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All Projects → mefistotelis → swars

mefistotelis / swars

Licence: other
Syndicate Wars port, alternative binary for the classic Bullfrog game

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swars

Syndicate Wars Port, alternative binary for the classic Bullfrog game.

This is continuation of the project created by Unavowed and Gynvael Coldwind.

About

Syndicate Wars Port is a port of the 1996 DOS game Syndicate Wars to modern operating systems. In particular, it runs on GNU, Mac OS and Windows, but it should also work on any system supported by the SDL library on the i386 architecture.

The port was created by disassembling the original DOS executable and replacing the DOS-specific parts with platform-independent code, using SDL for input and video display, Vorbis for music and OpenAL for sound.

Only the modernised executable is provided with this port. This means that game data are not included. To install the Syndicate Wars Port, you will need to have the original data from either Syndicate Wars CD, or digital distribution.

Community

If you wish to discuss the Syndicate Wars Port or if you have any problems, you may post to the Google group syndicate-wars-port (you don't need to be a member to post).

Installation

To install Syndicate Wars Port, you will need either the original Syndicate Wars CD, or digital distribution of the game. There were several physical versions released. The multi-lingual version was tested and will definitely work, other version were not tested. Only releases for PC can be used.

The steps you need to take vary depending on your operating system.

Installing on GNU or UNIX

If you're installing on GNU or UNIX, you will have to compile from source. The steps are:

  1. download and unpack the source tarball or clone git repo
  2. follow building instructions below to get a compiled executable
  3. after the build succeeded, do make install in the directory where build commands were executed, to copy built files into an installation folder (/usr/local/share/swars by default)
  4. insert the Syndicate Wars CD and make sure it is mounted (e.g. in /media/cdrom)
  5. do util/install -f SOURCE -t TARGET -l LANG, where
    • SOURCE is the game CD path, like /media/cdrom,
    • TARGET is the destination path, in this case /usr/local/share/swars,
    • LANG is the installation language, and can be one of: eng fre ita spa swe.

If all went well, you can now play the game.

Installing on Mac OS X

There is support for creating Mac OS X bundles. While you can just install the game into the UNIX directory structure, using a bundle is a cleaner solution.

Making a Mac OS app bundle

If you build an application bundle, you can install the game by just drag-and-drop into your Applications directory.

You can create the bundle by following these instructions:

  1. download and unpack the source tarball or clone git repo
  2. follow building instructions below to get a compiled executable
  3. after the code is compiled, install the data, as explained in the GNU or UNIX section, to any directory, say ./data (in case you wonder, the CD drive should be mounted under /Volumes/SYN WARS QA 9.0)
  4. finally, run util/mkbundle ./data (replacing ./data with the directory you installed the data to); this will produce an application bundle named Syndicate Wars.app in the current directory
  5. if you want there to be a pretty icon for the bundle, copy res/swars.icns to Syndicate Wars.app/Contents/Resources

Installing on Windows

There are two ways to install Syndicate Wars Port on Windows - either download the installer, or download the source code and compile it by hand. It is recommended to use the installer!

The installer requires the original Syndicate Wars CD to be present in the CD-ROM drive. It will copy the files from the original Syndicate Wars CD and optionally encode the game music from the CD to ogg files used by this port.

The Syndicate Wars CD is not required to play the game, it is used only during the installation process.

If you've decided on the hand-compilation option, proceed with the following steps:

  1. download and unpack the source tarball or clone git repo
  2. follow building instructions below to get a compiled executable
  3. copy all the files and directories, except for the Language directory, from the Game directory within the Syndicate Wars CD to the location of your desire, say SWarsLocation.
  4. copy all the files, except SOUND.DAT, from the Game\Language\LANGUAGE\ from the Syndicate Wars CD to the SWarsLocation\Data directory, where LANGUAGE stands for the appropriate subdirectory fo the language you want
  5. copy the SOUND.DAT file (from the directory stated above) to the SWarsLocation\Sound directory
  6. [optional] rip the game CD Audio tracks to track_{1,2,3}.ogg (vorbis)
  7. [optional] create a SWarsLocation\music directory and copy the previously encoded ogg files there
  8. copy swars.exe to your SWarsLocation directory

You can now launch swars.exe and have fun!

