Linux chex?

[spacemarine288]

Hey guys....
I finally got my Linux (ubuntu) running again (FINALLY!), and was wondering if anyone was running CQ on a Linux. I'm just wondering if there are any changes in the game play, graphics, ect. i that should know about before starting the program.
Thanks!
-SM
*EDIT: BLEH! It dosent work! I ran the setup program just fine, but when i run chex.exe, nothing happends! Help! D:

[Richie]

Howdy, spacemarine!

You're using WINE, I'm assuming.  Which version?

You MAY be able to run Chex Quest 3 (has all three games + a GZDoom-based engine) through WINE, but I've never tried.  CQ3 is the best version of CQ to play, but if you can't, DOSBox is a better thing to use for DOS-based CQ than WINE.

[spacemarine288]

Im using the most up to date version of WINE, seeing that i just did a MAJOR update, im sure it brought me up to date (or so i hope...)
Ill try downloading and running CQ3 right away!

[ChexCommander]

DOSBox if you're going with the original CQ, definitely. But CQ3 if it works.

[spacemarine288]

CQ3 works just fine:D its fps is a little slower, but that might have somethin to do with the cappy hardware xD
Do you think its possible to play multiplayer with it?

[Richie]

CQ3 works just fine:D its fps is a little slower, but that might have somethin to do with the cappy hardware xD
Do you think its possible to play multiplayer with it?

You can play multiplayer with Skulltag.  Linked below are instructions for running it in Linux. 

http://skulltag.com/wiki/Automatic_Installation_on_Ubuntu_and_Variants

[spacemarine288]

Yippy! ^_^ thanks!

[MarkGyver]

You can play multiplayer with Skulltag.  Linked below are instructions for running it in Linux. 

http://skulltag.com/wiki/Automatic_Installation_on_Ubuntu_and_Variants

Many thanks! :whale You've just saved me a lot of rebooting into Windows!

Skulltag works much better than Wine for me, but still not perfect. On Wine there are a bunch of pauses between levels, there's a "hall of mirrors" type of graphical glitch for every pixel that should be black, and there's a bunch of general slowness. The only problem I have with Skulltag is the music doesn't work.

Anyway, could this please be stickied to help the other Linux users out there?

[75]

Wow, a year and a half bump. That's okay, I saw this topic a while ago and wanted to add something.

I just wanted to say that you don't have to use WINE at all. Skulltag, zdoom, and GzDoom all run perfectly under linux

http://zdoom.org/wiki/Linux

[ChexCommander]

Wow, a year and a half bump. That's okay, I saw this topic a while ago and wanted to add something.

I just wanted to say that you don't have to use WINE at all. Skulltag, zdoom, and GzDoom all run perfectly under linux

http://zdoom.org/wiki/Linux

He doesn't anymore. He just said he switched to Skulltag and it works great except for sound. But it's good to point out that ZDooM and GZDooM work on Linux too, though.

[75]

Oh, another thing - To get sound in linux, you should install timidity++. That's the easiest way to get MIDI music working in linux.

Make sure you download a full soundfont

[MarkGyver]

Skulltag, zdoom, and GzDoom all run perfectly under linux

They may have the potential to run perfectly under Linux, but in my experience none of them have reached that potential, each for their own reason.
* ZDoom: I tried that the other year and could not make it compile. Dependency hell is still alive at the fringes and frontiers of Linux development.
* GZDoom: I'm pretty sure I didn't even bother. Why try ZDoom + OpenGL when you can't even manage ZDoom?
* Skulltag: For the first time I was finally able to run CQ 3 on Linux, but the music doesn't work. Also it's not able to save games, but I generally play an entire episode of CQ at once, so that's not such a big deal.

Ideally, the official CQ 3 source could be recompiled to work for Linux, but I do not feel ambitious enough to port a ZDoom mod to Linux when I can't even get ZDoom itself to compile.

He just said he switched to Skulltag and it works great except for sound. But it's good to point out that ZDooM and GZDooM work on Linux too, though.

If ZDoom and GZDoom work for others, that's great; but I wasn't able to get them compiled before. Skulltag has its own repository and is neatly packaged so dependencies, etc are dealt with automagically.

Oh, another thing - To get sound in linux, you should install timidity++. That's the easiest way to get MIDI music working in linux.

Make sure you download a full soundfont

I have the "timidity" package installed already, version 2.13.2-37.

I don't know what a "soundfont" is (I'm guessing some sort of translation table to turn MIDI into actual sound), but my distro's timidity package has "fluid-soundfont-gm" and "fluid-soundfont-gs" as recommended/suggested dependencies, so I'm installing them. One of them is 76 MB, so it'll take some time to download.

Edit: music's working now. Thanks! Installing the soundfonts and setting music to timidity++ and sound output to SDL did the trick.

As for the game not saving properly, the console says it's trying to save to ~.skulltag/save0.zds when it should be saving to ~/.skulltag/whatever, with a slash between the tilde and the dot. Since there's no mention of a save game directory in ~/.skulltag/skulltag.ini, it's probably something hardcoded and there's a typo in their source code. Bug reporting time.

Edit 2: I found a bug report that someone else had already made for the Linux issue. Basically, save_dir in skulltage.ini is blank when the file is autogenerated and when it's blank the game defaults to ~.skulltag instead of ~/.skulltag. Manually setting it works as a workaround for now and they say they've fixed it for release 98e.

[ChexCommander]

Sweet deal, I'm glad you found your problems and were able to get some reports in.

Actually true, I believe I remember 75 saying he couldn't compile ZDoom on Linux either. I personally haven't tried, but you should see if you can contact somebody over at the ZDoom forums to see what's up.

[75]

Actually, it wasn't me who couldn't compile zdoom. I'm terrible at compiling, I couldn't even compile skulltag by myself, I had to have somebody talk me through it.

You're right about dependency hell, that's made me not want to install some things...

[spoiler]E.G., The program needs 1.4.3 of FMOD: The latest version is 999.0.0, and they only bothered to save 1.4.2, and 1.4.4. Neither of those work, so then you have to do some intense google searching until you find the exact version you're looking for, and drat, it's not a package, you have to compile THAT too, which requires version 12.4.143 of some other obscure program, repeat...  :facepalm[/spoiler]