cualquiercosa327 / smac-loki-linux

Instructions for how to get Loki's port of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri working

Installing Loki's port of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire

Why?

There's really no good reason to. Get the windows version from GOG and run it in wine. That way you can use unofficial patches, too.

The text is rendered a bit nicer in the linux version.

How?

1. Get the loki games CD or an iso of it
2. Mount it and run setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/setup
3. Try running the binaries smac and smacx. They're static and it's not impossible they'll just work. Can also try qemu-i386 smac. Didn't work for me (segfault without qemu; Unable to initialize SDL: Not enough resources to create thread with)
4. If it's not working yet or you want allegedly less bugs, get the 6.0a patch http://updates.lokigames.com/smac/ (also on releases page). This fixes some bugs and provides dynamically linked copies of smac and smacx that we can use.
5. Run the patch with smac-6.0a-x86.run --keep because it won't find loki-patch. Then cd smac-6.0a-x86; bin/Linux/x86/loki_patch patch.dat /path/to/smac/ to patch
6. Get the Loki compatibility libraries from http://www.improbability.net/loki/ (also on releases page) and extract them somewhere
7. Run with LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/Loki_Compat /path/to/Loki_Compat/ld-linux.so.2 /path/to/smac/smacx.dynamic
8. If you don't want it to steal the whole display use Xephyr (see launch script below)

Caveats

Music isn't supported. The whining you might get from ALSA isn't about that.

IP multiplayer crashes the game. Hotseat/PBEM is fine.

Check Loki's FAQ: http://faqs.lokigames.com/smacfaq.html

Launch script

Adapted from a script on the lutris db. You'll probably want to change the paths.

#!/bin/bash

if [ ! -e /dev/dsp ]; then
    sudo modprobe snd-pcm-oss
fi
Xephyr :1 -screen 1024x768 -extension Composite -fullscreen -name "Alpha Centauri"&
xephyr_pid=$!
sleep 1

DISPLAY=:1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/SMAC/Loki_Compat ~/SMAC/Loki_Compat/ld-linux.so.2 ~/SMAC/smac/smac.dynamic
kill -9 $xephyr_pid

More SMACX!

You may also be interested in:

• Scient's Unofficial Patch
• The Alphacentauri2.info Wiki
• The Alphacentauri2.info Forum
• Plotinus Redux's PRACX UI mod
• Thinker
• Yitzi's patch
• bvanery's SMACX AI Growth mod
• The SMAC in SMAX project

The patches are all for the windows version.