Building

Note that you can oly build the port for x86 architecture, and you either need 32-bit OS, or 64-bit OS with 32-bit user space libraries available.

General building instructions

To build Syndicate Wars Port, you will need the following:

  • GNU Autotools
  • GNU C compiler
  • Python 3
  • vorbis-tools (oggenc in particular)
  • cdparanoia
  • development versions of the following libraries:
    • SDL
    • OpenAL (we recommend OpenAL Soft)
    • libvorbis
    • libogg
    • libpng
    • zlib

Once you've made sure you have the above, proceed with the following steps:

  1. go into the directory with swars source release (containing conf, doc, src etc.)
  2. do autoreconf -if to create build scripts from templates
  3. do ./configure to make the build scripts find required toolchain and libraries
  4. do make to compile the executable file

You should now have a working src/swars executable file.

Build example - Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit

Here are specific commands required to compile the executable on Ubuntu linux.

Install the dependencies - remember that some must be 32-bit (i386):

sudo apt install gcc-multilib g++-multilib lib32z1 python3
sudo apt install vorbis-tools
sudo apt install cdparanoia
sudo apt install libsdl1.2-dev:i386
sudo apt install libopenal-dev:i386
sudo apt install libvorbis-dev:i386 libvorbisfile3:i386
sudo apt install libogg-dev:i386

Now as our host is ready, we can start working on the actual swars sources. Go to that folder, and generate build scripts from templates using autotools:

autoreconf -ivf

Next, proceed with the build steps; we will do that in a separate folder.

mkdir -p release; cd release
CFLAGS="-m32" CXXFLAGS="-m32" LDFLAGS="-m32" PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkgconfig" ../configure --enable-debug=no
make V=1

Providing PKG_CONFIG_PATH allows us to tell pkg-config command where to search for 32-bit packages (it would use a path to 64-bit ones by default). The V=1 variable makes make print each command it executes, which makes diagnosing issues easier.

In case you also want a debug build:

mkdir -p debug; cd debug
CFLAGS="-m32" CXXFLAGS="-m32" LDFLAGS="-m32" PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkgconfig" ../configure --enable-debug=full
make V=1

Build example - MSYS2 updated 2022-01 on Windows

Using Minimal System and the MinGW toolchain available within, it is possible to build the executable using the same way as for UNIX systems, with bash and autotools.

First install the dependencies - mingw32, since we need 32-bit toolchain:

pacman -Si mingw-w64-i686-binutils mingw-w64-i686-pkgconf mingw-w64-i686-make mingw-w64-i686-gcc
pacman -Si mingw-w64-i686-libpng
pacman -Si mingw-w64-i686-SDL
pacman -Si mingw-w64-i686-openal
pacman -Si mingw-w64-i686-libvorbis
pacman -Si mingw-w64-i686-libogg

Now as our host is ready, we can start working on the actual swars sources. Go to that folder, and generate build scripts from templates using autotools:

autoreconf -ivf

Next, proceed with the build steps; we will do that in a separate folder. Note how we are modifying PATH environment variable to make shell search for mingw32 binaries before the default mingw64:

mkdir -p release; cd release
PATH="/mingw32/bin:$PATH" CFLAGS="-m32" CXXFLAGS="-m32" LDFLAGS="-m32" ../configure --enable-debug=no
PATH="/mingw32/bin:$PATH" make V=1

Building on Mac OS X

Mac OS X is at its core a UNIX system. To build the Syndicate Wars Port it is enough to follow the general building instructions.

The GCC compiler for Mac OS X comes as part of XCode, which you can get from Apple's web site. You can also make your life a lot easier by using Fink or MacPorts to install the required packages for you, instead of having to download and compile them manually.

If you have Mac OS 10.6 ("Snow Leopard") or newer, you will need to make sure that your libraries contain code for the i386 architecture. In MacPorts this is achieved by using the +universal variant (e.g. port -vu install libsdl +universal).

When you configure your compilation toolchain and location of libraries, you will need to pass CFLAGS="-arch i386", like so:

./configure CFLAGS="-arch i386"

If you are planning to create Mac OS app bundle, you will also need to pass data-path, so youf final command will be:

./configure --with-data-path="Syndicate Wars.app/Contents/Resources" CFLAGS="-arch i386"

Then, do make as the general building instructions tell.

Done

That's all. See more documentation at swars.vexillium.org.

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