Playing Doom under Linux: prboom

Posted on May 3rd, 2008 by spirit

About Doom and Doom 2

I guess Doom is the reason why I wanted an x86 computer when I was in the 4th or 5th grade. It’s maybe the most famous FPS game out there, and I won’t waste my time here telling you things about this game you already know. You’re a space marine who has to save the world from evil daemons that are accidentely summoned by the UAC during teleportation experiments in the near future. There are multiple Doom engines available for linux, including zdoom, doomsday and prboom. This article describes prboom.

Prboom is released under the GPL and includes the game engine and free game media (maps, enemies, weapons, …). You can also use the engine to play the original version of Doom and Doom 2 if you still have the iwad files from your Doom/Doom2 CDROM or floppy discs(!).

Installation

There are prboom packages in the Debian linux repositories, so if you’re using Debian, setting things up is fast and easy:

  1. Install the prboom package as root:
    apt-get install prboom
  2. If you have the original iwad files of Doom/Doom 2 or the special editions (doom.wad, doom2.wad, tnt.wad, plutonia.wad, …), copy them to /usr/share/games/doom/.
  3. Run prboom under your user account:
    prboom
    or
    prboom -iwad tnt.wad

You’re done, kill some daemons!

Tags: FPS, Free Games, Non-free Games // Add Comment »

Playing Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force under linux

Posted on May 2nd, 2008 by spirit

About Elite Force

Elite Force is a commercial first person shooter that was developed by raven software some years ago. It’s based on the Quake III Arena engine by id software.

The linux version of the STVEF engine was written by Thilo Schulz. It is based on the ioquake3 engine from icculus.org and allows you to play HOLOMATCH (the multiplayer part of STVEF, including bots). You cannot play the single player campaigns. The engine is released under the GPL license, but the game media is non-free and you’ll need your STVEF CD to install the media files.

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots I made:

The STVEF main menu.
STVEF in-game screenshot.
STVEF in-game screenshot.


Installation

The installation is very easy and took me about 10 minutes on Debian Etch. Here’s what you have to do:

  1. Download the latest release from this site. The file should be named something like io_eliteforce-1.37.run.
  2. Insert and mount your STVEF CD.
  3. Make sure the file you downloaded is executable, then run it as root to install for all users:
    cd downloads/
    chmod +x io_eliteforce-1.37.run
    ./io_eliteforce-1.37.run
  4. Once the installation is done, you can run the game under your normal user account by typing:
    iostvoyHM
  5. STVEF stores its config files in ~/.stvef/baseEF/, this is also the place to put additional maps.

Tags: FPS, Non-free Games // Add Comment »