Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2017

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault on Modern Linux

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault contains the original MOH and the two expansion packs, Spearhead and Breakthrough. MOH was first released in 2002. There is a Linux installer , released by Iculus, for the game, but it is for the original version and is a beta release. The libraries it needs are not available in a modern Linux. There is a standalone Linux binary available here . To use it, install the game on a Windows computer, patch it up to the latest level and then copy the installed game to a Linux computer. Place this downloaded archive in the root of the MOH directory and launch the game with ./mohaa_lnx . An attempt to use Crossover 16 to install the game failed as it was not possible to switch to the second DVD disc. There is a possible solution to this by creating a single DVD installation disk for MOH:AA. This process is described here . Reminder:   DVD5 = 4.70 GB DVD9 = 7.95 GB Better yet would be to create a single DVD that would encompass the original MOH:AA along

Index of Games for Modern Linux

Games for Modern Linux Index Halo: Combat Evolved for Modern Linux Doom for Modern Linux Quake for Modern Linux Quake2 for Modern Linux Quake3 for Modern Linux Quake4 for Modern Linux and WINE Return to Castle Wolfenstein for Modern Linux Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory for WINE Wolfenstein:ET for Modern Linux Unreal Gold for Modern Linux Unreal Tournament/UT99 for Modern Linux Unreal 2 on Modern Linux Unreal Tournament 2003 on Modern Linux  Unreal Tournament 2004 for Modern Linux Unreal Tournament 2004 for Modern Linux Unreal Tournament 3 Arena for Modern Linux Medal of Honor: Allied Assault on Modern Linux Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault on Modern Linux Call of Duty on Modern Linux Call of Duty: United Offensive on Modern Linux Additional Resources WINE Homepage Play On Linux Homepage Codeweaver's Crossover homepage Good Old Games GOG Linux Releases The "Judas™ does this run in Wine" thread PC Gaming Wiki Wide S

Recover Data From a Damaged CD/DVD

This is just a convenient place for me to bookmark this information as it is just a copy of James Litten's excellent page about data rescue. The steps are simple. All commands are to be run on a single line. 1. Clean the disc. If the disc is cracked, it may come apart in the drive. You might try a small dab of superglue on the very outside of the crack to hold it together. 2. First pass (runs about 30 minutes). $ ddrescue -n -b 2048 /dev/sr0   ~/recovered/mystuff.iso  ~/recovered/mystuff.log 3. Mount the image and see how we did. 4. Take a second pass if we need it (about 24 hours). $ ddrescue -d -b 2048 /dev/sr0  ~/recovered/mystuff.iso  ~/recovered/mystuff.log 5. Take a third pass maybe with the CD/DVD in a different drive (24+ hours). $ ddrescue -d -r 3 -b 2048 /dev/sr1  ~/recovered/mystuff.iso  ~/recovered/mystuff.log

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory for WINE

WINE Version (The native Linux version is here .) Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory has always rocked as an on-line game. Trying to capitalize on their success with the online part of Return to Castle Wolfenstien, they developed an online component for RtCW and farmed out the single-player mode. Turns out, the SP mode sucked , so they ditched that and gave away the online game. The Game's PAK files remained proprietary (as always) and they released the source code for the game engine. The original release had a Linux version as well as Mac and Windows version and can still be downloaded from SplashDamage . The problem with the Linux version is that Linux changed sound subsystems (OSS, ALSA, PULSEAUDIO) and the sound component of the game is no longer compatible with a modern Linux. Wolf:ET debuted with a native Linux version that can still be installed, but there have been unofficial game engines that have upped the ante for the game. The original version is available f

Call of Duty: United Offensive

The installation of Call Of Duty: United Offensive should be easier that that of Call of Duty since I could swap out discs. And I say "should" because there's no way to install it since it depends on the un-installable Call of Duty. Where this all gets fsck'd is that the installer will prompt you for CD2, you can eject CD1 and then successfully mount CD2 as the installer proceeds normally. However , you are then prompted to insert CD1 for a second time. This procedure is part of the stupid Copy Protection scheme where the installer creates the Windows Registry entries, so you can't really skip it, and for whatever reason, Crossover can't accommodate this final swap. It should be possible to copy both CDs to a directory named "COD" and use the crossover option to treat the directory as the installation media, but that also fails to work. It should be possible to create a single install DVD from the two CDs, so look here for that. I have not

Unreal Tournament 3 Arena for Modern Linux

Unreal Tournament 3 Arena  , the successor to Unreal Tournament 2004, was intended to have a Linux release , but that was late arriving. The Linux installer is on DISC3. If you want to run the Linux installer, you have some lying to do. Mount UT3 DISC3 and change to that directory and ' sudo su ' to root. Then enter: # export SETUP_LIBC=glibc-2.1 # linux32 ./setup.sh Scroll through the license agreement and agree to it. Since you are running as root, you can install the game in /usr/local . If you want it installed only for your use, change the paths presented to you, like ~/games and ~/bin . Choose the base install and pass on the server install (unless you really want to install the server rather than the client ... but that's another post). Don't go wild and install all the optional drivers (maybe you have a Voodoo video card handy that you want to use, more old-school power to you). Just answer no to that stuff. Why? Why, indeed. Now you get to read the

