing up till now, and best to put if all in one place.

2016-10-19 06:53:30

Hurrah! Needless to say as soon as the audiogames download has links I'll be updating the database as well. It'll be nice for the bsc games to have websites and downloads again, indeed I'll probably touch up the entries while I'm at it.

I was having a play through of hunter the other day and really the games rock!

Arcade titles yes, but very well designed ones, indeed hunter was reminding me rather of a proto crazy party, though I did miss knowing the keys for each of the minigames in advance.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2016-10-22 15:04:45

Downloads from our main site our coming soon, however, while you wait for the downloads, we are directing you to an alternate mirror of the games and software until they're all on the audio games archive. Thanks Peter for keeping these around on your site. The bs archive page is ready for you to visit, though, and that's where a link to the mirror will be.

2016-10-22 16:40:19

Hello I am running windows 8 is their any way to get pipe 2 to run?I get an error cannot load game intro

Audio game king

2016-10-22 18:06:06

Hello I have same problem with the pipe 2 and windows 10.

2016-10-22 20:57:39

Run the VB6 dependencies. I believe they are necessary for the game to run.

Oh no! Somebody released the h key! Everybody run and hide!

2016-10-23 00:05:41 (edited by Figment 2016-10-23 01:20:43)

Where is Pipe2? All I could find was classic pipe.

Also, While downloading the available files, I encountered the following:

In the Dependancies folder, wmaudioredist.exe produces The signature of this program is corrupt or invalid.

In the paid games folder, MSE says that ClassicPipeSetup.exe has a Win32/Dynamer Trojan.

And none of the unregistration patches can be downloaded, they all produce 403 forbidden errors.

I'd bet that MSE is producing a false positive, and I will just ignore the invalid signature for now. Just letting you know.

2016-10-23 09:38:44

Hi,

For pipe 2, you're looking for "blast chamber", which was the game's subtitle. Note that I actually never managed to run any of the newer BSC games that have encrypted sounds on anything newer than Windows 7 (that is pipe 2, troup 2 and hunter), and I did install all dependencies.

Not sure what's going on with the wmaaudioredist file, perhaps it got corrupted at some point. I'll see about reuploading it if this is the case. The virus warning is most likely a false positive, but in any case there's 2 other classic pipe setups in the "old classic versions" folder that have the original sounds so you should still be able to get the game to run.

I'll see about fixing the permissions on the unregistration patches  folder, though this may take a few days as I think my password might have been lost during the server move and Ghorthalon is currently experiencing internet issues. In any case it's unlikely you'll need to use any of those files for the moment.

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

2016-10-23 16:35:36 (edited by Figment 2016-10-23 16:37:48)

Hey! No worries! I don't expect to need the unregistration patches any time soon, I just wanted to get them so I'd have them if they were ever needed. So, when it's convenient will do nicely.

Regarding wmaudioredist.exe having a corrupted signature, I think IE doesn't know what it's talking about or is confused. When I looked at the file's properties in Windows Explorer, the signatures tab showed that all the signatures were OK. Go figure!

And thanks for the tip about Blast Chamber being Pipe 2, I'll probably just rename the file to make it more obvious to me since I never knew that Blast Chamber was the sub title for Pipe 2. I wasn't blind until late in 2013 so I wasn't around when BSC was.

Where are my manners? Thanks to everyone involved in making these games available! It is very much appreciated!