Install Guide

Linux

I performed the install on gentoo, and this guide includes details specific to that distro.  The basic steps are generic enough, however, that you should be able to handle another distro.

The following resources were helpful:

Linux Install Howto (TLDP)
DarkPlaces README

1. Install your choice of new and improved quake engines.  I chose DarkPlaces.  For gentoo, it required only:

   • echo "games-fps/darkplaces lights textures cdsound" >> /etc/portage/package.use
     echo "games-fps/darkplaces ~x86 ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
     emerge -avt darkplaces

   • That should pull in games-fps/quake1-textures as well.
2. Now you've got a new executable capable of playing the Quake game content, so you need the content itself, which is in the form of .pak files.  The shareware can be found online, but the full game content is only available (legitimately) from an original Quake CD.
3. I used my good old trusty Quake CD.
4. I used dosbox to run the Quake installer (install.bat), just for the purpose of letting it extract the resource.1 file from the CD into the Quake content files.  Supposedly the lha utility can extract it, but it didn't work for me.
5. I then copied the two pak files in the ID1 directory (PAK0.PAK, PAK1.PAK) to: /usr/share/games/quake1/id1 as pak0.pak and pak1.pak (the lowercase filenames are important).
6. Run darkplaces and enjoy!  It'll store config files and savegames in ~/.darkplaces/id1.

Music

You probably want the wicked good NIN music that accompanied the levels in the original game.  They're on the CD.  Most of the new engines should support the music in one form or another.  The easiest thing is (if you have the CD) to just leave it mounted and ensure that the game is aware of the presence of the CD, and the music should just play normally, automatically.  For convenience, however, and because the engine I chose (DarkPlaces) supports it, I converted the music into ogg files and placed them in the game's installation directory.

1. Mount the CD (mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom).
2. Use your tool of choice to convert the audio tracks on the CD into ogg files.  I used grip.
3. Ensure that the files are named trackXXX.ogg (where XXX is the track number).
4. Move the ogg files to the folder id1/sound/cdtracks in the game's installation directory (/usr/share/games/quake1).
5. DarkPlaces should just find and use them automatically.

Transparent Water

As awesome as any of the updated quake engines are, they don't do transparent water until the original maps have been updated to provide the correct 'vis' information that let's the engine turn on transparency for the water geometry.

1. Get the vispatch utility.  (emerge games-util/vispatch, or just download it.)
2. Get the new vis data for the original quake maps.  Extract that to get the id1.vis file.
3. Run the vispatch against the original quake map data:

   • vispatch -dir id1 -data id1.vis

4. Now run the game and ensure that r_wateralpha is <1.0.