Play Jedi Outcast + Academy on Linux

Old games are just a habit of mine. As one can see on my maintainer list at the wine project, gaming on Linux isn’t such a big problem anymore, even if there are only Windos versions of some of the games available.

But it’s even better that with the closure of Lucas Arts the source code ofStar Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy und Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast had been released. Kind of a last farewell from the developers, so to speak.

The source can – thanks to the OpenJK project- also be used on Linux, but just a little disclaimer: Jedi Outcast isn’t as well maintained as Academy. You can only play Singleplayer with it and there even are possible gamebreaking bugs, although I didn’t encounter any of them yet.

I’ve created a SlackBuild for Slackware 14.1 und -current. By reading through this file users from other distributions should be able to see easily what they have to do to build both version. Yes, you have to built the source twice. 😛

The only thing that’s needed is OpenAL and SDL2 to get it running. You also need the original game files, of course – just copy the “base” directory of the specific game to /usr/games/JediAcademy/base or /usr/games/JediOutcast/base.

By default, both games only support 4:3 resolutions.

For modern monitors you have to create autoexec_sp.cfg (or autoexec.cfg for multiplayer) inside of the base directory:

set r_customWidth "1360"
set r_customHeight "768"
set r_mode "-1"
vid_restart
cg_fov "97"
cg_fovaspectadjust 1

May the force be with you!