Jagged Alliance 2 On The Raspberry Pi
A quick tutorial how you can play Jagged Alliance 2 on the raspberry pi.
About The Project
There are many projects which want to preserve games and even try to improve them. One of them is Jagged Alliance 2 Stracciatella.
The project aims to restore the original feeling of the old game by not changing gameplay related mechanisms and focuses on fixing bugs and making it possible to still play the game on todays machines.
If you're interested in the project and even want to contribute to it you can find them on github.
Compile It Yourself!
Needed Packages For Compilation
We will need some packages to compile the game but these are partly outdated in the repositorys of Raspbian. Therefore we will configure a new repository which we can use to download any package out of the testing branch. Start the terminal and enter:
Add the following line to sources.list:
If you have a clean Raspbian installation the file should like this:
# Uncomment lint below then 'apt-get update' to enable 'apt-get source'
#deb-src http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ stretch main contrib non-free rpi
deb http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ testing main contrib non-free rpi
To prevent that our Raspbian updates all installed packages to the testing branch we will use apt-pinning.
Apt-Pinning
We need to create a file that tells apt how we use our repositorys.
Add the following to this file:
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 600
Installing The Packages From The Testing Branch
After we're done we update our repositorys and can start to install the needed packages. Run the following commands:
Compiling The Game
Now we will clone the sources from github and compile it.
This may take a while...
Getting The Assets
To be able to play the game we need the assets it. I will use the GOG version and extract the assets from the installation file. You can use every versíon of the game like the cd version.
To easy extract the assets from the installer we will use a tool called innoexract. Install it using apt:
Download the GOG installer on the Raspberry Pi and then run the following command on it:
A directory named "app" will be created with the contents of the installer. You can rename it for more convience using:
Configuring And Starting The Game
Configuration
Now we have to start the game so the configurations files get created in our home directory.
An error will occur but you can just ignore it. We will have to edit the configuration file now so do the following:
The configuration file will look like this. Change the path of "data_dir" to match the path where we extracted Jagged Alliance 2 using innoextract.
Change the path of "data_dir" to match the path where we extracted Jagged Alliance 2 using innoextract. Something like this:
Let's Play!
Start the game using your launcher or the console. You can start it in full screen by using the command like so:
