Hardwar

Games
1

I got this off of Underdogs a while back, and have put my spare time this past week to diving into it. Amazing little game, great combat and economics, with way more potential than what was actually implemented. Anybody know what happened to the Software Refinery guys? Or maybe if there are any semi-permanent Hardwar servers running, the way TerminusPoint keeps a couple Terminus servers going?

2

Hardwar is one of my favorite games that almost no one’s heard of. I still tend to fire it back up on a roughly annual basis.

I believe Software Refinery died, in the corporate-entity sense, a couple years ago.

http://zedo.hardwar.org.uk is a nice fansite; getting the last official patch for the game is a must–the SR guys released it not long before SR itself dissolved; it does very good things like sharpening up the graphics, pushing back the fog distance and so forth, handy for hardware advances since the game’s initial release date.

They also have several beta patches, that were being officially worked on before SR went away, and were kind enough to release anyway. They very much mean the “beta” from limited experience with them–they all had some serious disagreements with my rig at the time that the 2.04 didn’t, but worth a shot.

Edit: linkfixage.

3

A severely underrated title IMO…

Did they ever get the monorail working?

4

Great little game Hardwar. A lot of neat concepts in the game eventually found their way into the X-series.

5

Great little game Hardwar. A lot of neat concepts in the game eventually found their way into the X-series

A very good game that just about everybody overlooked or severely underrated (including myself in a CGW review) at the time. It didn’t help that Interplay inexplicably dumped the game straight to the bargain bins in the U.S.

As for relationships to the X-series: yep, Hardwar is the first space-sim I can recall with an actual working economy; i.e. things got built according the resources the factories were getting. Indeed, unless you specifically delivered certain resources to certain factories, the best ships in the game would not be built.

–scharmers