KeeperFX — Apple Silicon fork

Personal, unofficial fork. Use at your own risk.

Dungeon Keeper was a favourite game of my childhood, and I wanted a version of KeeperFX — the open-source Dungeon Keeper remake — that builds and runs natively on Apple Silicon (arm64). I'm not a KeeperFX expert; I've just made judgment calls along the way and tried to keep the changes clean rather than hacky.

This fork is not affiliated with or endorsed by the upstream KeeperFX team. It comes with no guarantees or support: it may break, and the macOS app is ad-hoc signed (not notarized). Nearly all of the game is upstream's work — I've only touched what was needed to get it building and running natively on Apple Silicon.

This fork is temporary. Native macOS support is being worked on upstream; once the official project ships a macOS / Apple Silicon build, this fork will have done its job and I'll stop maintaining it. Until then I keep it building and roughly in step with upstream.

If you just want to play KeeperFX, use the official project: https://github.com/dkfans/keeperfx

Download (Apple Silicon)

A prebuilt, self-contained KeeperFX.app is published here — no build needed:

https://github.com/matthewdeaves/keeperfx/releases/latest

(Versioned releases are tagged macos-v*; that link always resolves to the newest one.)

Drop it next to your existing KeeperFX data (and the original Dungeon Keeper files) and double-click. First-launch Gatekeeper and folder-layout notes are under macOS: running; or build it yourself.

Changes in this fork

Everything below is what this fork adds on top of upstream dkfans/keeperfx; the game itself, and Windows/Linux support, are upstream's work. This is the one place I keep updated as the fork evolves.

Apple Silicon / arm64

• Native arm64 build (macos.mk) — a real Mach-O binary, no Rosetta or emulation — plus a self-contained, self-locating KeeperFX.app that bundles its dylibs and its own config defaults (so it still works dropped next to an older KeeperFX data install).
• arm64 correctness fixes — unaligned-access (SIGBUS) crashes in the isometric render, sprite/pixel draw, computer-player gold scan, and the named-field config framework; in-memory-only packed structs unpacked for natural alignment. x86 behaviour is unchanged.
• Safety fixes — bounds-check the RNC decompressor and the script command-name lookup; guard the power-hand path against a bad dungeon pointer or out-of-range creature model.

User-data locations

• Saves, settings, high scores, netplay config and screenshots now write to the proper per-user location instead of the game folder, so the install can be read-only and replacing the app never touches your saves. Existing saves are migrated once (copied, never moved).
  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/KeeperFX
  • Linux: $XDG_DATA_HOME/keeperfx (default ~/.local/share/keeperfx)
  • Windows: %APPDATA%\KeeperFX
• On macOS, screenshots go to Application Support, not ~/Pictures, so taking one never triggers a privacy permission prompt mid-game. Full rationale in docs/adr/0001-macos-userdata-locations.md.

Packaging & CI

• Optional starter keeperfx.cfg shipped with the macOS download, with a calmer GUI flash rate (5 vs upstream's 1). Only used if the game folder has none.
• CI builds and checks the macOS, Windows and Linux builds on every push to master.

Requirements

Like every KeeperFX build, this needs a game folder containing the KeeperFX data plus the original Dungeon Keeper files (from an old CD, or the digital editions on GOG / EA / Steam) listed in docs/files_required_from_original_dk.txt. The install gate is simply the presence of data/bluepal.dat.

I built and tested this fork against Dungeon Keeper Gold from GOG.

macOS: build from source

brew install pkg-config sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_mixer sdl2_net ffmpeg luajit \
    openal-soft libspng minizip miniupnpc libnatpmp zlib curl dylibbundler
./tools/build_macos_deps.sh                 # one-time: builds astronomy/centijson/enet6
make -f macos.mk -j"$(sysctl -n hw.ncpu)"   # -> bin/keeperfx (arm64 Mach-O)

The full write-up is in docs/MACOS_ARM64_PORT.md.

macOS: package a self-contained KeeperFX.app

tools/make_macos_app.sh          # -> dist/KeeperFX.app

This bundles the engine's libraries (via dylibbundler, including the SDL3 that sdl2-compat loads at runtime) and ad-hoc signs it, so the .app runs on any Apple Silicon Mac with no Homebrew installed.

macOS: running

KeeperFX.app is a drop-in engine: on startup it locates itself and changes the working directory to the folder containing the .app, so it finds the game data next to it. The layout is:

YourKeeperFX/            <- any folder (including Desktop/Documents)
├── KeeperFX.app         <- drop the app in here, next to the data
├── data/  sound/  ldata/  fxdata/  creatrs/  campgns/  levels/  music/  ...
└── keeperfx.cfg

Double-click KeeperFX.app. On first launch:

• If you downloaded the .app, macOS blocks it with "Apple could not verify…" (it's ad-hoc signed, not notarized). Clear the download flag once — in Terminal: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /path/to/KeeperFX.app — or double-click, then System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. (A locally built .app has no such flag and just opens.)
• If the folder is privacy-protected (Desktop, Documents, Downloads), macOS asks to let KeeperFX access files there — click Allow.

Tip: if you have GOG's Dungeon Keeper Gold installed, the required original files ship uncompressed inside its app bundle at Contents/Resources/game/{DATA,SOUND}/ (and the keeper0*.ogg soundtrack in its game root) — no CD-image extraction needed. Copy them in with lowercase names.

Windows / Linux

Use the official project, not this fork. This fork exists for the macOS / Apple Silicon build. On Windows and Linux, upstream KeeperFX is the real thing — get it from https://github.com/dkfans/keeperfx. I do my best to keep the Windows and Linux builds working here (CI checks them on every push, and they build with make and make -f linux.mk), but there's no reason to use this fork over upstream on those platforms.

License

GNU General Public License v2.0, same as upstream — see LICENSE.