Recently in Games Category

One of the projects I’m working on as funds and time permit is the restoration of a Neo Geo arcade cabinet.

An upgrade I performed not long ago was the installation of a Universe BIOS ROM. This handy little upgrade enables all manner of cool features on the Neo Geo hardware and is really something no Neo Geo enthusiast should be without; if you already have an EEPROM programmer it’s even a free download. Not having such I beast myself, I opted for the pre-made chip.

The chip arrived on the same day as a new Kickstart ROM for my Amiga 2000 (though from a different source), so it became quite the chip swapping event!

Next on the agenda is to install new joysticks and buttons as the ones I have now are pretty worn (they work, but they’re a bit sloppy). For sticks I’m thinking Sanwa JLF-TP-8T or JLW-UM-8; still undecided on whether to go with bat or ball style handles. Undecided on the buttons too, though the Seimitsu PS-14-KN looks interesting.

As always, more to come!

SkyBound has announced the availability of FlightGear v0.9.8 for IRIX:

We are pleased to announce the release of FlightGear v0.9.8.

FlightGear is a free, open-source, multi-platform flight simulator.
It is available for free download from:

http://www.flightgear.org

FlightGear features:

* Sophisticated and highly tunable flight dynamics engines.
* Aircraft modeling system that supports fully interactive, fully 3d cockpits, sophisticated internal and external animations can be tied to just about any FlightGear variable.
* SRTM based world scenery available for free download.
* Over 20,000 airports modeled around the world.
* Seamless continuous oblate ellipsoid world model.
* Accurate day/night and lighting effects synced to real time.
* Correct sun, moon, star, and planet placement (and correct phase of the moon.)
* Ability to automatically sync with real weather conditions via the internet.
* Flexible, adaptable, interfaceable, open architecture.
* Complete source code licensed under the GPL.
* Ported to many platforms including Windows, Max OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and sgi.

A summary of the new features, updates, and changes for this release
can be viewed here:

http://www.flightgear.org/version.html

Erik

SkyBound has just announced the immediate availability of FlightGear v0.9.4 for IRIX:

I am pleased to announce the release of FlightGear v0.9.4. It is available for free download from:

http://www.flightgear.org

The IRIX binary is available at:

http://www.a1.nl/~ehofman/fgfs/

FlightGear is a free, open-source, multi-platform flight simulator. The source code is licensed under the GPL.

Precompiled packaged versions are available for most platforms including Windows, Linux, Sgi, Solaris, and Mac OS X.

The IRIX version now lives in the standard conformal /opt/FlightGear-0.9.4 directory and has optimized versions of the main program for mips3/R4k and for mips4/R10k.

Here are a few of the highlights from this release:

- Ability to fetch weather conditions in real-time from the NOAA web site.
- Working VASI/PAPI lights.
- Ability to fly under bridges, taxi into hangers, etc.
- Added a tool to facilitate installing additional scenery chunks.
- Many updated textures and models.
- The San Francisco area has been vastly improved.
- Several new aircraft were added (Comper Swift, Hawker Hunter, and T37 Tweet)
and most of the existing aircraft have been improved in various ways.
- A built in scripting language.
- Updated aircraft AI and ATC modules.
- Complete overhaul of the autopilot system.

For more information on the FlightGear project, please visit our web page at:

http://www.flightgear.org

You can view a summary of the new features, changes, and bug fixes for this release here:

http://www.flightgear.org/version.html

Erik

IRIX Central has released an updated tardist of the popular BZFlag multiplayer 3D tank battle game:

We have built and packaged the current bzflag multiplayer tank game (http://www.bzflag.org) for IRIX 6.5.18 and above. Other IRIX version support is forthcoming.

You can find our bzflag software package in tardist format at
http://www.irixcentral.com/downloads/other.html

See you on the battlefield...

Here's another one just for fun. Lincity is a city simulation game in the spirit of SimCity©. It was originally written for SVGA (that's Super Video Graphics Adapter, not Scalable Vector Graphics as I originally assumed), but was nicely ported over to X11R6 by the authors. It claims on the home page to be IRIX compatible, but I did not see a binary availible so I put this one together for the Nekochan regulars.

Compiling went pretty smoothly with GNU C, but the MIPS C compiler choked on the GNU inline directive. That means the tardist should be MIPS3 compatible. Also, for some perverse reason I renamed the executable from xlincity to just lincity, which is all you have to type in order to get it to run.

