Shmupping on Linux

[PooshhMao]

Hi,

I haven't really spent any amount of meaningful time on this forum for ages now, due to real life obligations and stuff. However I'm still very much into my shmups, probably more than ever.

I vaguely recall this topic being discussed before, but searching for it and not finding it for several pages I figured I should start a new thread instead of resurrecting an ancient one.

I'm a dedicated Linux user. In fact, I am running my own Debian-derived distro with a desktop that sits somewhere between a traditional one and a media center. It's called SQEW, and the Github page can be found here: https://github.com/RalfVB/SQEW-OS. But I'm not here to plug the fruits of my labor.

Despite persistent, uneducated opinions, Linux is a wonderful gaming platform. Obviously, not quite as wonderful as Microsoft's, but I'm very much willing to make that compromise because of the myriad of advantages it has. But, I'm not here to start a platform superiority flamewar, either.

To the point; I already have more shmups available to last me several lifetimes, because of emulation. Obviously MAME provides the huge majority, but apart from that there's 'industry-standard' emulators such as PPSSPP and especially PCSX2.

Outside of emulation, there's the controversial Wine. I don't care what you think about Wine - it's a marvellous piece of software, and getting better all the time. It especially pays off if you learn how to use it properly, and aside from allowing me to run my beloved Ableton Live and VST plugins flawlessly, gives me access to a number of awesome Windows-exclusive shmups too. Here are my findings:

Kamui - runs perfectly out of the box, no tricks or additional configuration needed.
Great game too, plays like RayForce with a dash of Soukyugurentai.
Raiden III - runs perfectly. Probably the best version of the game as well, even though I think it's a step back from Raiden II/DX in some ways.
Raiden IV Overkill - Can't get this one to work. The game seems to run (I can hear music and sound effects), but doesn't display any graphics outside of the intro video.
Steel Saviour - Runs flawlessly. Great looking hori with Einhander influences, interesting art style, reminiscent of Axelay's 4th stage. However doesn't play that well.
Alltynex 2nd - Starts up properly, but crashes once in-game
Blue Wish Resurrection Plus - Used to run, although the colors were off and the speed way too high. Doesn't seem to start anymore
Reflex - crashes on startup
Ether Vapor Remaster - in-game graphics are messed up, playable otherwise
DemonStar (+ Secret Missions 1 & 2) - Runs flawlessly. Good pixel art (especially the later titles), obviously inspired by Raiden, but they play pretty poorly, uninspired weapons that feel very underpowered throughout the game.
Excess Fraction - doesn't run. IIRC, average doujin, not missing much
Genetos - I'd like to try this one out, heard many good things about it, crashes on startup, sadly
Prototype & Prototype II - Great homebrew R-Type homages, freeware too, both run perfectly

I used to have lots more doujins, but lost them due to a hard drive crash, and the place I got them from doesn't exist anymore.

In case you start to wonder what the whole point of this exercise is, it's -

- If you could recommend some more Windows shmups worth trying, please do;
- If you manage to run one of the above mentioned games fine in Wine, please let me know.

Thanks for reading.

[Aleksei]

The one case
zen-ichi
tails gear

[zakk]

Making the assumption that if I can get it to work under wine on OSX, that it'll work under linux (probably a safe bet given that wine's primary development target is linux), these are the games I've successfully run under wine:

CrimzonClover (both original doujin release and world ignition)
Darius Burst (run wine-staging if you want multi-monitor support)
Eschatos
Ikaruga
Mushihimesama
Strania
ZenoHell
Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
Imperishable Night
Mountain of Faith
Perfect Cherry Blossom
Subterranean Animism
Judgement Silversword/Cardinal Sins



I managed to get XIIZeal to run, but I had to build a custom wine to do it; I filed bugs just recently for one of the issues.
DeltaZeal unfortunately won't run because it uses DX11 (or maybe DX10, I forget) and wine doesn't do that yet.

[LordHypnos]

Kenta Cho's stuff can be run natively under linux (it's open source).
The shmuppiest games are noiz2sa, rRootage, Parsec 47, and Tumiki Fighters. Apart from Tumiki Fighters there's a pretty significant RNG component to all of those, and only Tumiki is really structured like a traditional shmup. Also many people have reported that the games run better under wine than when compiled into a native executable from source. There are downloads on that site, but also you can find links in the games' respective scoring threads.

There's also Linley Henzell, but I don't personally feel that his stuff is as good. Also might run better in wine. That being said, I haven't really put too much effort into it, so take that opinion with a grain of salt.

