Need Help Compiling an old Software

Support Gaming
1

Hello Manjaro Users worldwide,

I need your help compiling an old Adventure Game - basically the first Adventure Game ever.

Its Colossal Cave Adventure/Adventure/ADVENT from 1977. I tried to compile it but it didn’t work. I try this for self-education purposes. So here is what i tried:

I followed this Guide ( Its in German language):

1 Step : I cloned the git-Repository by the following terminal command: git clone Eric S. Raymond / open-adventure · GitLab

2 Step: I changed my current directory (pwd) to the directory i just cloned (cd xy). In the Terminal.

3 Step: And now i am lost. The instructions says, that before you can compile the Source Code, you need the following two packages installed on your system: python3-yaml and libedit-dev.

How can I install these on Manjaro? I tried it without these two packages but i didn’t worked.

Python 3 is up to date i think. That is another Question: How i update python 3 to an actual version?

Thanks for any advice.

1 Like
2

Hi @Pascal,

The game is available in the AUR:

$ pamac search open adventure
wanderers-git  r97.054c1cd-2                                                                                                                                                                                                 AUR
An open world adventure and dungeon crawling game
solarus-git  1.5.3.r2217.gcbb29669e-1                                                                                                                                                                                        AUR
An open-source adventure 2D game engine (git version)
open-adventure  1.16-3                                                                                                                                                                                                       AUR
Port of the 'Colossal Cave Adventure' text-based adventure game
gog-pine  1.13-1                                                                                                                                                                                                             AUR
Pine is an open world action adventure simulation game.

And it can be installed with:

pamac build open-adventure

Just tested it on my machine, and it works:

$ advent

Welcome to Adventure!!  Would you like instructions?

>
1 Like
3

Thanks for your answer. I know that, but i originally wanted to compile it myself. I have never used an AUR before i think. In the readme from the developer of the project i have found these:

So i think the only problem i how to install the package libedit-dev. Maybe it has another name on manjaro?

4

Maybe, maybe not. In the first step on that page it says:

Install libedit from Editline Library (libedit) - Port of NetBSD Command Line Editor Library (aka: editline) on your system.

The key might be (aka: editline), which is in the extra repository:

$ pamac search editline
[...]
editline  1.17.1-4                                                                                                                                                                                                         extra
A readline() replacement for UNIX without termcap (ncurses)

So it can be easily installed with:

pamac install editline

I don’t know if it will solve the issue, but it might. I’m no expert.

Edit:

I am unsure, but I think:

pamac install python-yaml

What do you mean an actual version? a Custom one? a Newer one? Look at:

  1. the AUR; and/or
  2. a virtual environment manager, such as uv (that I use.)
5

Giving the actual errors you get would be more helpful than just saying it did not work.

I can see some install instructions in the INSTALL.adoc file which is part of the repo you cloned: INSTALL.adoc · master · Eric S. Raymond / open-adventure · GitLab

I tried running make in the cloned directory and it just worked. I have libedit installed and you may find that package is enough.

Python 3 is up to date i think. That is another Question: How i update python 3 to an actual version?

What do you get when you run python --version and what version do you think you need?

6

Thank you Phemisters and Mirdarthos for your answers.

I just found out that when i just type ./adventure the game starts - without editline.

I didn`t tried that because i was sure i get errors before, when typing make and make check.

Typing make gives me the following output: make. advent is already actual.

When i type make check it throws this output:

/bin/sh: Zeile 1: pylint: Kommando nicht gefunden
make: [Makefile:73: pylint] Fehler 127 (ignoriert)
/bin/sh: Zeile 1: cppcheck: Kommando nicht gefunden
make: [Makefile:70: cppcheck] Fehler 127 (ignoriert)
make: batchspell: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden
make: *** [Makefile:79: spellcheck] Fehler 127

Its in german. Kommando nicht gefunden = Command not found.

Fehler=Error

So it is throwing out Errors i think. But it works anyway?

7

Yes, it looks like the make check runs tests which require extra packages, but these packages are not required by the game.

You can run some of the tests by installing a couple of packages

sudo pacman -Syu python-pylint cppcheck

Not sure about batchspell at the moment. :thinking:

Edited: looking at the Makefile, batchspell is only being used to spell check a couple of docs, so it is not important for the running of the application.

1 Like
8

ok thanks

9
10

If you look inside the PKGBUILD provided at AUR (en) - open-adventure I am sure will succeed in the end :slight_smile:

The dependencies listed at the referenced gitlab is debian or ubuntu package names.

You will need to convert those to the arch linux equivalents.

11

Hallo Pascal. :germany:

As people said, an easy answer is to look up: PKGBUILD - aur.git - AUR Package Repositories

To build the binary

sudo pacman -S libedit

make advent

To build the manpage

sudo pacman -S asciidoctor
make advent.6

man ./advent

I did a lot of refactoring and porting over the past decades.
I just suspended the refactoring of AUR (en) - vectoroids.

While I find it challenging and interesting to mess around with old code like this, it can be very time-consuming, and there are actually very few occasions where this knowledge is truly rewarding. I used to be a reverse engineer, so I guess it’s just a habit - a form of cognitive maintenance that keeps certain neural networks active.

So, can you elaborate on your motivations for doing this?

I mean, such projects - even with tests - but with a lot of custom style and workflows can be very daunting. And in the end, it’s ‘only’ a text adventure, and its analysis can be broken down into a few things.

Are you trying to look into other areas, like
GNU Make, C, CMake, C++, Rust?

I added a picture of my refactoring of Vectoroids, which used to be a single monolithic C file with over 3k lines of code.

I mean, I learned about asciidoctor here, which is a totally different tech-universe; meanwhile I do all of my docs in Markdown.

BTW: Eric S. Raymond is on X/Twitter

:waving_hand:

image
image152×486 8.08 KB

1 Like