Spheres of Chaos (a new Linux user trying to install and it's a mess in old way)

snap-requests
1

The concept: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/1eeq64b/spheres_of_chaos

“Many years ago, I used to play this game a lot. I’m now a fairly new Linux user. The website has a download link for a Linux version of the game but I’ve no idea how I’m supposed to run it within Ubuntu.”

Spheres of Chaos website: https://www.spheresofchaos.com

So, please? Anyone to snap this to accomplish a sane installation experience for all interested in this old game.

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2

It appears to be recognized by Lutris: https://lutris.net/games/spheres-of-chaos/

Maybe this will help. There is also a registration key bbd8b010c7ee50c492b30454dd504d87

It’s required for permissions on the .chaos folder

3

I made this Snap but when the game does launch its shows ‘error while loading shared libraries: libSDL-1.2.so.0: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64’.

No idea about how to fix it, so I post my snap here :


name: spheres-of-chaos # you probably want to 'snapcraft register <name>'
base: core24 # the base snap is the execution environment for this snap
version: '2.07' # just for humans, typically '1.2+git' or '1.3.2'
summary: Psychadelic arcade game. # 79 char long summary
description: |
  Spheres of Chaos is a hectic, fast-paced, and rather colourful arcade
  game in the old-school style.
  Fly a ship around, dodging amongst hordes of assorted strange objects that
  subdivide when you shoot them. Earn bonus ships for score, Collect tokens for
  extra-powers. Battle the big aliens and other wierd things that occasionally
  appear. Survive as the game gets ever faster and more manic.

grade: devel # must be 'stable' to release into candidate/stable channels
confinement: devmode # use 'strict' once you have the right plugs and slots

# platforms:
#   amd64:
#     build-on: [amd64]
#     build-for: [amd64]

parts:
  spheres-of-chaos:
    plugin: dump
#    source: https://www.spheresofchaos.com/files/chaosl.zip
    source: .
    stage-packages:
      - libsdl1.2-compat-dev
      - libsdl-sound1.2-dev

apps:
  spheres-of-chaos:
    command: Chaosl
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4

Thank you very much for your “right away” effort! I hope someone from e.g. Snapcrafters here have an idea what’s stopping it :pray:

5

The program seems to depend on 32-bit libraries, which means you need to stage package_name:i386 instead of package_name.

Note that the recent Ubuntu releases(>18.04) have dropped most of the i386 architecture support, in the situation where the i386 package isn’t available from the software archive you may need to build them from the source instead of pulling from the Ubuntu software archive.

Also, packages with the -dev suffix are for software development which aren’t really fully used in runtime, you should rather stage the packages without the suffix to reduce the resulting snap size.

Hope it helps!

Also, you might want to package the Windows version instead, using snapcrafters/sommelier-core: Package a Windows application for Linux using a Snap with Wine., it may have a better result than the Linux native version as Wine also have 32-bit application support.

1 Like