How To Guide How to run Quake

How to run Quake

One of the RPMs provided with the ST Linux distribution is the game Quake by ID Software. This is the executable part of the game; for licensing reasons we are unable to distribute the data files which are necessary to play the game. These may be purchased from ID Software, or the data files from an existing Linux or Windows version of the game (either the full retail version or the shareware version) can be used under ST Linux.

The next section has instructions on where to find the data files and how to install them. For more details, see the Linux Quake HOWTO.

Installing the data files

If you have a copy of Quake on CD, then you can use the data files provided on that. See the HOWTO for more details, as the method depends on the version of the CD. It is also possible to use the data files from the shareware version. This can be downloaded from ID Software or one of their mirror sites. The download will be a zip file. Unzipping this file creates another file called resource.1.

resource.1 is another archive, this time compressed using lha. If lha is not already installed on the host machine it can be downloaded from here. To unpack the archive use:

host% lha e resource.1

This will generate an id1 directory. Move the entire directory to /usr/X11R6/share/quake on the target file system.

Playing the game

You are now ready to play the game. Make sure that the DISPLAY environment variable is set, and then run:

target% quake.x11 -nosound -nolan

If there is a sound card and/or a network card installed, it may be possible to remove the -nosound or -nolan options. Unfortunately the error checking is not very good, so if anything is not set up correctly Quake will just produce a core dump.

To run the benchmarks go into the quake console and type:

timedemo demo1

At the end of the demonstration it will print out the total number of frames and the average number of frames per second.