October 4, 2002


Some New Utilities for Duke Nukem 3D

A question we get asked a lot is how to make Duke Nukem 3D work under Windows. As the game is now six years old, and was released when DOS was still a well used OS, getting it working under Windows has been a dicey proposition at best. Our official stance is still to play it under pure DOS, but if you want to try and play under Windows, some utilities recently released might help.

Keep in mind that these utilities were not written by 3D Realms, and as such, we do not support them. Having said that, here's the utilities.

NOLFB for DOS games

First up is a short TSR program named NOLFB. It's from Ken Silverman. Ken, as you may remember is the original author of the Build code upon which Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and over a dozen other games were built. Anyway, this short program will allow you to use the VESA modes of Duke3D (and Shadow Warrior, but not the 3DFX Shadow Warrior patch) again. It's a very tiny program. Here's some text from Ken about it:

NOLFB is a TSR that disables the linear framebuffer (LFB) in VESA 2.0 (and above) BIOS. Doing this will make some DOS games (including BUILD engine games and other demos on my website) run under Windows NT/2K/XP. Programs will run slower without the LFB, but at least they work!

You can download download NOLFB here, or over at Ken's Build site.

ACRSetup for Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition

Also available is a cool new Windows launcher for Duke Nukem 3D. Written by a Duke fan who goes by the nickname of "King", this Windows launcher will allow you to select any specific starting level, any particular VESA video mode (it also includes the nolfb utility in it), launching user maps, network play, as well as several other options. It's a very cool utility, and if you're a Duke Nukem user who has windows (which is pretty much everyone these days), you owe it to yourself to check out this program.

There are two versions available. One is specifically for single player mode, and the other one is for multiplayer (although the multiplayer one can also launch single player games). You can download both of them via the links below. You can also visit the home page for the guy who wrote it by clicking here.

Download Links:

*Single Player Version

*Multiplayer Version

Posted by Joe Siegler on October 4, 2002 at 5:30 PM | Permalink
News Categories: Duke Nukem 3D