Anyone know if Cho Ren Sha runs okay in wine? I remember it would crash on my old computer, but that computer was a complete POS.

[PooshhMao]

Kenta Cho's stuff can be run natively under linux (it's open source).
The shmuppiest games are noiz2sa, rRootage, Parsec 47, and Tumiki Fighters. Apart from Tumiki Fighters there's a pretty significant RNG component to all of those, and only Tumiki is really structured like a traditional shmup. Also many people have reported that the games run better under wine than when compiled into a native executable from source. There are downloads on that site, but also you can find links in the games' respective scoring threads.

There's also Linley Henzell, but I don't personally feel that his stuff is as good. Also might run better in wine. That being said, I haven't really put too much effort into it, so take that opinion with a grain of salt.

Anyone know if Cho Ren Sha runs okay in wine? I remember it would crash on my old computer, but that computer was a complete POS.

Yeah, forgot to mention that one. It runs well. Incidentally, the original X68k version is officially supported by MAME, so I play that one instead to get my Cho Ren Sha fix.

[LordHypnos]

Yeah, forgot to mention that one. It runs well. Incidentally, the original X68k version is officially supported by MAME, so I play that one instead to get my Cho Ren Sha fix.

ORLY? Sweet. By MAME do you mean MESS? or actually MAME? Not that it matters, I have UME installed (though I did recently find an AUR package of MAMEplus, so I was considering uninstalling UME in favor of it for the sake of autofire, mostly.)

For the record, I dual boot with Win7, so that's usually where I go for my PC shmupping.

[PooshhMao]

Yeah, forgot to mention that one. It runs well. Incidentally, the original X68k version is officially supported by MAME, so I play that one instead to get my Cho Ren Sha fix.

ORLY? Sweet. By MAME do you mean MESS? or actually MAME? Not that it matters, I have UME installed (though I did recently find an AUR package of MAMEplus, so I was considering uninstalling UME in favor of it for the sake of autofire, mostly.)

For the record, I dual boot with Win7, so that's usually where I go for my PC shmupping.

Heh, you're confused. Several releases ago, MAME and MESS fused officially into a single binary, as the official successor to UME, which is now obsolete. So now MAME does both arcade and home games.

Just compile MAME yourself, it's dead easy, provided you have satisfied all dependencies.

1. Download source
2. Extract to folder
3. Open terminal, go to folder
4. Enter 'make -j<amount of cores your PC has times 1.5>' (for example, if you have 4 cores, enter 'make -j6')
5. Wait until compilation is finished, can take a while

[LordHypnos]

^Wow, news to me. Actually there's a package of 0.168 in the official arch repository, so I just used that. How do you get the 2HD file to actually load?

[vasilvv]

Incidentally, has anyone tried compiling Shmupmame 4.2 under Linux? I've tried doing that, but it seems like it's based on some other MAME which is based on top of the actual MAME of a very specific version, and I did not get that version to even compile. And running it under Wine seems... somewhat suboptimal.

[LordHypnos]

Incidentally, has anyone tried compiling Shmupmame 4.2 under Linux? I've tried doing that, but it seems like it's based on some other MAME which is based on top of the actual MAME of a very specific version, and I did not get that version to even compile. And running it under Wine seems... somewhat suboptimal.

IIRC, it's running on top of mamePlus 0.142. I tried really hard to make my own package for it a while back (which is probably only slightly more complicated than compiling, but I like having things indexed by pacman), but failed. That being said, I'm not exactly a pro at that kind of shit. I'm sure there's somebody who can get it to work.

[colour_thief]

I've only recently switched to Linux (Ubuntu) and haven't got around to setting up dual booting (which would literally be just for shmups).

Could someone explain the process of getting the combination of Wine/Steam running? I'd love to support these recent releases if I could get them working.

[PooshhMao]

^Wow, news to me. Actually there's a package of 0.168 in the official arch repository, so I just used that. How do you get the 2HD file to actually load?

I'm not sure what you mean with 2HD file?

[Pixel_Outlaw]

You might try Warning Forever. I recall it seemed to work a few years ago using WINE.

I do recall the Linux port of noiz2sa having crash/freeze problems some time ago.
Just tried it on Ubuntu, yep still segfaults after a while.

