Opening the Keen 4 demo version in Abiathar

A while back, someone asked me how to open the Keen 4 demo version in Abiathar. That's tricky because it doesn't come with an external EGAHEAD, EGADICT, or MAPHEAD. I had an interesting time getting those because the executable is compressed with PKLite instead of LZEXE, so UNLZEXE didn't work. Eventually I did get it decompressed with UNP.

After a few minutes of fiddling around in a hex editor, I extracted the three necessary files. You can download them here. Interestingly, I saw that the EGA header has 4-byte entries unlike the 3-byte entries in the full game. Even after I got that file, though, I didn't know where this version starts its tiles. To find that out, I used KeenGraph, which has the really awesome ability of auto-detecting chunk layout.

All in all, this is the Abiathar New Project Wizard configuration for the Keen 4 demo version:

• Template: Keen 4 with advanced settings
• Level Format: Carmack
• EGA Layout: 4, 478, 1296, 1774, 2916
• Tile Partitioning: defaults
• Containing Folder: pick your folder
• Level Source: start from existing files
• Level Files: original GAMEMAPS and my MAPHEAD
• Graphics Source: EGA resources
• Graphics Files: the original EGAGRAPH and my EGAHEAD and EGADICT
• Tileinfo Source: never use tileinfo

I confirm that those settings work. To me, the demo levels look extremely similar to the final ones, except that most of the ones present in the full game are missing here.