[solved] 1.2.1 and master fail on Debian, but 20160109 works

[ravenshining]

Deciding to get back into Marathon after many years (because my favourite Let's Play-ers are going to do Rubicon), I went to build for my system. The official release failed to compile due to the resolved FFMPEG bug, so I downloaded the master from git and couldn't get it to configure with SMPEG.

Code: Select all

checking smpeg/smpeg.h usability... no
checking smpeg/smpeg.h presence... yes
configure: WARNING: smpeg/smpeg.h: present but cannot be compiled
configure: WARNING: smpeg/smpeg.h:     check for missing prerequisite headers?
configure: WARNING: smpeg/smpeg.h: see the Autoconf documentation
configure: WARNING: smpeg/smpeg.h:     section "Present But Cannot Be Compiled"
configure: WARNING: smpeg/smpeg.h: proceeding with the compiler's result
configure: WARNING:     ## -------------------------------------------------------------------- ##
configure: WARNING:     ## Report this to https://github.com/Aleph-One-Marathon/alephone/issues ##
configure: WARNING:     ## -------------------------------------------------------------------- ##
checking for smpeg/smpeg.h... no


Now I don't really know anything about programming, but I noticed the master required SDL 2 whereas the official required SDL 1.2, yet debian's smpeg uses SDL 1.2, so I tried navigating to a point after the FFMPEG fix and before the migration to SDL 2, specifically January 9, 2016:
https://github.com/Aleph-One-Marathon/alephone/tree/cfbd016c619f8be4f8cd01230bad195b86e975de

Which compiled and is running great so far. Haven't tried netplay yet. On the off chance any other Linux users out there want to are not able to get A1 going, I hope this helps!

Later I might try building newer versions of smpeg and/or A1 and see if that works.

Debian 8.8 Jessie (stable) +backports, smpeg 0.4.5+cvs20030824-7.1
NVIDIA G84GLM (Quadro FX 1600M) v340.102-1

[treellama]

You don't need SMPEG If you have FFMPEG.

[ravenshining]

Oh... well that makes sense. I got thrown off by the line in INSTALL.Unix from the official release:

"Make sure you use SMPEG's mp3 library when configuring SDL_Sound! If you use
the built-in mp3 library, M1A1 will hang when you start Aleph One."

So I assumed that SMPEG was critical for A1 to work. That line isn't in the latest, but so aren't a lot of others.

[ravenshining]

Just as you say, it compiled and worked just fine without SMPEG.

After I that, I wanted to test a bit more, so I downloaded the latest SMPEG from https://github.com/Distrotech/smpeg and built it.

At first A1 was still failing, however, I noticed SMPEG is now (10 years newer than the one in Debian) up to 2.0, and it installed "smpeg.h" under "/usr/local/include/smpeg2/" instead of "/usr/include/smpeg/". So, I did a make clean, and searched with kate for "smpeg/" in all files of the source directory, changing every instance to "smpeg2/".

That also compiled and is running just fine.

[treellama]

"Make sure you use SMPEG's mp3 library when configuring SDL_Sound! If you use
the built-in mp3 library, M1A1 will hang when you start Aleph One."

Oh wow, we haven't used SDL_Sound for (strange) eons. That bug was one of the reasons we dropped it!

Ignore, even for stable release. If you have FFMPEG, you don't need SMPEG at all. And even if you didn't have FFMPEG, you'd only need SMPEG for EMR; that's the only scenario I'm aware of that plays chapter screen videos.

[President People]

Ignore, even for stable release. If you have FFMPEG, you don't need SMPEG at all. And even if you didn't have FFMPEG, you'd only need SMPEG for EMR; that's the only scenario I'm aware of that plays chapter screen videos.

EVIL begins with a very short animation, I believe.