The game play looks very advanced, although I haven't really had time to try it out. As always, please leave comments if you experience any problems. Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD: lincity-1.12.0.tardist (1.5 MB)

I was asked by the maintainers of Freeciv.org to update the IRIX binary for their distribution site. While the latest version 1.14.1 (a bug fix and minor feature upgrade) compiled and ran fine on both an Octane2 and an O2 running IRIX 6.5.21, when I tried to install it on an Octane running 6.5.20 it bombed with exactly the same error message posted by katos (as a comment on the original July 10, 2003 news post announcing the 1.14.0 tardist). The error was:

Trace/BPT/RangeErr/DivZero/Ovflow trap (core dumped)

I recompiled and made a new tardist on the Octane machine and all seems well. The tardist is available for download here:

freeciv-1.14.1-mips4.tardist (4.7MB)

It still contains the server and GTK+2 client, but I removed the source code and manual in order to trim down the size of the distribution. The support files still can be obtained from Freeciv.org.

Before I send it to the offical distribution site, I would like it if a few of the friendly Nekochan members would verify that it runs OK and post a comment either "yah" or "nay". The server and client are installed in /usr/local/bin and may be executed with the commands civserver and civclient respectively.

Thanks in advance (and I promise to stop hogging the December news space)!

Crossfire is a multi-player graphical arcade and adventure game made for the X Windows systems environment. It has certain flavours from other games, especially gauntlet and the rogue-like games (Nethack, Moria, Angband, and Ragnarok.) Any number of players can move around in their own window, finding and using items and battling monsters. They can choose to cooperate or compete in the same world.

It uses a client/server model. Pre-compiled tardist are availible for both applications. The server distribution is fairly large since I bundled the "small" map set with it, to make it easier to get it going. Fortunately, there are many public servers out there, so it's safe to just get the X11/GTK+ client first and run it a few times to see if it's worth getting the server side.

To use the client, just type gcfclient for the GTK+ client or cfclient for the X11 version. There are quite a few GTK+ related dependancies and SoftwareManager/inst should complain if they are not found. If you just choose to install the X11 client, it only needs libpng and libz. All dependancies are readily available from SGI's excellent freeware site.

To run the server just type crossfire, assuming /usr/local is in your path and /usr/local/lib is in your linker search path (i.e. $LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:...).

I managed to get it to compile under IRIX with only a few samll tweaks. For those interested, the server required a change to /common/porting.c line 153 to change #define popen fixed_popen to #define popen popen_local. Also some more extensive changes to the client /gtk/image.c file were made in order to get it to compile. Those changes affect lines 190-195 and are included as a patch in the distribution.

BUGS
The -sdl command line option doesn't work on the GTK+ client as I think my hacked patch was not a real fix. Also there is no sound. Otherwise, I played it this past holiday with my nephew for a couple hours and it seems stable.

Here are the files:
crossfire_client-1.6.0-mips4.tardist (780KB)
crossfire_server-1.5.0-mips4.tardist (38MB)

Enjoy! Please leave comments if there are any problems.

The Flight Gear Flight Simulator project is a free, open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight sim development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GPL. The Flight Gear project is working to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for the development and pursuit of interesting flight simulator ideas. We are developing a good basic sim that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.

FlightGear can be found at:
http://www.flightgear.org
http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/binary.html

A few of the highlights of this release are:

* A flight "replay" system.
* More convenient ways to control the time of day.
* Many improvements to sky, cloud, scene, and aircraft lighting.
* Proper displaced thresholds added to runways that have them.
* Many new buildings and land marks added to the San Francisco area.
* Updated airports and navaids database (based on DAFIF and other sources.)
* Inclusion of a launcher that enables the user to select aircraft and starting location without needing to specify command line options.
* First stab at modeling helicopters with 3 initial designs to try.
* Several new aircraft and many improvements to existing aircraft.
* A complete rebuild of the world scenery based on SRTM terrain and VMAP roads, rivers, lakes, and land use.

For a complete list of changes, please visit:
http://www.flightgear.org/version.html

Erik Hofman

squeen comes through again with another quality game tardist - glTron 0.62!

What is it? "Well, as the name suggests, it's inspired by the movie TRON. Or more exactly, by all the games that where inspired by the movie TRON. You steer a futuristic bike, called lightcycle. Combat takes place in a rectangular arena. Your bike leaves a trail behind, which is like a wall. The goal is to force the other players to drive into a wall. The winner is the last player alive. "

More information on glTron can be found on the project web site.

As always, have fun!

Note: Audio apparently does not work in this release. More information can be found in this forum thread.

