Loki games

Between 1999 and 2002, Loki Software released native Linux version of a small list of games.

The Linux of year 2000 is very different from the Linux we know today, and so it can be quite difficult to get such an old binary working well on modern systems. While the Linux kernel has maintained very good backwards compatibility, other parts of a Linux distribution have changed, from the X server to libraries like glibc, libstdc++, and SDL.

Here lies a number of guide to install & play these old games on modern Linux.

Special thanks:

Alan Swanson for his collections of old libraries
Linux Installer For Linux Gamers
Ryan C. Gordon

Common workarounds

You are most likely running a Linux distribution on a shiny 64 bits CPU, that architecture is know as x86_64 or amd64 in the Debian world. The binaries you are trying to run are build for the i386 architecture (the classic 32 bits PC architecture). While the Linux kernel can handle 32 bits code, we need to install library packages for proper userspace support:

# dpkg --add-architecture i386
# apt-get update
# apt-get install libc6:i386 libsdl1.2debian:i386

Architecture detection

Most of the Loki installer/updater programs performs a check to see if your system is compatible with the game, ie: if you are not using an outdated system based on libc5 (the migration to glibc/libc6 happened 25 years ago now).

But now your system is completely different, chances are the checked file doesn't even exist. Ex: on Debian/Ubuntu, /lib/libc.so.6 doesn't exist and we fail the test, so we need to create this file with the following content:

#!/bin/sh
# GLIBC_2.1
# GLIBC_2.2
cat <<EOF
GNU C Library stable release version 2.2.5, by Roland McGrath et al.

Report bugs using the glibcbug' script to <bugs@gnu.org>.
EOF

And don't forget to make it executable:

# chmod 755 /lib/libc.so.6

Sound

The majority of those games use the original sound system for Linux, Open Sound System v3 (OSS), that was superseded by the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) in 2002. On modern Linux, there is no more a /dev/dsp device file.

But fear not, there is an elegant solution to this problem: osspd. It's a userspace daemon that emulate the OSS devices (/dev/dsp, /dev/adsp and /dev/mixer)

In the end the pipeline looks like this (it's a lot of forwarding, but on modern machines, it won't be too noticeable) :

game-binary -> /dev/dsp -> CUSE -> osspd -> ossp-padsp -> pulseaudio -> ALSA -> speakers/headphones

The only thing you need to do is to install it:

# apt-get install osspd

GTK 1.2

You probably know that GTK is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Loki's installer programs use GTK version 1.2. That version is very old and very much unmaintained (GTK2 was released in 2002, GTK3 in 2011 & GTK4 in 2020).

If you can still find binaries of i386 GTK1.2 libraries for your Linux distribution, you can install them, it's a nice bonus. The fallback is a simple prompt interface that will works in all cases.

The games

Other games from the same era

In 2000-2001 Hyperion Entertainment did port & release 2 more games of interest:

In 2000 Xatrix Entertainment released Linux binaries for their game

Kingpin: Life of Crime