Asgard

Run Loki Games and other Linux classic games on modern systems with Docker.

Linux games released in the late nineties were running in a totally different environment than what a modern Linux system is today. Instead of Wayland, there was XFree86. Instead of PulseAudio, there was OSS. Instead of being x86_64, the architecture was i386... glibc, OpenGL, SDL were rudimentary compared to what they are now. For all those reasons and more, it's either very difficult or just plain impossible to run old classic Linux games on a modern system.

Despite all those problems, Linux has an excellent binary retro-compatibility. With tools like Docker, it is possible to recreate an environment friendlier for old games without requiring virtualization or installing a legacy OS.

Dependencies

• Docker (Tested on the version shipped with Ubuntu 20.04)
• osspd (For games using OSS)

Installing Dependencies on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install docker.io osspd

Preparing your game

Old games can be just as tricky to install from their original media as they are to run them. This can be worked around by installing the games in a virtual machine but this a cumbersome process. It's possible that Asgard will take care of extracting games from their original media in the future. The servers hosting the demos for the Loki games are almost all down and installing them required some scripting. An ISO image containing the Loki demos already extracted is available to all.

Place the fully installed game files in a subfolder in games. Name the subfolder with the name of the game executable (For exemple: sc3u for Sim City 3000, civctp_demo for the Call to Power demo)

Build the game image:

./asgard-build <game_name>

This will copy the game files to a Docker image and setup the game to run when bash starts.

Running the game

After building your game image run:

./asgard-run <game_name>

Tested games

The following games have run successfully on Pop!_OS 20.04.

• Civilization: Call to Power
• Descent 3
• Doom 3
• Heretic 2
• Heavy Metal FAKK2
• Jamestown
• Railroad Tycoon 2
• Rune
• Sim City 3000 Unlimited
• Soldier of Fortune

Credits

Asgard is brought to you by the Lutris team. All content is under GPL v3.

If you like this project, please consider supporting the project.