Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 15:21:07 +0100 From: "Karel J. Bosschaart" <karelj@wop21.wop.wtb.tue.nl> To: Kevin Mills <kmills@a6l.net> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Loki's SOF on FreeBSD? Message-ID: <20010125152107.A15428@wop21.wop.wtb.tue.nl> In-Reply-To: <85ofwwpz9u.fsf@diablo.in.a6l.net>; from kmills@a6l.net on Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 10:42:53AM -0800 References: <85ofwwpz9u.fsf@diablo.in.a6l.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 10:42:53AM -0800, Kevin Mills wrote: > > A very thoughtful(?) relative gave me Loki's Soldier of Fortune for Linux as > a gift. Is there any chance in getting this to run under FreeBSD? According > to the game's manual, I have a supported graphics card (a Voodoo3). > > Has anyone attempted this? Anyone have any pointers for me? > Yes, I got Soldier of Fortune running in FreeBSD, either with Voodoo2 or Matrox G400. I don't know about Voodoo3 though. On http://wop21.wop.wtb.tue.nl/freebsd/sof.txt I wrote down how I installed SOF, but it is actually a horribly difficult way of doing it. I think it will be much more painless to do everything as normal user, not root, being sure you have permission to write to the install directory. So in a nutshell, install the extra libs from http://www.lokigames.com/~overcode/ut-compat.tar.gz and do 'sh setup.sh' (setup.sh from the CD, as normal user). Then, again as normal user, install the patches (optionally) that you can download from Loki Games to upgrade to the most recent version. Some issues that I came accross: * The problem with running the installer/patchers as root was in my case that for some reason FreeBSD thought that Linux binaries included in the archive were FreeBSD binaries. As a common call in Linux translates to 'shutdown' in FreeBSD, if unwrapped, you can guess what happens to your machine when run as root... unfortunately, it doesn't even shutdown properly and you have to touch the reset button and watch the fsck during startup. It is unclear to me why this happens; when unpacking the archive, the binaries _are_ correctly branded. * Check your console and/or dmesg for core dumps or segfaults, especially from xdelta. If this happens, install or patching did not succeed despite the messages from the install script, and the game will most likely crash during startup. However, if you run as normal user or follow the instructions in above mentioned page, you shouldn't see it. * I'm rather disappointed with the performance of the game; on my machine (K6-2 at 500 MHz, 128 MB RAM, Voodoo2-SLI and G400) it feels quite slow. I've read the FAQ at Loki Games and browsed their newsgroup (which I can recommend!) and have read some tips that improved performance but it still is too slow for me to have fun playing :-(. I installed the game also on a real Linux installation on the same machine (Slackware 7.0) but it wasn't considerably faster there. I downloaded the Windows demo version and will install that one (again on the same machine) to see if it is faster. The slow performance surprises me somewhat... SOF is Quake2 based and I would expect it therefore to be well playable on my machine. Unreal Tournament and Quake3 Arena (Demo version) both play well, also on FreeBSD. Not super fast, but I'm pleased with it (UT typically 20 - 25 fps on 1024x768 with Voodoo2-SLI, I didn't get that with the G400 yet). * I will try to reinstall and update my guidelines hopefully soon to have an easier way described than it is now :-). * Installing the game is one thing, but you need the Voodoo3 card going which is another story... for Voodoo2, the linux Glide2 drivers can easily be installed, "available" at the 3dfx site. Quotes because it appears down a lot :-/. Looking at http://www.xfree86.org/4.0.2/Status2.html#2 , Voodoo3 is supported in both X versions 3.3.6 and 4.0.2. However, you need some extra libs in /compat/linux and also some extra stuff in linux_ioctl.[ch], just like with the G400 I assume, when using the X drivers. Check the archives of the -multimedia list, the patches were posted there (by Stephen Hocking if I remember correctly). You also might have a look at http://wop21.wop.wtb.tue.nl/freebsd/hwaccel.html , this is how I got the G400 working with acceleration. Still planning to add instructions for installing the necessary linux stuff to make linux games work - the information is actually mostly in the -multimedia archive, but a webpage is easier to read, isn't it :-). Eeer, well, I hope I didn't scare you off running SOF... don't hesitate to mail me if you have questions or problems. For me, installing linux games became large part of the fun :-). At least I like it a lot more than the hopeless reinstalling of (newest) drivers in Windows to make those crashes go away... Good luck! Karel. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20010125152107.A15428>