Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Well, it’s time for a return to retrogaming as a topic. Honestly, I wish I had enough time to write a separate monthly retrogaming column because there is SO MUCH that could be covered. Still, we can revisit this topic from time to time in Everyday Ubuntu, and it has been a little while since our last look at getting old DOS games running on modern Ubuntu.
Back in 1992 or 1993 or thereabouts, I was working at Dallas Semiconductor when one of my bosses asked me how I came to know so much about computers, and I told him that learning how to run games was probably the single biggest factor. You see, back in those pre-Windows 95/pre-Linux GUI days, you had to work surprisingly hard to accomplish much of anything on a computer. Many DOS games required knowing how to manage memory, assign IRQs and DMAs for hardware, edit configuration files, and more. Linux was even more challenging. I remember having to learn the rudiments of the included C language editor and compiler just to install a really basic Pac-Man style game.
Although things are MUCH easier now on both Windows and Linux, getting old DOS games to run on Linux is a satisfying and enjoyable activity, a challenge of its own, and a way to learn more about how Linux actually works, as we’ll see in this month’s Retrogaming Revisited.
Dungeons and Dragons: The Print Game
In the early 1980’s, my good friend Trey Seastrunk (who remains a good friend to this day), talked me into going to visit a guy who was Dungeon Mastering a D&D session. I was somewhat reluctantly roped into playing in the session myself, although I knew absolutely nothing about the game. Much to my surprise, with minimal coaching, I was able to contribute to the party’s adventure successfully and decided it seemed pretty fun. Soon I was buying the first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons core rulebooks (Dungeon Master’s Guide, Player’s Handbook, and Monster Manual), and creating my own fantasy world as a backdrop, where I would create my own adventures and occasionally drop in pre-designed game scenario modules that I would purchase.
Over time, TSR, the company that published D&D, put out quite a lot of modules, from the basic adventure background location ‘The Keep on the Borderlands’, to the notorious player-killing meat grinder of a dungeon called ‘The Tomb of Horrors’. I’ve always wished I could play Tomb of Horrors as a player to see how challenging it really is. I have the module and did read through it, but that was literally decades ago and I don’t remember any specifics, so it would be a legitimate challenge.
And there’s actually a way to do this, without having to find someone willing and able to DM, or Dungeon Master, a game session. There’s even a way to do it specifically on Linux.
Dungeons and Dragons: The Gold Box Series
From 1988 to 1992, SSI (Strategic Simulations Inc), under license from TSR, produced a series of D&D games for DOS (actually, originally for the Commodore 64) called the Gold Box series. They literally came in recognizable gold-colored boxes, used a common game engine, and allowed you to play D&D on your computer, even with no other players around. SSI created an ongoing story with these games, set in a detailed and lively game world. Titles included Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Hillsfar, Gateway to the Savage Frontier, and quite a few others, as the series was a roaring critical and commercial success.
However, even this success had its limits, and by 1993, TSR had a condition for renewal of the license: retire the now clearly aging and obsolete Gold Box engine. SSI responded by creating a fantastic swan song – Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures.
Rather than being just an actual game, FRUA was essentially a game-creation toolkit. Users could create their own ‘Gold Box’ adventures and load them into FRUA. A still active online community grew up around this, and soon there were hundreds of modules free to download and play for anyone who owned Unlimited Adventures, including adaptations of many of the print modules.
Enter: GOG.COM
Fortunately for us Linux users, we don’t even need to manually use DOSBox and try to find an old copy of FRUA on EBay or Craigslist. GOG.COM has a version of FRUA remastered for Ubuntu, and it’s currently on sale (at the time of this writing), as part of their Forgotten Realms Collection 2 (which includes several other Gold Box games) for the only mildly outrageous price of … two dollars and forty-nine cents. Definitely worth the cost, in my humble opinion. I wouldn’t remotely balk at paying the non-sale price of $9.99; it’s really great value even at full price. End of sales pitch, I don’t exactly get a commission….
Installing the Game: Bash Shell Scripts
For me, I’ve actually owned this package for years, but have never installed it or tried it on Ubuntu. Time to remedy that omission, I think! We’ll start by going to GOG’s page for owned games and download the installation program to a local folder. Here, mine is in the folder $Home/Downloads/Games/FRUA:
As you can see, the file is of type and extension sh. This means it is a bash shell script file. Bash is the normal default shell for Ubuntu Linux, meaning that when you go into the Terminal to perform command-line functions, you are actually running Bash in order to do so. There are other shells that can be used, like KornShell, but for most users, even professionals doing high-end functions in the command-line interface, Bash works just fine. For our purposes here, Bash is more than sufficient.
A Bash shell script is a file that is a sequence of commands, in a plain text format, telling Linux to perform a function or (more often) a series of functions. In this case, GOG has provided an installer for Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures in the form of a script. But, as it stands right now, Linux does not understand this by default. It will, if you double-click it, open the file for editing:
Fortunately, GOG has been good enough to provide instructions at the top of the text file. Lines in a script file like this that begin with a # character are ignored when the file is run as an executable script, so those lines are used to document commands and functions within the file. They are equivalent to REM command lines in old-time BASIC computer language interpreters, and are an important way to inform others of what your intent is if you create a script file. “But, what is this chmod command the file mentions, and how do I access it?” you ask with pleading eyes and trembling voice. Not to worry, beloved reader, you actually don’t need to know. CHMOD is a very powerful and useful command, to be sure, but your average Ubuntu end-user will probably never need it. Instead, we’ll get to where we need to go using the File Explorer.
What we’re actually trying to achieve is to let Ubuntu know that we want to execute this shell script file, not to edit or change it. We can do this without using chmod. What we need to do is to right-click the .sh file in the File Manager and go to Properties.
Go to the Permissions tab at the top and look on the line that says Execute. Click the checkbox next to ‘Allow Executing File as Program’: This will accomplish what is otherwise manually done by using the chmod command as the script requests. Now, you can double-click the file and the script will run as an executable file, once you confirm that you do want to run the script:
Huzzah! Now we’re in the executable installer!
Next month: We’ll complete the installation, download and unzip the required support files, and discover how to run the many downloadable modules for the game.