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UT2004 (Atari DVD Release Version)

Install from the DVD. Navigate to the location the DVD was mounted at and run:

sudo sh ./linux-installer.sh

Follow the installation steps.

After installation completes do not run the game immediately after install. Patch first!

Patch to latest version

The patch can be downloaded here: ⬇️ UT2004 Mega Pack Linux + LinuxPatch 3369.2 - utzone.de

Extract contents from the archive and copy them to the install location, overwriting all the files:

NOTE: If cp is asking for confirmation on every file, it is likely there is an alias to cp -i. Prepend a \ before the cp command to temporarily ignore this alias. Alternatively, unalias cp to undefine the alias.

tar -xf ut2004megapack-linux -C /tmp/
cp -R /tmp/UT2004MegaPack/* /usr/local/games/ut2004

Launch in 64-bit

By default, the ut2004 command will launch the 32-bit version of the game. To make it launch the 64-bit version, edit the start script /usr/local/games/ut2004/ut2004 and change line 49 from

	exec "./ut2004-bin" $*

to

	exec "./ut2004-bin-linux-amd64" $*

Missing libraries

The game tries to load quite some old libraries, e.g. it will complain about libSDL-1.2.so.0 or libstdc++.so.5 missing.

In the case of libSDL-1.2.so.0 simply install the SDL 1.2 compatability package:

pacman -S sdl12-compat

Then, remove the libSDL-1.2.so.0 the game came with and put a symbolic link to your system's libSDL-1.2.so.0

sudo rm /usr/local/games/ut2004/System/libSDL-1.2.so.0
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0 /usr/local/games/ut2004/System/libSDL-1.2.so.0

To fix the error about libstdc++.so.5, an AUR package with the files is available:

yay -S libstdc++5

No sound

UT2004 expects there to be a /dev/dsp sound device to access the sound card directly. This goes back to OSS (Open Sound System) which has long been deprecated in favor of ALSA and contemporaries.

This can easily be fixed in one of two ways:

  1. Further edit the start script of ut2004, prepending the execution of the game binary with padsp to route all audio through PulseAudio: 
    	exec padsp "./ut2004-bin-linux-amd64" $*
  2. Edit your user's UT2004 config file ~/.ut2004/System/UT2004.ini, go to the section [ALAudio.ALAudioSubsystem] and change the value of UseDefaultDriver=True to UseDefaultDriver=False

Screen resolution

Some higher resolutions might not show up in the game's configuration screen. To set a resolution manually, edit your user's UT2004 config file, go to section [SDLDrv.SDLClient] and set the following parameters, e.g.:

ATTENTION: The config file contains two sections for various graphical settings, one for Windows and one for Linux. The one for Linux comes after the one for Windows.

[SDLDrv.SDLClient]
FullscreenViewportX=2560
FullscreenViewportY=1440

Proper wide-screen support

A mod is available that expands UT2004's wide-screen support: foxWSFix-UT2k4

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