Have to ask them if they have bandwidth to spare for it.

No idea on price.

But it would be cool if new folks could play it….

You may or may not have heard of CloneKeenPlus (aka Commander Genius) which is an open source interpreter built to run the original keen games via the original data files. I joined that team a little while back and we currently have builds for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and some portable thing called the Wiz. One of our Team members has also just within the last two days released an unofficial iPhone version that can be used on Jailbroken iPhones. I would also like to port it to Nintendo DS and Wii homebrew, and if possible PSP, and it will at some time be available for the Pandora.

Currently it only runs Keens 1-3 and we are going through a major overhaul of our internal engine, making it have much cleaner code and the such. Now, it adds multiplayer support (very rough, not a high priority to polish it up yet) support for better graphics as well as stretching without becoming blurry (something that happens with DOSBox) and a few other things. We will release a new version sometime soon that makes Keens 1-3 have most if not all of the features that Keens 4-5 have as well as more features new to both. We have already implemented ingame menus in the SVN version, as well as changing the controls to match Keens 4-5 and other things as well. We also hope to implement support for Keen Dreams, although that will be a little difficult because no one understands the compression format used on it. When we do add support for it, we will make sure that all of the discovered bugs within it would be fixed so that it would run as well as the rest of them.

You can look at it at http://clonekeenplus.sourceforge.net/ and if you feel like helping at all we would love to have you contribute. This could be your way of making some more Keen without actually doing it, like by helping us cement out the details of exactly how multiplayer would work. http://www.pckf.com/viewtopic.php?t=950 has the current ideas, and we would love to hear your thoughts on them.

Now, I’m wondering, if id decided they would like to use our engine to release Keen on the iPhone (which I’m not going to get my hopes up on, but I figure that if we have done most of the work and all they have to do is approve it and submit it to apple to be approved maybe they will) then I’m wondering what the price should be. If this happened before we implement Keens 4-6 support then there would obviously be a lite version with just Keen 1, and then when we would update it with Keen 4 once we got support within our interpreter.

But then, I think that the full version would cost about $3 and have the first three games (based on $5 for the first 5 on Steam) and then there would be an in app download of Galaxy available for $2 (and if the rights were ever received to sell Keen 6 and Keen Dreams, they would each be available for $1) which would allow people to not have to pay the full $5 to get all of them at once (and allow for the aforementioned way of getting 6 and Dreams should that become possible) and would help to increase the popularity of Keen once again.

I just wanted to know your opinion on the matter, and I am going to email id somehow to tell them about this.