[MathU]

With a lot of doujins I've attempted to run over WINE before I run into a big issue with my controller adapter. My controller adapter has some trick it uses in Windows that allows you to change the D-pad input method from button mode to POV mode to same-as-the-analog-stick-inputs mode. Unfortunately, most doujin games tend to read their inputs from the analog stick inputs. The problem is on GNU/Linux I can't get this input-switching feature to work and the default D-pad input method is not the same-as-analog-stick-inputs mode, meaning I'm forced to play them with analog stick which sucks to say the least. Would anyone with more experience in this be able to walk me through how to tell Xorg to read my D-pad inputs as the X/Y analog axes?. I generally use Ubuntu/Debian-based distributions.

[vasilvv]

With a lot of doujins I've attempted to run over WINE before I run into a big issue with my controller adapter. My controller adapter has some trick it uses in Windows that allows you to change the D-pad input method from button mode to POV mode to same-as-the-analog-stick-inputs mode. Unfortunately, most doujin games tend to read their inputs from the analog stick inputs. The problem is on GNU/Linux I can't get this input-switching feature to work and the default D-pad input method is not the same-as-analog-stick-inputs mode, meaning I'm forced to play them with analog stick which sucks to say the least. Would anyone with more experience in this be able to walk me through how to tell Xorg to read my D-pad inputs as the X/Y analog axes?. I generally use Ubuntu/Debian-based distributions.

I would just remap it to the arrow keys on the keyboard using a joystick-to-keyboard mapper of your choice.

[LordHypnos]

^Wow, news to me. Actually there's a package of 0.168 in the official arch repository, so I just used that. How do you get the 2HD file to actually load?

I'm not sure what you mean with 2HD file?

Well, you can download the X68k version of Cho Ren Sha from Famibe no Yosshin's site, and it's in the form of a X68k disk image, in this case .2HD.

@MathU: Like Vasilvv says, mapping the dpad buttons to your keyboard is pretty much the only thing that works. That's how I do it in Windows, anyway (my hori gem pad does not have the option of telling windows to read directional input from the dpad as being from the a stick. I'm not sure if I've had to do that in linux yet (well, I mostly play shmups in Windows, anyway)
In linux I use QJoypad. (also use it for autofire in MAME, at present). Not sure if there's a better option.

[PooshhMao]

Well, you can download the X68k version of Cho Ren Sha from Famibe no Yosshin's site, and it's in the form of a X68k disk image, in this case .2HD.

Oh okay. In that case MAME should be able to run it like so;

MAME x68000 -flop1 /path/to/file.2HD

Ultimately, what you want - at least, what I'd recommend - is to use the softlist system.
MAME comes with a huge amount of softlists, which are stored in the /hash/ folder.
These lists describe officially verified media for their respective platforms, so if you have that media and it has the correct name and is in the correct folder, you can simply go

mame x68000 chorensa

[zakk]

You may want to try Raiden IV Overkill again. I see there's a wine appDB entry for it that claims it works under linux now. Unfortunately it still crashes on startup under OSX and I've been unable to figure out why, even after quite a bit of IDA spelunking.

I've gotten Alltynex 2nd to run under OSX. You'll need to run wine-staging (or if you're the adventurous sort, compile wine with this patch: https://github.com/wine-compholio/wine- ... ze_Inplace). And do winetricks d3dxof

XIIZeal may work under linux now; the bug report I filed for the crash on start was resolved and I think the linux X11 drivers properly deal with the vsync locked speed of the game. Under OSX it'll run too fast unless you use the X11 driver. I have a patch/hack that resolves it and a so-far ignored bug report.

[donluca]

Deathsmiles runs under Wineskin in OS X, so it should work under Wine in Unix too.

Only issue: you have to use a pad/stick because when you launch the game you lose focus on the window and can't get it back, so all the keyboard strokes are lost, but the pad input is fine.

[zakk]

With both Mushihimesama and Deathsmiles you MAY need a fairly recent version of wine on linux to get them to run. There was a bug that was patched in either 1.9.5 or 1.9.6 that would cause them to crash on startup. It was a bug in OSX too, but it wouldn't cause a crash with engines compiled with gcc, which most of the wineskin engines are.

It's possible you may not see the crash under linux, but it's a stack corruption bug so it's one of those things where it may or may not happen depending on a bunch of different factors. So if you try to start those games and they crash, change to a recent engine.

[MathU]

MECHA Ritz works great over WINE by the way. I have only noticed a very slight bit more slowdown at the final bosses and I'm sure it's because of my old processor. If your rig is good enough it shouldn't be any different from the Windows experience. The only issue is the key config utility doesn't work, but you can just edit the config.ini manually. You may need to tinker a while or look up the values for your inputs.