Installing cheat on Mageia6

Tecmint recently ran an article about a new way to obtain information about an application using cheat , an open-source interactive cheat-sheet  application. What the application does is provide a means of showing examples for a command. If none exist in the cheat database, cheat creates a blank cheat file in that name and opens it in a text editor of your choice so that you may add examples. Instructions for installing it on "Linux Systems" assumes that "Linux" means "Debian" or "Redhat". Please read the article linked above and follow the installation instructions below to install cheat on Mageia6. Mageia6 offers the choice of Python version 2 and Python version 3. Since cheat uses version 2, we'll be installing the version 2 python files. Python will already be installed on Mageia6, but if it is not, install it. Install Python: # urpmi python Install Pip: # urpmi python-pip Install the dependencies for cheat: # urpmi pyth

HOWTO Install Word Perfect 5.1, a DOS Application, using Crossover

Codeweaver's Crossover, now at version 18, does an excellent job of making most MS Windows applications run reliably on a modern Linux installation.DOS But what if you have an old DOS-based game or application? Crossover doesn't do DOS in a way that enables it to run these old DOS applications and the smart money is on installing and using DOSBox as a native Linux application and running those apps from there. Using it is pretty straightforward, but you must read the documentation to get started. But if you just installed the native Linux version of DOSBox you would miss out on several very nice features of Crossover such as easily accessing the apps from your desktop menu, and being able to archive and restore the DOS application. You can do all of this without Crossover, but if you use Crossover for Windows apps, it would be nice to use Crossover with DOS apps. Fortunately, Crossover does offer and easy way to install the Windows version of DOSBox. You can also add

Trouble Finding Your Linux Game Libraries?

Some Linux games, especially the older Linux games, are installed with the versions of libraries that they need. The problem arises when the specific libraries are unknown to your system and the game won't launch. The old Loki game installers attempted to fix this with some shell scripting. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't. Here's an easy way to fix this problem. First, we use a kernel utility, ldd , to see what shared libraries the binary expects to see. $ ldd /full/patch/to/application/binary You will get a list of libraries needed and a clear indication of whether they are present or not. Trick #1 Assuming your system reports them missing, but you can see them in the directory where you installed the game, rather than fix the script that launches the game, we'll simply tell the system where to look. Become root , and change directory to /etc/ldd.so.conf.d. Once there, create a file, name_of_game.conf and in that file enter  /full/path/to/the

Hexen on Modern Linux

There is a Linux binary housed at  Hexen II: Hammer of Thyrion . It is in the Mageia repositories and can be installed using urpmi . The binary gets installed in /usr/bin and the rest of the game files and documents can be found in /user/games/hexen2 . I have not yet experienced Hexen2 since I don't have the retail version. The installer only installs the game engine, so I've purchased an original game CD from eBay to extract the game data files. The Heretic DOS games can be obtained form the AbandonwareDOS site for Heretic and Beyond Heretic . Doomsday is an advanced port of the Doom game engine, capable also of running Heretic, and Hexen games. RESOURCES Index of Games for Modern Linux Hexen II Wikipedia Hexen Wiki Doomworld Wiki Hexen II: Hammer of Thyrion Linux-x86 Linux-AMD64 Install HOWTO Hexen II Linux Demo

nVidia Triple-head Display

What with the price of older-but-decent video cards and monitors being very reasonable, I decided to move from the dual-head display I have been using in various forms for the past 15 years to triple-head. I was currently running dual-head using a single vNidia 9800GT card and two monitors. I added a second vNidia 9800GT and a third Samsung SyncMaster 930b 17" monitor which was attached to the new video card. After some aggravation, I got it working, except that the Google-Chrome browser goes wonky in the display, but Firefox and other apps seem to be unaffected. If you want to see the wonky behavior, a video is available . As it was, it was mostly unusable for daily work and completely useless for games. After much tweaking and swearing, I chose the path of least resistance and purchased a newer video card that would work out-of-the-box with three monitors, a 4GB nVidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. There's a lot of help with this setup when using MS Windows as well as special

Converting Game CDs to DVDs Using Linux

Once you start installing MS-Windows games in a Linux OS, you run into some difficulties. One is that sometimes your game has multiple CDs (This was before DVD drives were ubiquitous) and for whatever reason you cannot get the installer to allow you to eject the CD. Or  you must fumble through six install CDs to install the game, plus patches and updates, plus search for no-cd cracks and hi-res textures or game mods. It's possible to place all that on a DVD to make our installation less painful. File Forums is a community that deals with creating game backups and CD/DVD Conversions. It's a friendly community with an easy registration  and it offers a wealth of information about the nuts and bolts of how game installers work. Go ahead and join now so the following links will work for you. What we want for this discussion is the PC Games-CD/DVD Conversions forum. There, user Joe Forster has listed links for applications needed for editing the databases for game installers

Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault on Modern Linux

Installation using Codeweavers Crossover from the DVD version found no problems for the installation or running the game. Of course, the DVD must be in the drive due to the much-hated  SafeDisc v3 DRM .  You can avoid that hassle and get a no-cd version of the game executable from GameCopyWorld.com . The game played without any issues (36FPS), but became unplayable (12FPS) after installing the v1.2 patch , so don't install it . I also installed, again using Codeweavers Crossover, the GOG.com version which is very useful considering that this version of the game is DRM free. However, I received error messages during the install:  "Runtime Error (at 181:806): Out Of Stack Range" and "Out of Global Vars range" messages. Still, the game launched, so I'm guessing that the errors were  from the GOG game installer, not the game itself. Even though the game would install and run, it was very slow (12FPS) which is due to the version of the game engine that GOG in

Call of Duty on Modern Linux

What a pain in the ass to install using Crossover from the two-CD version, and by pain in the ass I mean it won't install at all. Call of Duty , a first person shooter released in 2003, spawned an entire franchise of COD games that persist to this day. Installing using Codeweaver's Crossover should be easy, but it's not. COD: United Offensive is an expansion pack for COD and the COD game must be installed before COD:UO can be installed. Crossover expects you to install the game through Steam, which works. I own the original discs and shouldn't have to pay for it again, but the copy-protection method keeps it from installing. As I understand it, the third step of the install where you must re-insert the first CD causes a Windows registry entry to be written that the game looks for to verify it was "installed". Without this entry, the game will not run. I found some info about registry entries for COD2 here . Maybe they can be applied to COD. And there

Doom for Modern Linux

DOOM was released in 1993 and is considered a pioneer in 3D gaming. Previous games from id Software were 2D. While the original game might be playable in DosBox, there are more modern ports of the game engine with greater stability and offer wide platform support. One of the ports,  prboom , is available for Mageia Linux (and MS-Windows and many other platforms). Based on the release of the original source code; it uses the SDl library. prboom is one of those rare Linux things that has been fixed enough that everything works. It offers a true-to-the-original gameplay rather than updating the game with modern features like ZDoom , EDGE , and Eternity Engine . GZDoom offers OpenGL support. The prboom engine emulates the different games engines from the different versions of DOOM providing an authentic retro experience; it is also compatible with the demo version of DOOM. To install in Mageia: $ sudo urpmi prboom  installs the game in /usr/games and when run the first time wit

Unreal 2003/2004 for Modern Linux

If Unreal2 was the redheaded stepchild of the original Unreal game,  Unreal Tournament 2003 was the redheaded stepchild of the original Unreal Tournament (aka UT99). The gaming community was not happy with the game play as it originally shipped in September 30th, 2002. So unhappy, in fact, that EPIC released Unreal Tournament 2004 which re-used much of UT2003 but reverted to UT99-style gameplay. UT2003 does offer a Linux installer and there is a Linux update  as well as the DE Bonus pack and the Epic Bonus Pack . A Windows-only Community Bonus Pack was released followed by a Linux installer for it. While it can be installed using WINE, PlayOnLinux and Crossover, we will be installing the Linux binaries as root to make the game available to all system users. The Linux installer is on disc3. Mount the game discs and copy them all to  ~/ut2003 . Copy the Linux installer to that directory, cd there and sudo su to become root. First, we need to set a usable libc version. # ex

32-bit WINE on 64-bit Mageia6

Any Windows application that I want to use with WINE will be a win32 binary, so the installation of 64-bit WINE is not necessary or useful. Since the 32-bit repositories are included with a 64-bit install, I just need to select the i586 versions of the following: q4wine wine wine-gecko wine-mono wine32 I also install winetricks by downloading it from $ cd ~/bin $ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks  $ chmod +x winetricks And also install the 32-bit version of Zenity because winetricks expects to see it. Winetricks is a handy tool and makes dealing with. NOTE: I has a problem with q4wine in that when I installed it with urpmi, it did not install its dependencies and would not launch; I reported it as a bug. At this forum post at GOG.com, user  JudasIscariot has a description of a  Mini Git Wine tutorial to compile and run WINE . While it's not necessary to compile and install WINE by this method since the packa

Unreal2 on Modern Linux

Unreal 2: The Awakening was not a popular game. It launched on February 3rd, 2003 with only a single-player mode when on-line multiplayer demonstrated in Unreal Tournament was the  the hot new thing. Although a one-game multiplayer mode was added, Unreal2 just never caught on. It does offer a good story-mode single, player experience and a pretty attractive female sidekick. Unreal2 also has no native Linux binaries and must be run with some version of WINE. The current version of Unreal2 offered by GOG.com can be run using WINE , PlayOnLinux or Crossover. Install it into a Win7 bottle. Before You Start Before you launch the game the first time, delete all of the *.con files you find in the /Music sub-directory. These are containers for the looping music that is played in the background and for whatever reason, they are not supported in the game. If you leave them in place, you can open the configuration menus, but launching the game will fail. You can download .mp3 version of