Cannon Fodder (Open Fodder)

Games: Cannon Fodder (DOS, 1993) · Cannon Fodder 2 (DOS, 1994)

Open Fodder: an open-source reimplementation of the engine of Cannon Fodder, Sensible Software’s 1993 action strategy game, and of Cannon Fodder 2, for modern systems. According to the project, it keeps the original’s timing, soldier handling, and weapon physics. It reads the data from Cannon Fodder for DOS CD, Amiga, and Amiga CD32, and from Cannon Fodder 2 for DOS CD and Amiga; if you have both versions, F1 and F2 switch between the Amiga and PC ones. It adds a random map generator written in JavaScript, with hostages, rescue tents, vehicles, and a helicopter, windowed play with scaling, options to skip the intro and the briefings, and playback of the CD32 version’s intro video if you extract it from your disc; new campaigns and maps are made with OpenFodder Editor, a separate project. There’s a Windows installer and a Flatpak for Linux, and it builds on other systems such as OpenBSD or RetroPie. Version 2.0.0 (December 16, 2025) added the missing unarmed helicopters and fixed soldier animation bugs carried over from the original engine. The Windows installer includes seven magazine cover-disk demos (six Amiga, one PC) and the campaign data, which the original game kept inside its executable; on Linux or when building from source, that data has to be downloaded separately from the OpenFodder/data repository on GitHub.

You needFor the full campaigns, the files from your own copy of Cannon Fodder or Cannon Fodder 2: from the DOS CD version (GOG’s, for example), Cannon Fodder’s CF_ENG.DAT or all of Cannon Fodder 2’s files; from Amiga, the disks unpacked with SOS Unpacker or installed with WHDLoad; and from CD32, the CD’s Fodder folder. Without a copy, only the bundled demos are playable. Plus Windows, Linux, or another Unix-like system.

How it gets to PC

Fan reimplementation

Console

MS-DOS

Original studio

Sensible Software

Year

1993

Author

Robert Crossfield

Stars

614

Last activity

2026-10-30 · 1 day ago

Latest version

2.0.0 · 2025-12-16

License

GPL-3.0

Language

C++