Dune II (1992)
The grandfather of real time strategy.
The grandfather of real time strategy.
This was the game that started it all for me, the grandfather of real time strategy.
I can remember watching my big brother play this the early 90s, and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
I had to play this game.
Clocking in at over 30 years old, Dune 2 has never been more playable – and more fun – than it is right now.
The modern open source engine Dune Dynasty, developed originally by David Wang, has become the game standard. The project is now being spearheaded by mystery coder CodeFlorist.
Built to run on modern machines, Dune Dynasty adds widescreen resolutions, multi-unit select, waypoints, build queues, skirmish mode – and TCP/IP multiplayer.
This is a game that I still play to this day, w/ the occassional LAN game w/ my eldest son.
Head over to grab the pre-built files for DuneDynasty. You can put these in a game directory for Linux native games, I use ~/Games/Linux/.
Find the original game files for Dune 2 (I think you want the USA version?) and place them in the data/ directory of DuneDynasty. These game files you are pasting in are the pak files and such from the original game install disk.
In many of the folders of DuneDynasty you’ll see various FILELIST.TXT files that tell you what you could put in that folder, if you had those files. These are optional enhancements beyond the original game, like music packs and custom campaigns.
Before you can actually play this Linux build, you’ll need to install some system dependencies:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:allegro/5.2
$ sudo apt install liballegro5.2 liballegro-acodec5.2 liballegro-image5.2 libenet7 libfluidsynth3 libmad0 libgl1
You could run the game now with this:
$ cd ~/Games/Linux/Dune2 && ./dunedynasty
Add this to ~/.bashrc as an alias:
alias dune2="cd ~/Games/Linux/Dune2 && ./dunedynasty"
Reset Terminal so it reloads the config:
$ source ~/.bashrc
Run it easily from any directory:
$ dune2
In the main menu, go to Options & Extras, find Gameplay, and turn on everything except Brutal AI and Insatiable Sandworms.
When you get into an actual game, there are more Game Control settings you can adjust.
Note that these settings get saved to a file in ~/.config/dunedynasty/dunedynasty.cfg.
Enjoy this classic game! If you want to play a match, hit me up.