1996 Quake in 2021

Run the legendary 1996 game on on your modern Linux (or macOS) machine. You know you want to.

Requirements

• innoextract: for extracting the game files from the .exe
• bchunk: for extracting the music files from the game files (optional)
• sox: for de-emphasising the extracted music files (optional)

Extracting and preparing QUAKE’s PAK files

First off, go and get the game. This guide will assume you’ll be using the version from GOG.

To make things simple, here’s a script that performs the full extraction for you:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -xe

# Setup some directories
mkdir -p temp quake/id1/music quake/hipnotic/music quake/rogue/music

# Extract the game files from the installer
innoextract setup_quake_the_offering_2.0.0.6.exe --output-dir temp

# Copy the pak files that the modern engines need
cp temp/app/id1/PAK0.PAK      quake/id1/pak0.pak
cp temp/app/id1/PAK1.PAK      quake/id1/pak1.pak
cp temp/app/hipnotic/pak0.pak quake/hipnotic/pak0.pak
cp temp/app/rogue/pak0.pak    quake/rogue/pak0.pak

# Extract the music for each game/expansion
bchunk -w temp/app/game.gog  temp/app/game.cue  quake/id1/music/track      && rm quake/id1/music/track01.iso
bchunk -w temp/app/gamea.gog temp/app/gamea.cue quake/hipnotic/music/track && rm quake/hipnotic/music/track01.iso
bchunk -w temp/app/gamed.gog temp/app/gamed.cue quake/rogue/music/track    && rm quake/rogue/music/track01.iso

# De-emphasise the audio files
for wav in $(find quake -name '*.wav'); do
  sox -V3 "$wav" --comment "" "${wav}.sox.wav" deemph;
  mv "${wav}.sox.wav" "$wav";
done

# Finally, move the prepared folder to where quakespasm expects it (more on running the game below)
mv quake ~/.quakespasm

The Abyss of Pandemonium

There’s also the third commercial (now free) expansion, Abyss of Pandemonium!

You can download it here. It’s fairly straightforward to install into the same directory:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Extract the expansion
unzip aopfm_v2.zip

# Move it to the directory with the other game files
# NOTE: this moves it to where the previous script moved the game files, adjust accordingly for your needs
mv aopfm_v2 ~/.quakespasm/impel

Running the game

There are quite a few ports of the game, but the ones I’ve tried are darkplaces and quakespasm. The latter being a closer representation of what the game was when it was released, and the former bring more modern, compatible and extendable.

quakespam expects the game directories (i.e., id1, hipnotic, rogue, etc) to be placed at ~/.quakespasm, and darkplaces just wants them in its game directory. For this guide we’ve placed them in ~/.quakespasm, but we can easily run the game via darkplaces using its -basedir command line argument.

With darkplaces, here are a few tips:

If you have a multi-monitor setup, or otherwise just want to run the game in a window, append -window to the command line.

darkplaces-sdl -basedir ~/.quakespasm

darkplaces-sdl -basedir ~/.quakespasm -game hipnotic

darkplaces-sdl -basedir ~/.quakespasm -game rogue

darkplaces-sdl -basedir ~/.quakespasm -game impel

As you can see above, darkplaces-sdl is the command that’s used to run the game. There’s also darkplaces-glx which is identical on the command line but doesn’t use SDL.

For more information on that see the darkplaces forums. Probably worth just trying both and seeing which works better on your system.

Final Recommendations

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend watching this:

I gathered information from these links, they might be of use if you need more:

• https://www.gog.com/forum/quake_series/linux_playability_quake_the_offering
• https://www.gog.com/forum/quake_series/quake_the_offering_tweak_guide_video_quakespasm_extracting_audio_deemphasising/page1
• https://www.gog.com/forum/quake_series/suggested_autoexeccfg