Gaming on Ubuntu

There are only a few games i play regularly, Fields of Battle, a WWI turn based strategy game from Denmark (company is out of business) and Civilization II Gold for the Mac. I don't like the windows versions or the osx version.

I was interested in the Linux version of Call to Power. Years ago we had played with the FreeCiv version but found it too much like the windows one. I managed to install the game manually as the graphical installer choked but when it started it crashed causing Ubuntu to log me out.

Anyway, this got me interested in gaming and the possibilities of gaming using either ports, wine or emulation. I used to play the mac version of civ on windows xp using a mac emulator.

So we fire up the package manager to see what's available. First let's try freeciv to see how it's come along since way back then. It has added a freeciv menu item to the games menu. We give it a go. Well the graphics are a lot nicer and there is sound and the gui interface is good but the gameplay is still bad.

There is a section in the package manager called Games and Amusements and we look there. The regular games are the usual lot so we check out the multiverse and universe sections which have the restricted packages that may not have source code or are proprietary. We find some interesting things here like:

Alien Arena - a standalone 3D first person online deathmatch shooter
crafted from the original source code of Quake II and Quake III. We decide to install this. It adds an alien arena menu item to the games menu. We give it a go.

Well that was good fun - excellent graphics, sound effects and a real quake experience. Of course it is best played in deathmatch mode with other people. Fragging computer ai is not the same.

The other option is to look at emulators or virtualization. We have virtualbox installed but were not too successful at installing other operating systems such as windows 98, 2000 and DOS. There is a free VMware server you can get from VMware and lots of community contributed virtual machines on their web site. We should try that too.

The Cross Platform (multiverse) section has some neat things. I notice it has the mac emulator i used to use:

Basilisk II is an Open Source 68k Macintosh emulator. That is, it enables
you to run 68k MacOS software on you computer, even if you are using a
different operating system.

I will have to sort through the boxes of old mac CD's tomorrow to find the ROM images i made.