Speedball, Canon Fodder, Alien Breed, Flood, Defender of the Crown, Powermonger… the list of classic Amiga games is not quite endless, but is certainly far longer than I can be bothered compiling.

A recent bout of nostalgia had me searching obsessively for Amiga games, and a way to play them. UAE and WinUAE have been around for a while, and, so it seems, as E-UAE, which is a fork of UAE and adopts features form WinUAE. Cool! The application is available in a variaety of forms, from precompiled 32 bit binaries and 64 bit binaries, to the source tarball itself. I opted for the source code, and set about compiling it myself. If you don’t have the tools to compile from source, they need installing – from a Terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) run

sudo apt-get install build-essential

To compile the source is a pretty simple procedure:

wget http://rcdrummond.net/uae/e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4/e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4.tar.bz2
tar -jxvf e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4.tar.bz2
cd e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4
./configure –with-sdl-gfx –with-sdl-sound
make

More compile options are explained in the file docs/compile.txt which can be viewed by running:

more docs/compile.txt

Once the code had compiled, it can be installed by running:

sudo make install

However, I used a rather cool tool called checkinstall, which produces a .deb file, which can be installed, and therefore tracked by dpkg. It needs installing first:

sudo apt-get install checkinstall

To create the deb package, and have checkinstall automatically install it, run it as root <This article has been interrupted by my Wife requesting I give our Daughter a bath. I apologise for any inconvenience this may cause, and service will resume as soon as possible >

Anyway, where was I? Run checkinstall as root to have it auto install:

sudo checkinstall

You’ll need to answer a couple of basic questions – adding a Description and such, but the final options should look a little something like this:

0 - Maintainer: [ username@host ]
1 - Summary: [ The enhanced version of UAE, the UNIX Amiga Emulator ]
2 - Name: [ e-uae-0.8.29 ]
3 - Version: [ 0.8.29-WIP4 ]
4 - Release: [ 1 ]
5 - License: [ GPL ]
6 - Group: [ checkinstall ]
7 - Architecture: [ amd64 ]
8 - Source location: [ e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4 ]
9 - Alternate source location: [ ]
10 - Requires: [ ]
11 - Provides: [ uae ]

If you just want to build the deb package, without installing, you can run:

checkinstall --install=no

This will create .deb file in the e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4 directory (I’ve already compiled if for AMD64, so if it’s easier to download than to compile, etc. grabe it here: e-uae-0829_0829-wip4-1_amd64.deb).

If you have the .deb file, simply run:

sudo dpkg -i e-uae-0829_0829-wip4-1_amd64.deb

Either way, once it’s installed, it can be run from the Terminal:

uae

Or by creating a new menu item pointing to the uae binary.

The last thing required to run Amiga games, is a Kickstart ROM (preferably v1.3!). There a few methods for obtaining one – you can buy one from http://www.amigaforever.com; you can use an application such as TransROM or GrabKick from within Workbench/Shell on your Amiga to dump the ROM to a file, then transfer the file from your Amiga to your PC, or, you can probably acquire a ROM file via a Google search. Personally, I opted for the latter – I already own 2 A500s, but since they’re in the UK, and I’m in Thailand, it kind of makes sense…

Anyway, once I had the Kickstart ROM, I created a directory in which to keep it, and my games:

cd ~/
mkdir -p amiga/rom
mkdir amiga/games

and extracted the ROM file to ~/amiga/rom then started E-UAE:

uae

then navigated to the Memory tab, and clicked “Change” under Kickstart ROM File, selecting the ~/amiga/rom/kick.rom file. Tweak whatever settings you like – I increased the memory to a whole 1Mb (don’t laugh – a 512kb RAM upgrade was expensive in those days!), then saved the Configuration from the File menu. This creates a text file called .uaerc in your home directory, which can either be edited via the UAE GUI or directly in a Text editor such as vi, pico, gedit etc.

That’s it – once it’s set up, it’s a simple case of inserting the disks, and starting up the Emulator. Games will come as .adf files (Amiga Disk Files), so once you have an archive containing them, extract them to ~/amiga/games then in the Floppy Disks tab of E-UAE point each “drive” to the game disks:

By the way, if you’re even more Old Skool, then you might want to check out my previous post on Speccy 48k Emulation: Retro: Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k on Ubuntu 64 Bit.

