Friday, April 23, 2010

Installing Heroes Of Might And Magic III (3) On Linux (Ubuntu)

...to remind myself because I always seem to forget how to.

1. Put the contents of the CD somewhere (e.g. /tmp/heroes).

2. Install:

/tmp/heroes$ ./setup.sh

3. Download and run patch with --keep:

/tmp/heroes$ wget ftp://mirrors.dotsrc.org/lokigames/updates/heroes3/heroes3-1.3.1a-unified-x86.run
/tmp/heroes$ _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 ./heroes3-1.3.1a-unified-x86.run --keep

4. Download the patch for the patch:

Dowload http://downloads.sourceforge.net/goldenfiles/loki_patch-fix-0.1.tar.gz

/tmp/heroes$ tar xvfz loki_patch-fix-0.1.tar.gz
/tmp/heroes$ cp Loki_patch-fix/fixedpatch heroes3-1.3.1a-unified-x86/bin/Linux/x86/loki_patch

5. Now update:

/tmp/heroes$ ./heroes3-1.3.1a-unified-x86/update.sh

6. Get the compatibility libs:

wget http://www.swanson.ukfsn.org/loki/loki_compat_libs-1.3.tar.bz2

Extract them to a directory you can remember (e.g. HEROES3_INSTALL_PATH/lib).

7. Start the game with (assuming you used HEROES3_INSTALL_PATH/lib):

LD_PRELOAD=HEROES3_INSTALL_PATH/lib/libstdc++-3-libc6.2-2-2.10.0.so:HEROES3_INSTALL_PATH/lib/libsmpeg-0.4.so.0.1.3:HEROES3_INSTALL_PATH/lib/libsmjpeg-0.2.so.0 HEROES3_INSTALL_PATH/heroes3 -w

Now to get the sound working...

Thursday, April 01, 2010

New Theme, Testing 1, 2, 3...

I've been planning to redesign this blog for a while now. I was going to write up the changes myself (I even built a small PHP-based static blog generator engine I might put online later) before finding out Blogger now comes with a great new template designer sporting some very nice themes.

This frees me of the redesign-work, which is nice, because my design skill are "only okay" at best. However, it might turn out that someone else is using the same design, in which case I'll probably change the background and the colors a bit (everybody likes to be unique).

List of changes worth noting:

  • Main column is wider (blog should still fit on a 1024px screen). This should make things a lot more readable (images and code were getting cramped in the previous design).
  • The abstract header is gone and replaced by an abstract background. I think it's a nice touch.
  • Some small custom css changes.
  • "Advertisement"-sidebar widget is gone. I only made around three dollars of it, it bothered me, and no one was clicking it anyway.
  • The black theme (and hence the style switcher) is gone. White is the new black (I kept the dark theme around for nostalgia reasons only, things are a lot clearer using a light look).

The only thing bothering me now is the WYSIWYG editor for writing posts. I wish I could write Markdown (using something like wmd for example).

In fact I'm going to try writing this post in Markdown to see how the generated html looks (which I will copy paste in Blogger)... You can ignore the rest of this post.

This is a heading

Test text please ignore this only to provide some filler text which should look okay from a distance. I would have pasted some dolor sit amet here but I'm too lazy to look it up and don't know it by hard (anymore).

And this is a sub-heading

Test text please ignore this only to provide some filler text which should look okay from a distance.

Another heading

A smaller filler sentence would go here. Let's see how this look.

And another heading

With the last piece of text.

Let's test code and blockquotes

This is what she said:

Here would be a quote. It could be something from a website, too.

And this is what I coded:

print("code sample");
function a_lame_function(){
echo "Python is better.";
}

And now an image

alt text

  1. This is a numbered list
  2. It is very nice
  3. But I don't use it that much