(Open)Tyrian on Ubuntu 11.04 (and 12.04)

When I was a young child, my dad worked as an IT professional at Boeing. Our household computer, which was a rare occurrence in our neighborhood, was built from old Packard Bell surplus parts. I grew up playing several DOS games on this machine. Among them were Dune 2, Jazz Jackrabbit, and Tyrian.

Recently, I was reminded of the game and decided to relive a part of my childhood all over again. OpenTyrian is the C and SDL version of the Tyrian game. It was originally written in Pascal with DOS.

Download the Tools

You will need to get some existing libraries before you can compile the game:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libsdl1.2debian libsdl-net1.2 mercurial

Update 08-09-2012: Ubuntu 12.04 or later:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libsdl1.2debian libsdl-net1.2 mercurial libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev

Download the Source and Game Data

Check out a copy of the source code from the Google Code repo:

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/opentyrian/

You will also need a copy of the game data. It is available here: http://sites.google.com/a/camanis.net/opentyrian/tyrian/tyrian21.zip.

Build and Run OpenTyrian

You're almost there! All you need to do now is unzip the tyrian21.zip folder into the opentyrian source code folder.

unzip tyrian21.zip
mv tyrian21 opentyrian/data

Now you can go into the opentyrian folder and compile the code:

make clean release

To run the game:

./opentyrian