New game for Linux

[Brian Kelsay]

Into the Maelstrom
By Eric Foster-Johnson

Linux boasts an increasing number of commercial games, although nowhere
near as many as Windows. Further embedding this inequality, a smaller
Linux user base, especially the game-buying user base, remains nowhere
near the level of Windows. Linux, in true free software tradition,
offers quite a few free games to help offset the gaming disparity.
Furthermore, a number of older commercial games, such as Heretic, Doom,
and Quake, are available for free.

The latest commercial game made free is Maelstrom, a space game
available at http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/Maelstrom/. The player
pilots a spaceship through an asteroid belt while other ships try to
destroy yours. Maelstrom requires the Simple Direct media Layer, or
SDL, library. In fact, Maelstrom 3.0 requires SDL version 1.0 (which I
discovered since I had 1.1 on my system). SDL provides a portable
multimedia library that makes it easier to port games to multiple
operating systems. You can download SDL from
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/.

Maelstrom was originally developed by Ambrosia SW; you can find more
information about the original game at http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/.
Ported to Linux by Sam Lantinga of Loki fame, Malestrom sources are
online at http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/Maelstrom/source.html. You
can also download pre-built binary packages in RPM format for Alpha,
SPARC, PowerPC, and Intel versions of Linux at
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/Maelstrom/binary.html. You'll also
find a Debian .deb file for Intel Linux. There are binary versions for
Windows and BeOS on the same page.

It's nice to see more games available on Linux, particularly non-Intel
Linux versions, and the SDL library is really proving its worth as more
and more games are ported to Linux using SDL.

About the author(s)
----------------
Eric Foster-Johnson wrote 14 books on Linux, UNIX, programming, and
open source tools. He can be reached at erc at pconline.com or
http://www.pconline.com/~erc/.