Ace of Spades
2 ports
Ace of Spades (OpenSpades)
yvt/openspades
OpenSpades: an open-source client compatible with Ace of Spades 0.75, Ben Aksoy’s free online first-person shooter, with fully destructible voxel terrain and community-made game modes such as Capture the Flag. It connects to vanilla servers and to pyspades and pysnip ones, and it also supports the 0.76 protocol. It was created by yvt and is maintained by the community. It uses OpenGL, with effects such as volumetric fog, and has a software renderer; audio goes through OpenAL or the YSR engine. It includes a server browser, supports weapon mods, and is translated into more than a dozen languages. The latest release is 0.1.3 (January 4, 2019), with builds for Windows and macOS; on Linux it’s installed with Snap or Flatpak. The latest code changes are from May 2023. The downloads include the pak000-Nonfree.pak package, which according to yvt contains the player and map object models extracted from the original client and one sound from 0.75. When building it, that package is downloaded from the author’s openspades-paks repository on GitHub; this can be turned off, but then, according to yvt, it isn’t really playable.
You needNo copy needed: Ace of Spades 0.75 was a free game and OpenSpades comes with everything needed to play. It’s played online, so you need an internet connection. Plus Windows Vista or later, macOS, or Linux; at minimum a 1 GHz dual-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM, and a graphics card with 512 MB (Intel HD Graphics 3000, GeForce 9 series, or Radeon HD 7350).
Ace of Spades (BetterSpades)
xtreme8000/BetterSpades
BetterSpades: an open-source client for classic Ace of Spades (the Voxlap-based 0.75), Ben Aksoy’s online voxel shooter, with no Jagex code at all. It targets modest hardware: it runs on OpenGL 1.1 and OpenGL ES, its author says it performs as well as or better than the original Voxlap client, and it once had a Steam Link build. It has a server list with country flags, local network game discovery, and first-person spectating, and it can open aos:// links like the original client or replace it when copied into its folder. The latest release is 0.1.5 (May 14, 2021), for Windows only; on Linux and macOS you build it, and there are nightly builds. The latest code changes are from July 2025. When building, CMake downloads a resource pack from aos.party, a community site, which the repository doesn’t include because, according to its author, the copyright status of the 0.75 assets is unknown.
You needNo copy needed: Ace of Spades 0.75 was a free game, and the download works on its own, extracted into a new folder. It’s played online, so you need an internet connection. According to its README, Windows 98 or Linux, a 1 GHz single-core CPU, 256 MB of RAM, and a graphics chip with 64 MB (Intel 945GM or equivalent) are enough; on macOS you have to build it.
Questions
What projects are there for Ace of Spades?
The catalog has 2 ports for Ace of Spades, all on this page with their status.
What do I need to play it?
Your own copy of Ace of Spades (Windows). Recompendium only links projects that don’t distribute the game, and each entry says which version or region you need.
Which one is the most popular?
Ace of Spades (OpenSpades), with 1,249 stars on GitHub.