Quake2 in a Browser in Mandriva 2010

Slashdot ran a story about getting Quake2 running in a browser windows. That is very cool.

There were installation instruction at quake2-gwt-port except the instructions were not for "Linux" but only for Linux distros that provide apt-get (probably Ubuntu). That is not cool at all.

While it would have been possible for them to write their HOWTO instructions in a generic way (provide a list of all dependencies, provide links to source code for needed apps not included in every Linux distro, etc.), they just assumed that everybody uses Ubuntu. Bad. Bad. Bad.

Here's what I needed to do to get it compiled and installed on my Mandriva 2010 system. Read those Ubuntu-ed instructions first for the details. You should be using sudo to run commands that need root privileges. (All the following commands are written on one line even if they appear to be on multiple lines.)

$ sudo urpmi mercurial ant gcj-tools javacc lame vorbis-tools

URPMI asked, and I told it to install the SUN JDK.

$ hg clone https://quake2-gwt-port.googlecode.com/hg/ quake2-gwt-port

$ cd ~/quake2-gwt-port

$ sudo ant run

Which will install the original Quake II demo resources, build the client and server code, then run the server.

Although, I got these error messages, it ran OK:

/usr/bin/build-classpath: error: Could not find jaxp_parser_impl Java extension for this JVM
/usr/bin/build-classpath: error: Could not find xml-commons-apis Java extension for this JVM
/usr/bin/build-classpath: error: Some specified jars were not found

Run it in the browser with: http://localhost:8080/GwtQuake.html

It seems to run maybe OK in Firefox 4.x. It didn't in prior versions because of the opengl requirements IIRC.

While it runs on my machine (AMD Athlon XP 3000, 2GB RAM, FF 4.1), it runs very slow. Perhaps the above errors are significant? Maybe I need a newer version of FireFox or maybe Chrome? It does play smoother in the current (as of December, 2011) Chrome.

UPDATE
As of December 2012, I have a more powerful machine (and the current Firefox browser, so I tried this again and it works great!

UPDATE
As of July2015, I tried this on an x86_64 Mageia5 system with Firefox ESR 38.1.0 and it compiles and plays just fine.

Comments

DOS4GW.EXE Version 2.01a and Alternative DOS Extenders

DOS4GW.EXE The Tenberry DOS extender DOS4GW.EXE was used by many early DOS games. I still enjoy playing many of these games and DOS4GW.EXE is usable with DOSBox , so they can be played on Linux. However, the version of DOS4GW.EXE that was included with the game was whatever was current at the time. The most recent version that includes many bugfixes that possibly affected the games when used with DOSBox have been fixed in the latest version, 2.01a. It's not free at US$49, but you can downloaded it here . Simply substitute it for whatever version of DOS4GW.EXE your game provided and enjoy the bug-fixed goodness. Tenberry also makes a "high-performance" "pro" version of DOS4GW.EXE, but it costs $300. I think that they could sell quite a few of these to hobby users (since, you know, DOS is dead) for US$5. Open Souce to the Rescue There are better performing, free and Open Source alternatives available and worth a look. DPMI Explained Let's unders...

Return to Castle Wolfenstein for Modern Linux

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a first-person shooter originally released on November 19, 2001. The game, like many other classic games, is available at GOG.com and costs only US$5.99. iortcw for Linux Don't bother with old and crusty Linux binaries offered by idsoft; they are problematic and it's painful to use them on a modern Linux. Fortunately for us, there are more modern GPL-licensed Linux binaries available for 32- and 64-bit systems as well as high resolution textures packages. The project at GitHub provides source code that can also be compiled for MS Windows using MinGW. iortcw for Windows and Mac You can download pre-compiled binaries for 32- and 64-bit Linux, MS Windows and Mac from here . Let's put our files in /usr/local/games/rtcw . As root, extract the downloaded .ZIP file for your architecture to /usr/local/games/rtcw . All we are missing are the game data files. I purchased them from GOG.com. The game installer downloaded from GOG.com can be ...

Unpack those .EXE game files from GOG.com (Plus other un-packers)

I just came upon innoextract today. I have many of the wonderful games from GOG.com, some of which have native Linux Clients. Before now, I've had to use PlayOnLinux or Crossover to install these for use with WINE, then add the Linux client. InnoSetup as a way to create an installer to install the games on Windows. Daniel Scharrer has created innoextract to allow the unpacking of those archives on a non-Windows platform. The website provides information on using innoextract , but this information from the page is very useful: GOG.com Installers GOG.com installers with a 2.x.x version number on the download page or in the filename use InnoSetup 5.5.0 and cannot be extracted by innoextract 1.2 and older. Older installers use InnoSetup 5.2.3 and usually have no version in the filename. Some GOG.com multi-part installers with version 2.1.x or higher use RAR archives (renamed to .bin) to store the game data. These files are not part of the InnoSetup installer and require...

MaximumHoyt

Search This Blog