Sim City 3000: Unlimited

SC3U is by far the most difficult of these old games to run on modern system.

To install the game, mount your CD & run the installer with linux32 from the util-linux package :

# mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
$ linux32 bash /media/cdrom/setup.sh

Apply the last released patch :

$ linux32 bash sc3u-2.0a-x86.run

Patch the binaries to use (system provided) SDL1.2 instead of the bundled SDL1.1

cd <installation-directory>
$ patchelf --replace-needed libSDL-1.1.so.0 libSDL-1.2.so.0 sc3u.dynamic
$ patchelf --replace-needed libSDL-1.1.so.0 libSDL-1.2.so.0 sc3bat.dynamic

# apt-get install libsmpeg0:i386

The dynamically linked version of the binaries requires a very old libopenal-0.0.so, with a specific ABI, released in 2000. I can't even find source code for a such ancien version.

All I could find is a binary version bundled at https://www.improbability.net/loki/. This version cames from the original UT99 release.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="./" ./sc3u.dynamic

./sc3u.dynamic greets you with “undefined symbol: __ti9exception”

It seems the game was developed using C++, but was compiled with gcc instead of g++

The missing function can be found in a very old libstdc++, you can use libstdc++-3-libc6.2-2-2.10.0.so from https://www.improbability.net/loki/

Now that we have all the old libs required, you would think “OK let's run it!” and try:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="./" LD_PRELOAD="./libstdc++-3-libc6.2-2-2.10.0.so" ./sc3u.dynamic

but all you will get is “Segmentation fault”

Very short story: the game need another serie of tricks to run with a modern glibc.

You need to use a little shim that hijack the pthread_kill() function and does some magic.

Now you can start the game:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="./" LD_PRELOAD="./sc3u-nptl.so:./libstdc++-3-libc6.2-2-2.10.0.so" ./sc3u.dynamic

If you are interested by all the gory details, I encourage you to read the comments in the sourcecode https://github.com/twolife/sc3u-nptl/blob/main/sc3u-nptl.c