Installing the Quake2 data files in Linux using the old Linux build CDs

Including Mission Pack I. The Reckoning and Mission Pack II. Ground Zero



Quake II was an early game among mainstream first person shooters to be released with a native Linux version. I purchaed it new, I don't know how many years ago. And unsurprisingly, as a commercial binary distribution it is unlikely to run on any up to date Linux computer today. Fortunately the game engine itself was open sourced and there are a few versions that are installable today.


At the time I am writing this there are three versions of quake2 in the Gentoo repositories. They are the Yamagi Quake2 engine, which Google tells me is the most popular and best one for single player use. There is also the icculus.org port which I believe is the more common one for multiplayer and there is red-blue-quake2 which purports to work with 3d glasses. Only yamagi-quake2 built for me without errors. I have not tried very hard to debug the other two. I would like to have multi-player working however so if icculus does something for that which yamagi does not then maybe I will have to work on this.


What was open sourced was the code engine which runs the game. The level data (maps, images, videos, etc...) was not. For the open source engines to work you must install level data as well. This comes from the purchased CDs.


There is a tool for Linux which will extract the level data from a Windows CD. And there is an ebuild for Gentoo which will use this tool and copy the resulting files where they need to go and track them in Gentoo's package management. Unfortunately, the tool does not work with the Linux CDs. There probably just aren't that many people out there trying to use them!


Here's how I managed to get the level data installed.


The Gentoo ebuild by default looks for a CD in the CDROM drive. But it will not recognize the Linux CD and install it properly. It does have an option however where you can set a path to a folder containing the files in an environment variable and it will copy from there. So the first task was to unpack the files from the CD manually and build up a folder structure that the ebuild would recognize and install from. Of course, I could have just skipped the ebuild at that point and copied the files directly to the file system. But I would prefer all my files be managed by the packaging system so that they may be easily found and uninstalled later if need be.