Aleph One/SDL Unix Installation Instructions ============================================ As implied by its name, Aleph One/SDL requires the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library, available from the official SDL site: http://www.libsdl.org/ If you didn't install SDL from source, you have to install the "SDL-devel" package to compile Aleph One. You also have to install the "SDL_image" and "SDL_net" libraries which can be found here: http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_image/ http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_net/ To hear mp3 background music, you will need SDL_Sound: http://www.icculus.org/SDL_sound/ Make sure you use SMPEG's mp3 library when configuring SDL_Sound! If you use the built-in mp3 library, M1A1 will hang when you start Aleph One. Aleph One now requires the boost library: http://www.boost.org/ Support for Lua scripting, which may be required by some scenarios, requires you to have Lua installed. The source is available from the official Lua site: http://www.lua.org Precompiled RPM packages of Lua can be downloaded from: http://gwpr03.microlink.com.br/~acosta/lua/ The mutiplayer audio chat feature of Aleph One requires the Speex library which can be downloaded from http://www.speex.org Installing the program ---------------------- As with any autoconfiguring GNU software, installation is as easy as this: $ ./configure $ make [become root] # make install For a complete list of options that the "configure" script takes, type $ ./configure --help The most important option is --prefix=PREFIX which you can use to specify a different installation directory (the default is /usr/local). The "alephone" executable will be installed in PREFIX/bin, and the data files in PREFIX/share/AlephOne. If you don't have hardware accelerated OpenGL, you may want to specify the "--disable-opengl" option to the configure script. Installing the data files ------------------------- To play Aleph One, you will also need Marathon graphics, sound and map files. For your convenience, I've created archives containing the data files from the freely available Marathon 1 (M1A1), Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity, converted to the formats needed by the SDL version of Aleph One, which can be downloaded from my Aleph One/SDL page: http://alephone.cebix.net The archives contain the files "Images", "Map", "Shapes", "Sounds" and "README" and have to be unpacked to /usr/local/share/AlephOne (unless you specified a different PREFIX above) Alternatively, if you have a Marathon 2, Marathon Infinity or Marathon Trilogy Box Set CD, you can copy the needed files from the CD. This is a bit complicated, however, due to some ideosyncracies of the Mac HFS file system (every Mac file is really two files, one "data fork" and one "resource fork"). Aleph One/SDL needs these files: "Images" (resource fork) "Map" (combined data and resource fork of "Map" file in AppleSingle or MacBinary II format; or just the data fork, in which case the resource fork must be in a file "Map.resources") "Music" (data fork, optional, not included in Demo) "Shapes" (data fork) "Sounds" (data fork) Here's how to copy these files from a Mac Marathon CD under Linux: 1. Mount the CD with the HFS file system (you will probably have to be root to do this): # mount -t hfs /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom If you mount CDs on a different mount point, such as "/cdrom", use that instead of "/mnt/cdrom". 2. Change to the right directory on the CD. This can be complicated because of the Mac special characters in the directory names, but with TAB- completion or copying and pasting you will succeed. $ cd /mnt/cdrom/.... You should now be in a directory containing the above mentioned files. 3. The Linux HFS file system module has the useful property of handling Mac data and resource forks and making them available as separate files (the resource forks are in a hidden ".resource" directory). You can now copy the files: $ cp .resource/Images /usr/local/share/AlephOne/Images $ cp Map /usr/local/share/AlephOne/Map $ cp .resource/Map /usr/local/share/AlephOne/Map.resources $ cp Music /usr/local/share/AlephOne/Music $ cp Shapes /usr/local/share/AlephOne/Shapes $ cp Sounds /usr/local/share/AlephOne/Sounds That's it.