Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
We’re back for a palate-cleansing revisit to Linux Retrogaming this month, after our last two months of recipe management (see what I did there?).
Prepare To Meet Your (Chocolate) Doom!
Back in 1992, the rage in computer gaming was the impressively immersive experience of playing Wolfenstein 3D. Created by id Software and distributed by Apogee, it was probably the first really successful first person shooter, or FPS, game:
Cartoony though it may be by today’s standards, in 1992 it was absolutely revolutionary. As World War II spy hero B. J. Blazkowicz, you had to escape your German captors and fight your way past Nazis and Wehrmacht guards (and even Hitler himself!) to freedom. I had a close friend who refused to play the game because you would occasionally have to shoot German Shepherds. But they were, after all, NAZI German Shepherds, so I was personally OK with that part of it.
But id was not content to rest on its laurels. Returning to work from lunch break one 1993 afternoon, I stopped briefly at a used computer store (you know, one of those places that EvilBay helped put out of business) and, on a whim, picked up a shareware diskette for something called … DOOM. “Kind of a dumb name,” I thought, as it didn’t really tell you much. I got home that evening and installed it, then started it up. Amid the roar of angry monsters, I goggled at the game’s attract mode. It was FAR more real looking than Wolf3D, with weathered metal walls, barrels of toxic slime, zombified marines and demonic imps, and there I was with just a lowly pistol (in that respect, just like Wolf3D).
Doom took the gaming world by storm and laid the groundwork for most of today’s gaming, as the FPS shooter has become far and away the dominant gaming genre. Although it’s over 25 years old, Doom’s timeless gameplay, devilishly clever level designs, and undeniable immersive quality, mean it’s STILL fun to play. Observe this delightful Fine Brother’s Entertainment React video, where they show the game to modern-day teens and elicit some entertaining reactions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC7Onhm3tto
Doom was famously ported to Windows 95 as a proof-of-concept prior to Win95’s release, and it has been ported to every platform imaginable, including insane ones like the TI-83+ calculator and certain Kodak digital cameras. It may be the most widely ported piece of commercial software ever, and (of course) it is available, in multiple forms, for Linux. The one I use is Chocolate Doom, but there’s also gzdoom, prboom, freedoom, and probably others that I’m not even aware of. I also have the full Ultimate Doom on the PC side, which I purchased from GOG.com (which I recommend as a good site to find Linux games, as they have a pretty nice variety). You can install Chocolate Doom on Linux from the Synaptic Package Manager. Refer to Everyday Ubuntu from Full Circle Magazine #130 for more details on installing from Synaptic. Briefly, you can search in Synaptic for ‘Chocolate’, click the boxes on chocolate-doom, chocolate-common, and doom-wad-shareware, then hit Apply. Synaptic will then download and install Chocolate Doom for you.
Doom was originally distributed using the then-popular ‘shareware’ marketing model, something much less common today. When you downloaded Doom for free or paid a nominal fee like I had for the shareware diskette, you got what was called Episode One: Knee-Deep in the Dead. The full game at that time consisted of three ‘episodes’, the next two of which you could purchase directly from id, keeping their marketing costs down and increasing their profit margins substantially.
If you install Chocolate Doom, you get Episode One only, the shareware version. The game’s assets were included in a single file, with the extension WAD (Where's All the Data?), which is what we just installed from Synaptic Package Manager as doom-wad-shareware. The salient difference between the shareware and full version was simply a different WAD. Given this, if you have a full version of Doom, which is pretty affordable at only $5.99 on GOG.com, you can use that game’s WAD with Chocolate Doom to play the full version of Ultimate Doom on Linux. In addition, there are thousands of WADS available for free download that do interesting things like turn the enemies into purple dinosaurs (DIE, Barney!), or convert the whole game into a Star Wars game, or an Aliens game, or many, many others.
Copying to a Restricted Location
If you don’t have access to a Windows/DOS PC, you will need to have someone who does to install the Ultimate Doom package, if you go the GOG.com route. Once it’s installed, the game’s DDOM.WAD can be found in C:/GOG Games/DOOM/. You will need to transfer this file onto your Linux machine. Probably the easiest way to do so is via a USB thumb drive. After transferring the WAD file from Windows, put the USB stick in your Linux machine. We now need to invoke the File Manager using elevated privileges to give us access to a file location that Ubuntu will not normally let us use. We do this by invoking Nautilus (the File Manager) as a Super User.
Go to the terminal (usually the third icon from the top on the Launcher that runs down the left-hand side of the screen), or go to the Dash – top icon on the Launcher on screen left and type in term, then click the terminal icon):
and from the terminal type:
sudo nautilus
then enter your Superuser or admin password that you set up during Linux’s initial installation. This will start a SuperUser File Manager session that will allow you to copy the DOOM.WAD file to the necessary location. First, find the DOOM.WAD on your thumb drive using the shortcuts on the left to navigate, then right-click the file in the right-hand pane and Copy. Now, go to the filesystem root directory. You will see it on the left:
Click it, then double-click USR on the right. Scroll down to SHARE, double-click, scroll to GAMES and double-click, then double-click on DOOM. Right-click on an empty part of the right pane and Copy.
This is a VERY valuable thing to know how to do in Ubuntu, since a disadvantage of the Ubuntu distro is that it’s much harder to do admin-level file management than in many other Linux distros, so be sure and file this information away for potential future use!
Ultimate Chocolate Doom!
Chocolate Doom does support command-line parameters that allow us to customize various aspects of how it runs, including selection of WAD files. If we want to run Ultimate Chocolate Doom with our Ultimate Doom WAD file, we can invoke the terminal (again, go to the Dash – top icon on the Launcher on screen-left and type in term, then click the terminal icon).
From within the terminal type:
chocolate-doom -iwad DOOM.wad
then hit <Enter>, and Ultimate Chocolate Doom will start, but that’s not really convenient, is it? Let’s use a little Linux knowledge to make things easier.
Ultimate Chocolate Doom Desktop Setup
First, use the Dash again and search for ‘chocolate’, this should find Chocolate Doom. Click and hold the Chocolate Doom icon, then drag and drop to an open area on the desktop. This will create a new desktop Chocolate Doom icon:
The icon is actually an SLK, or Symbolic Link, file. Symbolic Links can be very useful in Linux (for example, you can save space by using SLKs in multiple file locations instead of multiple copies of the same file), and here it will give us an Ultimate Chocolate Doom launcher so we don’t have to always type in the command-line.
Right-click the Chocolate Doom icon on the desktop and go to Properties:
Now, let’s rename this SLK to Ultimate Chocolate Doom and put in the new command-line. Use the same command-line as before:
chocolate-doom -iwad DOOM.wad.
Now we can launch Ultimate Chocolate Doom routinely from our desktop and conveniently save humanity (yet again) from the demonic hordes that always impose in the computer gaming world!