Download:

glTron-0.62 (tardist) - 3.8MB

Nicolas put together a binary for the open source version of Abuse last week, but I'd forgotten about it until this evening.

Abuse is a side scrolling action game originally released by Crack Dot Com back in 1995. The tardist contains the full version of the game from the Abuse-SDL website as well as source code (optional install). I've found the audio in this build to be a bit rough, but other than that it seems okay.

Update: Nicolas recommends setting the following environment variable to address the sound quality issue:

setenv SDL_AUDIODRIVER esd

There's a surprisingly active Abuse forum at http://www.abuse2.com which is worth looking at.

Download:

Abuse-SDL 0.7.0-mips4 (tardist) - 3.9MB

Lots of interesting software in today's update; always a great way to kick off a new month!

ScummVM 0.5.1

Slashdot readers may have caught the recent article announcing the release of ScummVM-0.5.0. Probably the best part of the announcement was the news that Revolution Software has helped to bring support for their classic title Beneath a Steel Sky and released it as freeware.

I quickly threw an IRIX build together and logged a few hours playing it immediately afterward. Great stuff!

Grab the tardist here:

ScummVM 0.5.1-MIPS4 (tardist) - 2.6MB

Now proceed to the ScummVM Home Page and download Beneath a Steel Sky. Enjoy! (Oh, and ScummVM will play other games too, but you'll have to provide the data files).

Notes:
August 5th: New tardist added that removes libmad.
August 9th: Tardist updated to ScummVM-0.5.1 bugfix release.

TQ (Tranquility)

Marcus Herbert just announced on the forum the release of an IRIX 6.5 version of the classic TQ game!

"Hi,

i always had an old installation of IRIX 5.3 around just to be able to play one of my favourite games: TQ (which was only available as a COFF binary). Some day i asked Bill Romanowski (the author of the software) for the sources and gladly he gave them to me.

The source is written in C and uses GL for its (wireframe and solids) graphics. You only need a small machine to be able to run it (i have an Indy for that purpose).

Due to some bug in GL the game spills out a core when you leave it - i try to fix that. Another thing is the speed of the gameplay. While it fits fine on the Indy here it might be way too fast on an ONYX2. I will try to fix that too .

Here is a screenshot of the game.

And here is the link to the binary.

For those that don't know TQ: the aim of the game is to reach higher levels. You can do so by jumping into a vertex (those round shaped pulsing things) from above. So all you have to do is to jump from one rectangular platform to another to gain height and then jump into the vertexes.

My current HighScore is: Knight of the Phoenix 4th Plane

Have fun!"

Encrusted

Also announced on the forum today is the latest and greatest version of lisp's excellent game Encrusted:

"Ok, the "alpha" tardist, as it were, has been replaced with a beta. New features:

* Weird error on exit! Ignore it.

More seriously:

* Better synchronised sound.
* Bug fixes to game logic.

I use Allegro and AllegGL, slightly customised (the updated, better syncing sound driver should be incorporated into Allegro soon). This has the effect of stopping the window from being resized.

Plans include:
* Tweaking sound (give me feedback, people)
* Adding highscore board, etc.
* Making jewels shatter into particles."

Nebulus 0.5.0 XMMS Visualization Plugin

Next up is another visualization plugin for XMMS brought to my attention via semi-fly - Nebulus, a visually stunning OpenGL based plugin. Nebulus requires texture memory to achieve best performance; at the default window size I'm averaging between 30-60 frames per second on my Octane 360/MXE so if you have TRAM this is worth a look.

Download:

Nebulus 0.5.0-MIPS4 (tardist) - 920KB

Mark Hellegers just announced the release of what looks like a fun and quite original application - LegoConstructionKit 0.2 for IRIX:

"Hi all,

Mark Hellegers"

Here's another gem contributed by squeen - Freeciv 1.14.0. Freeciv depends on several packages from SGI Freeware, however the tardist has been built to identify these prereqs.

What is it? "Freeciv is a multiplayer strategy game, released under the GNU General Public License. It is generally comparable with Civilization II�, published by Microprose."

More information on Freeciv can be found on the project web site.

Have fun!

Download:

Freeciv-1.14.0 (tardist) - 11.6MB

Note: I had problems getting the game to display properly until I installed the latest (beta) build of fw_pango. It will be included in the August Freeware distribution, but for now you can find it here:

ftp://shell.sgi.com/collect/freeware/fw_pango-1.0.5-sgipl1.tardist

Forum regular (lisp) recently released Encrusted, an OpenGL based clone of Bejeweled. From her Usenet announcement:

"Just a little OpenGL Bejewelled clone I knocked up:

--
(lisp) - http://www.thecommune.org.uk/~lisa - http://www.lisastoys.co.uk
SBS#37(with oak leaf cluster) two#40 DOGMUK
Suzuki GS125ES
My other car's a cdr"

I finally got the chance to try the game out and it's wonderful. Highly recommended!

