Was this ever ported to a pi? I'm thinking about a scratch built cabinet if it won't work on my bartop.
I asked the autor (Geecab) for a pi port of the game, said perhaps one day will do it, but by now it is not playable on the pi. In addition, Geecab has not been here for almost two years...
Make that four years.
I managed to get this running on a Raspberry Pi using box86 (
https://box86.org/) which can run x86 apps on ARM platforms, although it took more than a little work! In case it helps anyone else the basic outline is:
- Use a 32-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS. The app is built using allegro and requires X11 so the full desktop OS is easiest route, although it can also be run under xinit from the CLI mode if you know how to use it
- Use the 32-bit Linux version of the mgpr binary with the allegro library statically linked
- Build box86 for your specific Pi hardware revision (see the instructions)
- Prefix your launch command line with BOX86_LOG=1 until you get it working since it will report all the missing dependency libraries you will need to supply
- For each of the missing libraries, you need to find i386 versions of the .so libraries and place them alongside the mgpr executable so that box86 can load them and translate them to ARM code. I found the Debian package page useful (use the 'stable' i386 packages) https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages
- You will need to use a KMS display driver (not the 'Legacy' driver) to get good performance. Run sudo raspi-config, select 'Advanced Options' -> 'GL Driver' and choose either 'Full KMS' (Pi4) or 'Fake KMS' (Pi2/Pi3) - Reboot!
It's possible that this will work on a 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS, using the 64-bit Linux statically linked
mgpr executable and using box64 instead of box86, but I haven't tried that yet.
With the above config I've been able to get this running (almost) perfectly, even on a Pi2B. The speed is fine, and CPU usage is still usually less than 50% but some of the text rendering on the intro screen and in the time/score banners is missing characters. Not sure why but it's related to the KMS hardware acceleration as it doesn't occur without it, (but then the game runs appallingly slowly!) This doesn't affect the gameplay at all though.
Well, I hope that helps somebody else to get this awesome remake running on a RPi, although a native version would be far more preferable. We can keep hoping