Compiling OpenTyrian under Ubuntu


I suspect that every one of you has some childhood memories about computer games. Recently I discovered that one the games which was iconic for me at the time, was released as freeware. I’m talking about Tyrian. Not only was it released as freeware, but the full source was made available (together with the artwork!).

While installing you can get in mood by listening to the Tyrian jukebox. Sidenote: isn’t Charlie Crowe’s “Vegas Hard Rock Shuffle” very similar to the ingame music? (you can listen to it on his myspace page – scroll in ~40 seconds to see what I’m talking about).

OpenTyrian is a recreation of the game. It has binaries for Windows and MacOS X and below I include the build instructions for Ubuntu (although it should be fairly similar for other Linux variants).

Install the needed packages:

sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion libsdl1.2-debian libsdl-net1.2 libsdl-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev

Check out the source code. You can either check out the classic version (which includes all the features of the original game) or the enhanced version (which is work in progress, and it may or may not work). As the GoogleCode page says:

To check out the classic source code:

svn checkout http://opentyrian.googlecode.com/svn/classic/trunk/ opentyrian-read-only

To check out the enhanced source code:

svn checkout http://opentyrian.googlecode.com/svn/enhanced/trunk/ opentyrian-read-only 

Now build the source code:

cd opentyrian-read-only
make

Now download the artwork and unzip it. If the specified URL doesn’t work, you can try the following two alternatives:

  • http://camanis.net/tyrian/tyrian21.zip
  • http://darklomax.org/tyrian/tyrian21.zip

wget http://sites.google.com/a/camanis.net/opentyrian/tyrian/tyrian21.zip
mkdir data
unzip -j tyrian21.zip -d data

And finally: enjoy!

./tyrian

PS. An other very important (for me) game is also freeware: One Must Fall 2097. Get it at the official website.


5 responses to “Compiling OpenTyrian under Ubuntu”

  1. Hmmmm …

    Following things for Hardy …
    libsdl1.2-debian now has many versions …
    libsdl1.2debian-all / -alsa /-arts / -foo / -bar

  2. Well … To get opentyrian enhanced to work you will need a newer version of boost than which comes with Ubuntu … 1.35+
    Next there are some obscure issues with the compile …
    namely bimap.hpp and something about boost date-time_mt and system_mt …

    Now its very important that we need to edit the MAKEFILE …
    under BOOST_LD_FLAGS … modify boost_system and boost_filesystem as follows
    boost_filesystem-gcc42 boost_system-gcc42

    and enjoy flawless compilation of tyrian enhanced

  3. yep that worked … libsdl1.2debian-all

    Trying to build open tyrian enhanced and I am now running into issue with libboost stuff … its asking for bitmap.hpp … cant figure out which libboost thats in … tried libboost-graph … but dint work … doing it one by one to find the correct one 😛

  4. Thank you for the comments. I didn’t try OpenTyrian Enhanced (I just wanted to play the game I remembered :-)), so I didn’t run into these problems. Thank you again for providing a solution.

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