Erik Hofmann is collecting performance information from IRIX FlightGear users.

"Hi,

Erik"

Make sure to drop him a note after installing FlightGear; I'm sure this information will be used to make FlightGear even better.

A new version of FlightGear was released last week, and an IRIX tardist of the core package is available for download.

From the 0.9.2 press release:

"The Flight Gear Flight Simulator project is a free, open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight sim development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GPL. The Flight Gear project is working to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for the development and pursuit of interesting flight simulator ideas. We are developing a good basic sim that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.

Erik Hofman"

Some of my observations while setting up the sim under IRIX:

1. Make sure to install the base package -- for some reason it isn't included in the FlightGear tardist. Currently the download link for the 0.9.2 base package on the IRIX download page doesn't work. Get it here instead:

ftp://ftp.flightgear.org/pub/fgfs/Shared/fgfs-base-0.9.2.tar.gz

Extract this file into /opt/lib32 (you'll need to create the lib32 directory first) and rename the resulting FlightGear-0.9.2 directory to FlightGear.

2. There are additional IRIX specific notes on the IRIX download page (tips for increasing framerates, etc):

http://www.a1.nl/~ehofman/fgfs/

P. Harvery-Smith has released an IRIX port of 3D Realm's Rise of the Triad based on the Linux open source port. Rise of the Triad requires the datafiles from either the full commercial release or optionally the demo (download links below).

Download the binaries, instructions and souce code from the official IRIX port site:

http://daria.bio.warwick.ac.uk/~bshu/rott/

The shareware datafiles can be downloaded at:

http://filesingularity.timedoctor.org/download.php?realfile=1&fileid=8

The datafiles for the full version are available from Abandonware Games (registration required).

Finally, here's a link to a great article on ROTT which covers the history of the game among other things; it's an excellent read:

http://www.classicgaming.com/rott/hell/

Assam Syrix has released to the public a beta build of Quake III Arena for IRIX. This binary requires either the demo PAKs or commericial PAKs from the Quake III retail CD as well as the 1.17 Point Release.

Download:

Quake_3_Arena_1.17beta_IRIX.tar.gz
q3apoint-1.17.tar.gz

Marcus Herbert has just posted new mips3/mips4 builds of BzFlag for IRIX.

The official BzFlag website describes this release best:

1.7g0 "Holy Dancing Monkeys" released! Buy now and get two for the price of one! world file caching, team killers die, tank labels on roaming, new GUI options including a smaller display for slow systems (set opacity all the way up), and much more!

This is a very cool game; you can find a screenshot here and binaries/sources here. Lots of additional goodness at http://www.bzflag.org as well.

Another IRIX game worth mentioning is Racer, currently at version 0.4.9. Racer is a free car simulation project offering real car physics as well as the ability to easily build custom vehicles and tracks. This focus on realism makes Racer more suited to hardcore sim fans than casual arcade gamers.

You can download the IRIX build here and the MacOS X build here. Note that unlike games such as Quake 2 which can utilize software rendering if a system doesn't have texturing in hardware, Racer absolutely requires texture support.

Racer enjoys a very active user community which contributes tons of tracks, cars, and other goodies. The Racer forum at Race Sim Central is a great place to start.

Did you know the server-side mod Quake 2 Battleground was available for both IRIX and MacOS X? Well I certainly didn't. Apparently deleet ported and released this back in February, giving us another gem to add to the IRIX game library.

Visit the official Quake 2 Battleground web site for information on the mod itself, and then deleet's Quake 2 Battleground for MacOS X and IRIX to download the packages. If you don't already have Quake 2 you can download the IRIX version from SGI's Game page and the MacOS X version from Fruitz of Dojo.

After a period of inactivity due to some legal wrangling between LucasArts and ScummVM.org, a new version of the open source implementation of LucasArt's S.C.U.M.M. (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) interpreter has been released. This package allows you to play classic games such as Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and many more ... on your SGI.

Marcus Herbert has compiled and packaged a IRIX binary (MIPS3 static). If you have any problems downloading the file let me know and I'll host it here as well. The source code is available at the ScummVM website, along with non-IRIX binaries. Have fun!