Remember Prehistorik? 1991: a caveman with a club, a tribe waiting for dinner, and a world of dinosaurs, frozen lakes and volcanoes standing between him and the food. If you played it as a kid on a 386 with a Sound Blaster, it is back, and it plays exactly the way you remember. If you missed it, or were not around yet in 1991, this is a good time to meet a proper 90s platformer: tough, funny, with a few secrets and a lot of caves to crawl into, and not in the mood to explain itself.
Olduvai is a new engine for that game, running natively on macOS, Linux, Windows and Linux handhelds. Play it as it was, pixel for pixel and bug for bug, or switch on widescreen, HD graphics and smooth motion and see the old levels as they never looked before.
You bring the game files (GOG sells them); Olduvai does the rest. No game data ships here, and CI makes sure it stays that way (LEGAL.md).
Release candidate: 0.9.11. The whole game plays, on the desktop and on handhelds: seven levels, three boss fights, caves, secret rooms, the balloon flights and the ending. No known bugs. Every frame is checked against an independent reference implementation, in lockstep, with zero tolerance.
What stands between this and 1.0.0 is you playing it. If anything plays differently from 1991, that is a bug: open an issue. F5 in the game saves a report with a screenshot you can attach.
For the curious, the code is held to the same standard as the play. Every change passes a complexity ratchet and whole-tree static analysis, coverage is measured per layer, and no cleanup may move a single frame. Start at docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.
| Classic DOS — as it was in 1991 | Enhanced HD — widescreen, smooth motion, vector HUD |
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Frames of this engine running a legitimately owned copy of the game (see assets/screenshots).
Two ways to play, one switch apart (Options → Style):
- Classic DOS: the 1991 game, its quirks included, at the original timer rate, with a VGA-style scanout and whole-pixel scaling.
- Enhanced HD: sharp HD upscaling, real widescreen (the side margins show the neighbouring screens instead of black bars), smooth 60 FPS motion, a vector HUD, and a few new touches, like balloons that drift away when a ride ends.
The sound of 1991 comes with it. Pick the card you had: Sound Blaster or AdLib are built in, the Roland MT-32 is emulated if you have its ROMs, General MIDI works with a SoundFont (docs/AUDIO.md).
Also in the box: any SDL2 gamepad (Xbox and Nintendo layouts), level select, quicksave, cheats for the hard bits, and F5 bug reports from anywhere in the game.
- GOG (recommended): Prehistorik 1+2
works out of the box. Olduvai finds the installation and reads its
PREH.SQZdirectly. - Your original floppies:
FILESA.CUR,FILESB.CUR,FILESA.VGA,FILESB.VGAandHISTORIK.EXE. Point--game-dirat them.
Your files are only read, never modified.
On the Releases page:
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| Linux x86_64 (any distro) | olduvai-<version>-x86_64.AppImage |
| Windows x86_64 (portable) | olduvai-<version>-windows-x86_64.zip |
| macOS (universal) | olduvai-<version>-macos-universal.dmg |
| TrimUI Smart Pro (KNULLI) | olduvai-<version>-knulli-trimui.zip |
| Powkiddy A12 (KNULLI) | olduvai-<version>-knulli-a12.zip |
| Other handhelds (PortMaster) | olduvai-<version>-portmaster.zip |
Handhelds: Enhanced HD runs on the TrimUI Smart Pro close to full speed. Install steps, controls and music: docs/HANDHELD.md. The PortMaster package reaches many more devices and firmwares, 64-bit and 32-bit ARM alike; it has been played on the TrimUI Smart Pro and the Powkiddy A12 (KNULLI) and on a 640x480 R36S clone (ArkOS).
The binaries are not code-signed yet (see the first funding goal):
- macOS: right-click
Olduvai.app→ Open → Open; on macOS 15+, allow it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway; if Gatekeeper still refuses,xattr -cr /Applications/Olduvai.app. - Windows: SmartScreen → More info → Run anyway.
- Linux:
chmod +x olduvai-*.AppImage. It can update itself with AppImageUpdate.
Verify a download: shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS.txt --ignore-missing.
Double-click to play. If Olduvai cannot find the game it asks for the folder once, then for Classic or Enhanced. From a terminal:
olduvai --game-dir /path/to/game --profile dos --play # the 1991 game
olduvai --game-dir /path/to/game --profile hd --play # Enhanced HD
olduvai --game-dir /path/to/game --play --level 3 # straight to a levelESC opens the pause menu, ALT+ENTER toggles fullscreen. A pad works out of the box; Options → Controls remaps it. Everything the settings file can hold: docs/SETTINGS.md.
cmake --preset release && cmake --build --preset release # → build/release/olduvaiCMake ≥ 3.21, a C++17 compiler, SDL2 ≥ 2.0.20. Platforms, packaging and the test suite: docs/BUILDING.md.
Evidence first. The DOS executable was read with several disassemblers and checked byte by byte, every finding went into a knowledge base, a reference implementation proved each behaviour, and this engine is held to that reference frame by frame. The full story: docs/METHOD.md.
Olduvai is a hobby project and free software, and will stay that way. If it brought your caveman back to life:
| Platform | Link |
|---|---|
| GitHub Sponsors | github.com/sponsors/ksokolowski |
| Ko-fi | ko-fi.com/styledconsole |
Sponsoring supports the engine; it does not buy the game. What it would buy, in order:
- Signed binaries. An Apple Developer membership (~$99/yr) and Windows code-signing, so installing needs no workarounds.
- Modern handhelds. Newer devices to port to and test on, Android-based ones in particular, on the way to an Android port.
Everything so far has been built on personal time and money.
Prehistorik was made by Titus Interactive in 1991. I was one of the kids who played it back then, and this engine is my thank-you to the people who made it. If Olduvai brings back a good memory, buy the original on GOG and keep their work alive.
Olduvai stands on SDL2, Nuked-OPL3, munt / libmt32emu, FluidSynth and stb. Thanks to their authors too.
Olduvai is written and maintained by Krzysztof Sokołowski (@ksokolowski), who holds the copyright. This repository is the upstream: the source, every release and each package (the AppImage, the macOS disk image, the Windows zip and the handheld bundles) are made and published from here by the author. A copy under the Olduvai name that does not point back to this repository is not the author's; the name and marks are covered in LEGAL.md.
The complete position is in LEGAL.md; in short:
- An independent, from-scratch reimplementation. It contains no code or data from the original game (CI-enforced), apart from a few curated, silent frames of this engine's own output.
- You need your own copy of the game; it is read locally, never redistributed.
- Prehistorik © 1991 Titus Interactive; all marks belong to their owners. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any rights holder.
- "Olduvai"™, the bone logo and the wordmark are this project's marks; forks must use a different name.
GPL-3.0-or-later: LICENSE. Third-party components:
THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md (release binaries carry the
texts in licenses/).