Any chance some of the copyright holders would be interested in open-sourcing the code? Escape Velocity in particular. EDIT: especially since these games are no longer playable without registration, ouch. Hope I still have my EV Nova code somewhere.
Someone has made an open-source clone called Endless Sky, I believe there are unofficial ports of the various EV campaigns to the ES engine. http://endless-sky.github.io/
It's not Escape Velocity, but Maelstrom was open-sourced [1]!
A while ago I forked a version and changed the braking power-up to be controlled by a button press, instead of always active [2]. It was cool to fix something that always bugged me in a game I played when I was a kid.
Works great! If you're on Ubuntu/Debian/etc, you'll need to apt install libsdl1.2-dev and libsdl-net1.2-dev. I thought something was wrong when the build took less than 2 seconds, but it turns out computers have gotten faster in the last 25 years.
Keep an eye on Cosmic Frontier: Override. It's not the original code, but it will be a re-release of the Override scenario in a new engine designed for data file compatibility with the whole series, plus new features.
I gather the rights to EVN are a more complicated issue because ATMOS was a whole bunch of people, versus EVO where Peter Cartwright owned everything. Rights to the EV name still belong to Matt Burch who wasn't interested in having it used for Cartwright's rerelease.
The answer is a definitive no. Matt Burch has made it pretty clear that he is not gonna open source it. Luckily there are two very good clones (Naev and Endless Sky) and a third got kickstarted (Cosmic Frontier.)
You can use the expired code by resetting your computer’s clock to the date and time right after the original purchase supposedly.
I haven’t been able to test this because my Nova code was a gift and I have no idea when it was purchased, but if you have the original email with the registration code it’s a possible solution.
