Unreal Tournament 99 on Ubuntu 15.04 (and problems with it)

Discussions about UT99
Post Reply
User avatar
Darkelarious
Skilled
Posts: 175
Joined: Sat Feb 08, 2014 12:02 pm
Personal rank: 333networks admin
Location: Phobos Moon
Contact:

Unreal Tournament 99 on Ubuntu 15.04 (and problems with it)

Post by Darkelarious »

Two months ago I finally found the time and money to buy a new desktop pc. Given that my old computer was about 10 years old and started to have usb/sata problems (probably a molten South Bridge), I thought it was time to get a fancy, new system.

Here are some specs:
- ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0 motherboard
- AMD Black Edition - AMD FX 8320 3.5 GHz - 8-core cpu
- Kingston HyperX FURY Black Series 16 GB RAM
- Sapphire Vapor-X R9 280X Tri-X OC video card

As Operating System I am running Ubuntu 15.04 x64 and (rarely) Windows 7 home premium, also 64bit. On both OS-es I have the ATI Catalyst driver installed and running properly. Other games, like UT2004, Killing Floor (ut2004 mod) and Portal 2 run fine on Linux and/or Windows, so I may assume that the graphical card and driver function properly.

Today I thought it to be a good day to install Unreal Tournament 99, since I already installed a few other useful things like my Masterserver development environment. I recently wrote a tutorial/wiki on installing UT99 on Linux, so I didn't expect it to be a big thing. Per help.ubuntu.com I followed the instructions for Ubuntu, but I immediately got stuck on the libsdl installation -- apparently the tutorial is not completely up-to-date, or the 1.2 versions of libsdl and libgl are considered "lost".

With a lot of Googling I got libsdl and libgl to install on my 64bit system and the installer completed the procedure as expected. But when I tried to start UT, it immediately gave a segfault and closed. I edited my ut99.ini to

Code: Select all

;GameRenderDevice=SDLGLDrv.SDLGLRenderDevice
GameRenderDevice=SDLSoftDrv.SDLSoftwareRenderDevice
to run the software renderer instead. This allowed me to start ut99 and it displays the introduction with the expected, crappy rendering. However, sound is not working (padsp or aoss don't do the trick) and I still can't switch back to hardware rendering.

I expect this to be a 64bit OS + ATI card problem, since libgl1.2 had some problems with that in the past. I expect the sound problem to be easily fixed once the graphical problems are solved.

Question 1:
- Has anybody had this problem on RECENT ubuntu versions and/or with ATI cards?

Question 2:
- Has anybody solved this problem for UT99 or any other older game with Unreal Engine 1?

Question 3:
- If all else fails, can UT99 still run on Windows 7 on earlier described hardware/OS?

Thanks in advance.

To add an off-topic treat for everybody who wants to help; if you guys help me out, I will be able to continue, test and expand 333networks' beta interface. Sneak peaks can be found on http://dev.333networks.com/g/all but beware that it is a beta: things may break, may not be secure yet and things may not show properly.
--Darkelarious
Image
Masterserver | Discord Channel
Oh, and we still are ready to receive donations. The url works, right? It doesn't seem to be doing anything...
User avatar
Raynor
Adept
Posts: 426
Joined: Sun Jan 27, 2008 5:09 pm

Re: Unreal Tournament 99 on Ubuntu 15.04 (and problems with

Post by Raynor »

When I switched to GNU/Linux it was quite a fuss to get UT1 run natively on modern 64-bit system. Solving all those dependencies and hunting for older libs that weren't part of my distro anymore was a chore.
So my solution (or rather workaround) was wine and I never looked back. UT1 ran as good as ever without problems and that is with open source Radeon driver.
Even managed to get rid of the input lag that I never ould eliminate completely on Windows.

So my recommendation to you is go with wine and be sure to use latest (3.7) OpenGL renderer - http://www.cwdohnal.com/utglr/
That aside be sure to do all the usual tricks like limiting your framerate etc.
Good luck.
User avatar
Dr.Flay
Godlike
Posts: 3347
Joined: Thu Aug 04, 2011 9:26 pm
Personal rank: Chaos Evangelist
Location: Kernow, UK
Contact:

Re: Unreal Tournament 99 on Ubuntu 15.04 (and problems with

Post by Dr.Flay »

I would ask Smirftsch for advice with running on Linux, and also make use of the actual latest renderers available at OldUnreal.
All his Unreal and UT development is on Linux.
Post Reply