2023 Edit: Machines Community Edition

The source code for Machines has been released, and a community build is available that modernizes many aspects of the game!

See this post for more information: https://wiredforwar.org/topic/167/announcing-community-patch-1-5-godsend/43

Resources the original game assets can still be found below.

Original Game Resources

The original game is available for download here:

• Machines Disk 1 ISO
• Machines Disk 2 ISO
• Zipped Machines Install Directory
• d3drm.dll (if file is missing on your system)
• Machines XP Patch

Installation

After you've downloaded the files above to your PC, you can follow these instructions to complete the installation process.

1. Extract Machines.zip to a directory on your PC.
2. Mount the disk 2 virtual image Machines Disk 2.iso. If you are running Windows 8.1 or above, you can simply double click the file to mount the disk image. Otherwise, you may need to use a program such as MagicDisc or Daemon Tools.
3. Play the game!

Note: If you receive an error about d3drm.dll missing, simply download the missing .dll file above and place it in your Machines directory.

Additional Files

If you're an absolute pro, you might find these useful.

• Alcohol 120% disk clone files
  • Disk 1: mds, mdf
  • Disk 2: mds, mdf

You can find the manual for Machines in PDF format at the following URL:

https://download.wiredforwar.org/Game/Machines Manual.pdf

Enjoy!

You can find the original soundtrack of the game encoded in FLAC here:

https://download.wiredforwar.org/Game/Machines OST.zip

Enjoy!

Should we have a Development section here on the forums where we can put stuff like this?

2021 Edit:

Machines is now Open Source Software! You can find modern builds here, and source code here!

Getting Machines Up and Running

This short guide should help you to get Machines installed and running on your... machine. Keep in mind that this game is very old. Things might break. If you can't figure it out, open up a thread here.

Download

There are a few things you'll need.

1. Copy of Machines
2. Machines Disk 2 ISO image.

Installation

After you've downloaded the files above to your PC, you can follow these instructions to complete the installation process.

1. Extract Machines.zip to a directory on your PC.
2. Mount the disk 2 virtual image Machines Disk 2.iso. If you are running Windows 8.1 or above, you can simply double click the file to mount the disk image. Otherwise, you may need to use a program such as MagicDisc or Daemon Tools.
3. Play the game!

Extra Goodies

• Check out the Downloads section

More detailed instructions may be available later.

Uploading to the forum since external sites don't tend to survive forever: sounds.rar

I'd certainly be willing to host one here. Though ironically I'm more of a fan of web clients now like JabbR 😆

Hola! Yes, it's a very new forum software.

I'm working on getting an archive of the old forums up so we can nab any old info / downloads / etc. we need and move it all over. Should be very nostalgic. :)

@Judas

Woah, hey! I tried e-mailing your old e-mail awhile back and got a bounce, so I wasn't sure we'd see you here again. Glad you made it back! It's weird after so long, we're all like... grown up now.

If you're in the mood for some heavy nostalgia and cringe, http://forums.wiredforwar.org . If you see anything worth saving, move it here!

@M123 said:

You didn't miss anything - due to the limitations of the ISO format, the music is not present in the Disk 2 ISO files available from the site.

Until someone updates the downloads with disk images in a format that supports CD audio, the instructions I posted are the only way I know of to get working music using the files available here.

I went ahead and dug up my Alcohol 120% clones of the disks and added them to the download post. Hopefully this helps some people. :)

Sweet, thanks !

If we could get GitHub.com/OpenMachines that'd be awesome!

@bilal a GitHub organization would work better - could you put one of those together and maybe add Judas and myself as admins? That way we can maintain multiple repos and have multiple users as admins.

As long as we're going OSS, I think a GitHub org would be better than a personal git server. They've got a lot of great tools there for managing the repo and project, plus it's friendlier to OSS devs who typically use GitHub.

Plus we can always set up our own build servers and whatever else to pull from GitHub.

Sounds like we need to start dev.wiredforwar.org back up.

In addition, someone should start a GitHub organization up for OpenMachines and add us all as contributors.

Originally written by @mb and posted to the old forums, here you will find tools for extracting

• descriptions of missions/campaign systems/planets etc. basically all *.bin files from pdata directory.
• complete planet tiles from *.psb files in pdata directory (usage is explained in map making tutorial).

Download

You can download the tools here.

Instructions

See the readme.txt inside the zip file for usage instructions.

@Pisarz said:

Cool! I couldn't upload my files anyway.

Let me know if you have trouble uploading and we'll figure it out!

If you need more space to upload this stuff I can get you access to upload to http://download.wiredforwar.org

For posterity, noting here the tools used to create the soundtrack (from a Discord message by Jim Croft):

Captain Crofticus — Yesterday at 6:23 AM

JV1080, Akai S3000 Sampler, Guitar!

Here you'll find metaex, a tool to extract and package game data for use with Machines, provided to WiredForWar in August of 2005 by Hal Angseesing, a Machines developer!

Download here.

Instructions are contained within the zip file.