This claims to be a quick guide on how to get Unreal Tournament running
happily under FreeBSD via 3Dfx Glide. It's written mostly from my very own
experience, so I suppose it may be useful to other UNIX souls who would like
to get this aging masterpiece running on their machines.
I hope you've got a CD with Unreal Tournament (or have the game installed
under Windows somehow), a functional FreeBSD 4.x or 5.x release with XFree86,
and a fast considerably i386-compatible machine indeed.
Now about 3D accelerators. I suggest you to obtain a pair of Voodoo 2
cards or a Voodoo 3, though a Voodoo Graphics, Voodoo Rush, Voodoo Banshee
or a single Voodoo 2 can do the job, too. You may also try a VSA-100 based
Voodoo 4 or Voodoo 5, but I cannot guarantee anything since I've never
tried them for this purpose. They're of a different architecture, and their
drivers are quite different as well. Of course, you may configure Unreal
Tournament for OpenGL rendering given a capable video card, or even set up the
game for software rendering. In the latter case, you needn't to worry about your
video hardware almost at all, just make sure you've got a fast CPU (say, a
P3-1GHz or a more decent one). I shall assume that you have some Voodoo card, so
here we start.
1. Find an applicable Glide 2 library for your Voodoo and
download a x86 Linux binary of it (see
3Dfx Glide for UNIX), then
install accordingly to the instructions given. If the library works fine for you,
we may continue.
2. Download either the official installer of Unreal Tournament for
Linux made by Loki Entertainment or my tarball, much easier to install
(
here it is, 5.1Mb).
3. Create a directory to hold Unreal Tournament (for example,
/usr/local/ut) and copy Maps, Music, Sounds, System and Textures directories with
all files into it. Although you may copy just System one and drop symlinks for
the rest if you've got the game installed alredy under Windows.
4. Assumed that you've preferred to make use of my tarball, unpack it
somewhere, then copy System and Textures directories with all files to your
Unreal Tournament's directory.
5. If your version of the game isn't 4.36, that's a good time to
upgrade it: run patch.436/apply_patch.sh.
6. Either copy System/UnrealTournament.ini.Glide to
System/UnrealTournament.ini or drop a symlink, and edit the file if necessary.
7. Write a start-up script of your own, here is a reference one for
Voodoo 2:
#!/bin/sh
# Unreal Tournament's startup script
# 3Dfx Voodoo2 & Glide for Linux are required
# path to your UT system directory
UTPATH=/usr/local/ut/System
# performance & quality optimisations
export SSTV2_SCREENREFRESH=85
export SSTV2_GAMMA=1.90
export SSTV2_VIDEO_24BPP=1
export FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=1
export SSTV2_FASTMEM_RAS_READS
export SSTV2_FASTPCIRD
#export SSTV2_GRXCLK=90
export SSTV2_INITDEBUG_FILE=/root/debug.log
# launching UT
cd ${UTPATH}
./ut-bin
8. Make sure there is COMPAT_LINUX compiled into your kernel,
otherwise do "kldload linux" (and add linux_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf). Of
course, you have to install a Linux binary compatibility package
(linux_base-x.x) first.
9. If you run FreeBSD 4.x, make sure you have root privileges. If
FreeBSD 5.x, you may try to compile "device tdfx" and "options TDFX_LINUX" into
your kernel, set appropriate access rights on /dev/3dfx0 and run as non-root. It
seems that this driver doesn't support SLI, so don't mess with it if you've got
a pair of Voodoo 2 cards.
10. Drop a symlink from /usr/compat/linux/usr/lib/libglide.so.2
to System/libglide.so.2
11. Let it ride!
If you feel that I've missed something, your feedback is welcome.
One more thing. In a matter of fact, you may _run_ Unreal Tournament even on
a P-100 with 48Mb of memory, but it you want to _play_ the game, a P2-300 with
128Mb of memory and a Voodoo 2 is the way to go.