Posts Tagged ‘linux game’

RafKill Raptor Free Software (Open Source) clone for GNU/Linux

Saturday, January 28th, 2012

I've earlier blogged on playing Apogee's Raptor Shadows of Death arcade on GNU / Linux with dosbox

All the old school raptor addicts will be interested to hear Kazzmir (Jon Rafkind) a free software devotee developer has created a small game resembling many aspects of the original Raptor arcade game.
The game is called Rafkill and is aimed to be a sort of Raptor like fork/clone.
Originally the game was also named Raptor like the DOS game, however in year 2006 it was changed to current Rafkill in order to avoid legal issues with Apogee's Raptor.

The game is not anymore in active development, the latest Rafkill release is from January 2007, anyhow even for the 2012 it is pretty entertaining. The sound and music are on a good level for a Linux / BSD shoot'em'up free software game . The graphics are not of a top quality and are too childish, but this is normal, since the game is just one man masterpiece.

Rafkill Level 1 Debian GNU/Linux

Rafkill is developed in C/C++ programming language, the game music engine it uses is called DUMB (Dynamic Universal Bibliotheque). By the way DUMB library is used for music engine in many Linux arcade games. DUMB allows the Linux game developer to develop his game and play a music files within different game levels in "tracked" formats like mod, s3m, xm etc.

The game is available in compiled form for almost all existent GNU/Linux distributions, as well as one can easily port it as it is open source.

To install Rafkill on Debian, Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Linux Mint en other Debian based distros

root@debian:~# apt-get install rafkill

Installing on Fedora and other rpm based is with yum

debian:~# apt-get install rafkill
...

Once rafkill is installed, in order to start it on Debian the only way is using the rafkill (/usr/bin/rafkill) command. It appears the deb package maintainer did not wrote a gnome launcher file like for example /usr/share/applications/rafkill.desktop
Just to explain for all the GNOME noobs, the .desktop files are a description file GNOME reads in order to understand where exactly to place certain application in the (Gnome Applications, Places, System …) menu panel.

Even though it miss the .desktop, it is launchable via Applications menu under the Debian section e.g. to open it from the GNOME menus you will have to navigate to:

Applications -> Debian -> Games -> Action -> Rafkill

This "shortcut" to launch the game is quite long and hard to remember thus it is handy to directly launch it via xterm:

hipo@debian:~$ rafkill

Rafkill raptor like native Linux game main menu screenshot Debian GNU / Linux Squeeze

or by pressing ALT+F2 and typing rafkill :

Rafkill Linux game gnome launcher screenshot

Rafkill Debian Linux Level 5 power weaponscreenshot

Starting the game I got some really ugly choppy music / sound issues.
My guess was the fizzling sounds were caused by some bug with the sound portions streamed through pulseaudio sound system.
To test if my presume is correct, stopped pulseaudio and launched rafkill once again:

hipo@debian:~$ pulseaudio -k
hipo@debian:~$ rafkill

This way the game was counting on ALSA to process sound en the sound was playing perfectly fine.

I solved this problem through small wrapper shell script. The script did kill pulseaudio before launching rafkill and that way solve gchoppy sound issues, once the game execution is over the script starts pulseaudio again in order to prevent all other applications working with pulseaudio.

Finally, I've placed the executable script in /usr/bin/rafkill :

Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash
pulseaudio --kill
/usr/games/rafkill
pulseaudio --start

You can download rafkill.wrapper.sh here
Or write in root terminal:

debian:~# cd /usr/bin
debian:/usr/bin:# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/bshscr/rafkill.wrapper.sh
debian:/usr/bin:# mv https://www.pc-freak.net/bshscr/rafkill.wrapper.sh rafkill
debian:/usr/bin:# chmod +x rafkill

Interesting in Ubuntu Linux, rafkill music is okay and I suppose the bug is also solved in newer Linux distributions based on Ubuntu. Probably the Debian Squeeze pulseaudio (0.9.21-4) package version has a bug or smth..

After the change the game music will be playing fine and the game experience is cooler. The game is hard to play. Its really nice the game has game Saves, so once you die you don't have to start from level 1.

Rafkill Load menu screenshot

  I've seen rafkill rolling around on freebsd.org ftps under the ubuntu packages pool, which means rafkill could probably be played easily on FreeBSD and other BSDs.

Enjoy the cool game 😉

Kill everything that Moves (KETM) an arcade spaceship Tyrian GNU / Linux game

Saturday, January 7th, 2012

I always love so much to go back to the times, when games were games and people had still valued words like moral and respect.
In that great days of old school computing, we used to play the awesome old schools Tyrian and the Nintendo 1941 game (hopefully some still remember).

KETM Tyrian like Old School 2d Spaceship shooter awesome

For all who don't Tyrian is one of the best Spaceship Arcades of all times!, and especially for DOS operating system the best I've personally seen.

Recently I was checking the arcade games available for install on my Debian GNU / Linux and happily come across a game called KETM.

KETM acronym stands for the memorizable KILL EVERYTHING THAT MOVES and is free software distributed game under GPL.
The original creation idea was probably to resemble the so famous in the '90s spaceshooter games.

KETM is pretty addictive just like tyrian and has santimental meaning for me since it brings me memories for my arcade gaming years 😉

The game is easy to play and has a feeling of "diversity" especially in type of weapons your ship can obtain and use against enemies.

The powerups you get is quite plenty compared to the enemy ship types you should destroy 😉 In overall the game is quite easy to play, this however is also a good thing, as you can play more smoothly without dying every few secs like it is in so many arcade games…

The game has only 4 game levels and on each level end there is a big spaceship "the boss" which is the last in line to destroy in the tradition of the 2d arcade games.

KETM Tyrian like Linux Debian arcade game

Kill Everything That Moves is available for Debian and Ubuntu as a deb installable with apt. To install the game on Debian and Ubuntu

debian:~# apt-get install ketm
...

ketm's official latest available source and binary of time of writting this article is at version 0.6 and as far as I checked it unfortunately seems like the game development is stucked and the code seems a unmaintained.
I'm sure ketm has a lot of potential en hope somebody will adopt the code and will push further its development.
The game runs by default in the annoying windowed mode, I don't like this so I always run it fullscreen:

Kill Everything that Moves Tyrian like arcade game for Debian Ubuntu Linux

debian:~# ketm -f

KETM also reminds a bit on GEKI 2 / 3, which I have previously blogged about but I found KETM to be more enjoyable than gekis.
I've seen KETM has RPM ports as well so installing the game on fedora will be probably as easy as downloading the respective RPMs fulfilling the RPM package requirements and installing with rpm -i. I would be glad to hear from people who had succesfully run the game on Fedora and other RPM based Linux distributions?

The only thing that prevents the game to feel a bit more awesome (in my view) is the missing sound & music … Even though in the game settings inside the main menu there is an option for Sound On / Off the game runs by default without any sound or music (at least on my Debian).
I hope you will have some fun with KETM just I like I did! 😉
Also if you haven't played Tyrian yet, then I strongly advice you download Tyrian from here and try it out with dosbox (a dos gnu linux / bsd game emulator)

Absolute Game Classics Tyrian native game play with dosbox Linux screenshot

Interesting fact to mention here,  while looking for the native tyrian game info , I found tyrian has an open source version under development called OpenTyrian . I'll check the game and write on it when I have time.