Diablo on Linux

One drive home from my ok-in-retrospect-but-very-awful-at-the-time-job I came across this video. I am not a fan of podcasts; I find youtube videos are always of a higher quality so I like to listen to them like one would a podcast. Eventually it brings to my attention that the Japanese PS1 Diablo port has some source code elements on the disk; a debug symbols file. How this was found is a good question. This file was coupled with more debug info found inside the MPQ archive on the PC version (debug version of the exe with insertion statements), along with 1000 hours of effort to produce a reverse engineered copy of the source. More akin to the Pokémon Red Disassembly Project than just stumbling upon the source ala this terrible PS1 game which just had the source on the damn disk inside a renamed RAR file.

Obviously this is nowhere near as cool as MVG porting it to a damn switch, nor is this especially unique, but I wanted to do it, so off I went to do it. It took me one work day (minus one very long and very boozy lunch with my hacking homie to move through all the different, seemingly unconnected issues I was having. Yes, this looks very, very simple. But when I went through this

• There was no existing Linux template
• I was doing it on Kali Linux because reasons

The simplified cookbook is as follows:

• Obtain diabdat.mpq
• Copy diabdat.mpq to a safe place That has our assets. That is the soul. Also it simply will not run without the file.
• Install the following packages

cmake g++ libsdl2-dev libsdl2-mixer-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev libsodium-dev cmake-curses-gui

Ironically the toolset was larger than the game…

• Clone the github repo
• Enter build directory
• ccmake ..

This will bring up the ccmake, the user interface for cmake. Rather friendly in all honesty.

It will show the following; this is not an issue.

Press c to enter the configuration screen.

Press c again whilst in the config screen to have the generate option appear

Obviously we want to actually generate our files so we can compile the game, so press g.

Once this is done, run make which will take about two or so minutes, then copy your diabdat.mpq file which you put into a safe place into the build folder. Make sure you rename it with entirely lowercase characters, because it says so.

Now we run devilutionx and feel like a goddamn Sorcerer. Although I do not recommend that class if you haven’t played the game in a while; skill is necessary.

It takes literal minutes following this recipe.. but the errors were numerous when I was fumbling my way through this process half cut and on a distro entirely unsuited for anything other than boot2roots, literally one day after the video from MVG was uploaded; there was no one else doing this then.

TA DA

mfw my at the time senior was very impressed that I had accomplished this, while my coworker who had to pick up all the slack was inordinately upset with my work ethic for the day