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Those who had an Amiga will remember this one, developed by Oceon in 1992: Pushover. A cool puzzle game, where you control an Ant, and have to work out and set up the correct sequence of Dominoes in order to topple them all, and the Trigger domino to progress to the next level. To make things more difficult, there are several platforms, accesed by ladders, and different type of dominoes, which defy gravity, bounce, create platform sections, and so on. Within a ceratin amount of time, you have to set them up, and then push them over! Just like Domino Rally! (Those who had a ZX81 or Spectrum 48k will remember Domino Rally). It’s available as an Amiga disk image on many Abandonware sites (such as lemonamiga.com or abandonia.com), but that involves configuring and installing UAE, and a Kickstart ROM, or DOSBox. However, a few days ago, an open source port was released – it’s currently v0.0.1, but I downloaded and installed it, and everything looks good!

So, I downloaded the Pushover tarball from Sourceforge to my Desktop, and compiled as follows:

cd ~/Desktop
tar -zxvf pushover-0.0.1.tar.gz
cd pushover-0.0.1
./configure
make

Now, you can either run the game by executing the pushover binary from this directory:

./pushover

or, if you’re comfortable doing so, install the binaries:

sudo make install

Controls are simple – use the left and right arrow keys to control the ant, the up arrow to climb ladders, and down to descend. Pushing the spacebar while in front of a domino make the ant will pick it up, and also drop the domino in an empty space. The up arrow key will also position the ant next to a domino ready to push, which can be done my pressing the arrow key in the direction you want to push and the spacebar. Simple. Who needs flash 3D graphics anyway?

Enjoy this damnably addictive game…

References

1. Pushover Open Source port site

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So, I have a state of the art Notebook (well, almost state of the art), with a Duel Core 64 Bit AMD Processor, 2Gb RAM, and a 64 Bit Operating System (Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon) – but, whatever… because I’ve found a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k Emulator! What better use for such a system than to play classic 8 Bit games from my childhood?! Yes, I could drag the old 48k machine along with the Dixons tape deck from my parents’ attic, and hook it up to the TV – but that would involve a trip half way around the world. I can’t afford that, so instead, I ran

sudo apt-get install spectemu-common spectemu-x11 spectrum-roms

which installed the Spectemu (xspect) command line Speccy Emulator, along with a few Speccy ROMs. Searching for some of my old favourite games (Skool Daze, Back to Skool, Lords of Chaos, Spy Hunter, Saboteur, Elite – also see the Oolite post), led me to World of Spectrum, where I downloaded a bunch of TAP tape image files, and dumped them in ~/Speccy

Spectemu is CLI, so from a terminal window, I ran
cd ~/Speccy

and extracted the games I’d just downloaded

tar -zxvf SkoolDaze.tap.zip

then ran the Emulator itself

xspect

which brought up the age old “© 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd” Speccy interface in a new window. In this window, I had to press Enter, and run

Load ""

by pressing the Speccy shortcut “j” followed by two double quotes “” which outputs Load “”, followed by Enter. Pressing Ctrl+p outputs a prompt back in the Terminal window to enter the tape file path, which was simply

SKOOLDAZ.TAP

followed by return. Back in the Speccy window, Skool Daze began loading. And loading… and loading… It’s as if I was back in the ’80s – a few minutes later, the game had loaded to memory (without crashing, or needing to adjust the volume of the tape player etc.!), and I could enjoy a blast from the past…

Quick loading of tapes is also possible. Before typing Load “” simply press Ctrl+y in the Speccy window, and the Terminal window reports “Quick Load on” (it can also be switched off with Ctrl+y). After entering Load “” follow the same procedure of entering the .TAP file name, and the game loads into memory much faster, bypassing the Speccy ROM’s load routine. Nice!

To quit – just press “Ctrl+c” in the Speccy window. More on the Speccy commands can be found at http://www.inf.bme.hu/~mszeredi/spectemu/README

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I used to love playing Elite when I was younger – a fantastic intergalactic space simulator, so I was delighted when I stumbled across Oolite, which is based on the classic game, but implements modern graphics! It’s already available via the Synaptic Package Manager (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager) – just search for “oolite” and select “oolite” and “oolite-data” for installation. Alternatively, it can be installed via the command line, by opening up a terminal window (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and running:

sudo apt-get install oolite oolite-data

The game itself is great fun, and what’s more, there are myriad addons, expansion packs and mods which can be downloaded and installed.

To install the addons in Ubuntu, I had to create the AddOn directory:

cd
mkdir .Oolite
cd .Oolite
mkdir AddOns

Now, any addon-name.oxp directories contained within downloaded expansion packs should be extracted to the new ~/.Oolite/AddOns directory for the Ubuntu version of Oolite to recognise and locate for use in the game.

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