GOG.com prefers that you use their GOG Galaxy desktop app to download, install and manage all of your GOG games. But customers always have the option to install the game on their own terms, with a platform-specific installer.
GOG offers these installers for Mac, Windows and/or Linux, depending on which platforms the game is available for. The installers truly are platform-specific:
- macOS games are distributed in a standard .pkg
- Windows games are distributed in a setup wizard .exe
- Linux games are distributed in a goofy shell archive
Of course, none of those are NetBSD. So, if I wanted to even attempt to play a game distributed by GOG.com on NetBSD, which one should I pick? The obvious choice is the Linux installer, since Linux is the most similar to NetBSD, right? Au contraire! In practice, I found that it is easier to download the Windows installer.
Here’s what I mean. For example, I ported the open source version of Aquaria to pkgsrc, but that package is only the game’s engine, not the multimedia data. The multimedia data is still copyrighted. Therefore, you need to get it from somewhere else. GOG is usually a good choice, because they distribute their games without DRM. And as mentioned earlier, picking the Linux installer seemed like a natural choice.
But I quickly discovered that the Linux installer, that goofy shell archive, is not portable.
charlotte@sakuracity:~/games$ sh ./pyre_1_50427_11957_23366.sh
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Pyre (GOG.com) 0% gzip: unknown compression format
Extraction failed.
100% Signal caught, cleaning up
Ah, maybe you just need a different shell…
charlotte@sakuracity:~/games$ bash ./pyre_1_50427_11957_23366.sh
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Pyre (GOG.com) 0% gzip: unknown compression format
Extraction failed.
100% Signal caught, cleaning up
Lol no? OK fine whatever.
That’s when I discovered that GOG’s Windows installers are actually easier
to deal with on NetBSD, with the help of the
archivers/innoextract package. It
really does Just Work. So, I’ve been using innoextract on GOG’s .exe files
almost exclusively in order to obtain multimedia data for all sorts of games
that have open source reimplementations of their game engines:
Jazz Jackrabbit,
Jade Empire,
Grim Fandango, and more.
That was my only way forward, until I remembered that NetBSD has a Linux compatibility layer!
You just have to install one of the Linux compat packages. I’m on a 64-bit
machine and I want the newest stuff, so I installed the
emulators/suse_base package from pkgsrc.
When that package is done installing, it writes you a big fat note:
===========================================================================
$NetBSD: MESSAGE.NetBSD,v 1.1 2013/12/05 11:42:14 obache Exp $
Do not forget to include COMPAT_LINUX in your kernel configuration file.
Linux binaries require this option in order to work.
Most Linux binaries also require procfs to be mounted with -o linux.
This can be automated by adding the following to your /etc/fstab:
procfs /emul/linux/proc procfs ro,linux
Some Linux binaries also require tmpfs to be mounted on /dev/shm.
This can be automated by adding the following to your /etc/fstab:
tmpfs /emul/linux/dev/shm tmpfs rw,-m1777
===========================================================================
I’m not positive if those extra entries in fstab(5) are 100% necessary for the task at hand (run GOG.com’s game installers for Linux), but it certainly doesn’t hurt. I have them enabled.
Alright, it’s go time!
charlotte@sakuracity:~/games$ bash pyre_1_50427_11957_23366.sh
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Pyre (GOG.com) 0% gzip: unknown compression format
Extraction failed.
100% Signal caught, cleaning up
Oh, right, derp, I should put the Linux binaries in the front of my PATH.
charlotte@sakuracity:~/games$ LINUX=/usr/pkg/emul/linux
charlotte@sakuracity:~/games$ PATH=${LINUX}/bin:${LINUX}/sbin:${LINUX}/usr/bin:${LINUX}/usr/sbin:${PATH}
bash ./pyre_1_50427_11957_23366.sh
bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.UTF-8)
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Pyre (GOG.com) 100%
/bin/sh: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.UTF-8)
Collecting info for this system...
Operating system: linux
CPU Arch: x86_64
trying mojosetup in bin/linux/x86_64
USING en_US
Error opening terminal: screen.
Error: Couldn't run mojosetup
It can’t run “mojosetup” (whatever that is) because it doesn’t like my
$TERM? Also, what’s that deal about the locale, doesn’t know what
en_US.UTF-8 is?
At this point I decided to use the simplest setup I could envision, and it worked! That means a locale of “C” and a TERM of “vt100”.
charlotte@sakuracity:~/games$ \
PATH=${LINUX}/bin:${LINUX}/sbin:${LINUX}/usr/bin:${LINUX}/usr/sbin:${PATH} \
TERM=vt100 \
LC_ALL=C \
bash ./pyre_1_50427_11957_23366.sh
It’s this insane little setup wizard which has interesting curses support (??!!)
┌───────────────────────────────── Pyre ─────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ Pyre │
│ Welcome to GOG.com installer! │
│ │
│ For technical support for this game, please visit our Support page at: │
│ http://www.gog.com/support/pyre │
│────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────│
│ < Cancel > < Next > │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
You use the arrow keys to highlight the option you want and hit SPACE and/or ENTER to select it.
Pyre
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── EULA ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ GOG.com End-User License Agreement │
│ ======================================== │
│ │
│ Your use of this product/service is subject to the GOG User Agreement. Copy and paste this link to your browser to check it out: │
│ http://www.gog.com/support/policies/gog_user_agreement │
│ │
│ │
│ MojoSetup License Terms │
│ ======================================== │
│ │
│ Copyright (c) 2006-2010 Ryan C. Gordon and others. │
│ │
│ This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. │
│ In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from │
│ the use of this software. │
│ │
│ Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, │
│ including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it │
│ freely, subject to the following restrictions: │
│ │
│ 1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not │
│ claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a │
│ product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be │
│ appreciated but is not required. │
│ │
│ 2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be │
│ misrepresented as being the original software. │
│──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────( 3%)──│
│ < Cancel > < Back > < Next > │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Wow, incredible. I didn’t know you could do this in a shell archive?
The installer asks you if you’d like to install the game data to somewhere
other than the default ~/GOG Games. I just left it at the default.
At a certain point, you’re invited to create a desktop shortcut and a “menu item” (most be some Ubuntu thing) and, well, I don’t know what happens with those options enabled on NetBSD, but I turned them off for safety.
┌──────────────── Options ─────────────────┐
│ [ ] Create a desktop shortcut │
│ [ ] Create a menu item │
│──────────────────────────────────────────│
│ < Cancel > < Toggle > < Back > < Next > │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘
And then the fun part, when the game is actually installed!
┌ Installing ─┐
│ Pyre │
│ 12% │
│ Music... │
│ │
│─────────────│
│ < Cancel > │
└─────────────┘
And sure enough, the game is installed in the place it said it would!
charlotte@sakuracity:~/GOG Games/Pyre$ ls -F
docs/ gameinfo support/
game/ start.sh* uninstall-Pyre.sh*
I suspect that the uninstall script there would require Linux compatibility, too.
Now, actually PLAYING the games on NetBSD is a separate matter entirely. The
game I’ve got here, though, my current obsession
Pyre, is built with MonoGame
and therefore could theoretically work on NetBSD, too, with the help of a
library called FNA and a script for OpenBSD
called fnaify. I do
hope to create a pkgsrc package for FNA and port the fnaify script to
NetBSD at some point.
UPDATE!
So, lol, haha, it turns out that if you install the meta-pkgs/suse131
package, then we get a hold of the Linux version of glib2, which enables the
GOG installer to spit out a GRAPHICAL SETUP WIZARD ON NETBSD
