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How to play Quake, with Quake Epsilon on Linux?

Date: 2021-08-22

So Quake will have an official source port from Nightdive. Great! It's not like we don't have countless engines and such to play this great game.

Personally I like to use Quakespasm if I want to play Quake in its original form. However if you want something more modern, and flashy, you can try out Epsilon…

What is Epsilon?

"Quake Epsilon is a graphically enhanced build of shareware Quake 1 for Windows/Linux/Mac, which can be upgraded to the full version of Quake along with it's mission packs Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity by copying the full-version .pak files into the correct folders."

It has 4 quality levels, which you can choose from depending on how powerful machine you have. Personally I can play at high, with my potato machine.

How to play Quake Epsilon on Arch Linux?

First: Download the mod from moddb:

Make a directory where you want your game, then extract the files there (check the readme files for instructions, especially for the expansion packs).

Second: At first it's hard to start the game, since it needs dependencies, but the script only knows Debian/Ubuntu language.

You need some dependencies to install, namely the libxxf86dga, linjpeg6-turbo and libpng14.

Third: Switch to terminal to choose you graphics settings:

./linux_changegraphicsquality.sh

Note: you only need to this once, or if you are troubleshooting and want to try another setting.

Fourth: And then start the game:

./linux_quake.sh

Of course if you want to, just make desktop/menu shortcut for easy use.

Fifth: Happy fragging!

Tip for choosing nightmare difficulty: it's hidden behind the hard skill door.

What about the music?

The music works as well. It has a placeholder music, and you need to copy the original one to the id1/music directory (create it, if you don't have one), and delete the quake1_music_diabolipak.pk3 file in the id1 folder.

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