Glenn Lagasse's Weblog

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Retro Gaming - Solaris Style

Wednesday Jun 22, 2005

Being a long-time avid gamer I enjoy reminiscing and running old favorites on today's hardware and software when possible.

Dan pointed out to me at lunch today that an old favorite of ours called star control 2 was available as open source. He thought it would be quite cool to get it running on Solaris x86 (which I agreed with).

So, after downloading the source and the content files it was a simple matter of adding some libs from blastwave and compiling it up. Sure enough, it runs just beautifully (1980's style) on my Solaris x86 box.

This was done on an x86 box running the equivalent of Solaris Express 06/05. You'll need the following:

gcc (/usr/sfw/bin/gcc) gnu make (/usr/sfw/bin/gmake)

You'll also need to install the following packages from blastwave (or you could roll your own):

/opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i libsdl libogg libvorbis sdlimage

Then set some environment variables:

export PATH=/opt/csw/bin:/usr/sfw/bin:$PATH
export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/csw/include -I/usr/sfw/include"
export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/csw/lib -L/usr/sfw/lib -R/opt/csw/lib -R/usr/sfw/lib"

Then your on to compiling:

./build.sh uqm config
./build.sh uqm depend
./build.sh uqm install

Finally:

/usr/local/games/bin/uqm

[7] Comments

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Posted at 12:01PM Jun 22, 2005 by glagasse in General
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Comments:

You rule! Thanks for taking the vast sum of... what, five minutes you said? The other question, of course, is whether or not it can work on SPARC too?

Posted by Dan McDonald on June 22, 2005 at 07:44 PM PDT #

Glenn, I spent several long evenings trying to get this run properly a while back. Perhaps they fixed some of the bugs I was hitting. I'll give it a shot again. Cool!

Posted by Dan Price on June 22, 2005 at 09:25 PM PDT #

Before 0.4 I spent some time making UQM work on an UltraSparc II. It still only works when compiling it in 32 bit mode. 64 bit support should follow at some point. I'm glad to hear it works just as well on x86 solaris. I don't know enough of Solaris to know whether I can expect the various dependencies in specific places. If there is some default, I can add those to the build script so that the setting of those environment variables aren't needed anymore in the future. I'll need to do some research on that. I myself compiled all the libs from source, and made sure they were somewhere where pkg-config could find them. With pkg-config the build script will find these libs without the need for any env vars. Btw, the lines ./build.sh uqm config ./build.sh uqm depend can be replaced by ./build.sh uqm Only if you need to change your settings afterwards is ./build.sh uqm config necessary. ./build.sh uqm depend should always automatically done when needed, unless you change the file structure of the UQM sources (which even us UQM developers rarely ever do). I can't guarantee I'll read replies posted here, so if you have some feedback you want to be sure I read, you can mail me at svdb at stack.nl

Posted by Serge van den Boom on June 24, 2005 at 05:36 PM PDT #

Sorry about the mess. I didn't know I needed to add <br/> tags manually.

Posted by Serge van den Boom on June 24, 2005 at 05:38 PM PDT #

Great stuff! I've been trying to get this great classic to compile on Solaris9 i386, and with the material here, not only was I able to compile it, but I made a Solaris packae out of it, too! I'll post the package on the 'Net as soon as I get a chance. We should really bring more games and more multimedia content to Solaris. I guess for starters, porting a game like "Torcs" would certainly give Solaris some good multimedia exposure.

Posted by ux-admin on October 12, 2005 at 07:08 AM PDT #

Ok, i got all the blastwave stuff installed and all that .. but uh .. how do I get gcc to build it 32bit rather than 64bit ... ? (sb1000 2xUS3-750, expt3d, 2gbram, solaris10)

Posted by gentimjs on January 27, 2006 at 10:21 AM PST #

Great blog post. I compiled everything with the Sun Studio compiler and got UQM running on my Ultra60! Awesome!!