Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge for Windows and Linux

Updated: 8/5/04

This is the first cut at Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge, version 3.0 beta 5, for Aleph One SDL. Please send suggestions and problem reports to gjditchfield at acm.org.

This scenario has not been tested thoroughly. I have done my testing on a Dell 600 with an ATI Mobility 9000 AGP video card, using Windows XP and SuSE Linux 9.1 (with SuSE's ATI video driver). I suspect that Aleph One and my video card don't get along, and I would like to hear whether you have the same problems or not.

When you do find a problem, try doing the equivalent thing in some other Aleph One scenario, such as the Marathon Infinity demo that is available from source.bungie.org. The problem may be a bug in Aleph One, not a fault in EMR.

Some problems I found:

- An EMR problem: only the central part of the chapter screen after the Prologue level scrolls. I expect other chapter screens to mess up the same way.

- Windows XP, all Aleph One scenarios: when OpenGL rendering is turned on, full-screen mode works badly. Clicking on menu items on the menu screen cause flashing effects. When I read a terminal, the previous view appears as a flashing background around the terminal's text. Work-around: go into the preferences and turn off full-screen mode.

- SuSE 9.1, all Aleph One scenarios: when OpenGL rendering is turned on, menu screens and splash screens don't fade in from black; instead, black pixels color-shift to red. If full-screen mode is off, black pixels turn red during game play, too. Typing "ESC" to quit the game causes it to disappear, but leaves it running; I must kill it from the command line. Work-around: go into the preferences and switch to software rendering.

Installation on Linux:
Get the Aleph One RPM for Linux from http://source.bungie.org. The current version is AlephOne-200404017-1.i386.rpm; I have not tried EMR with any earlier versions. Get EMR-20040623-1.noarch.rpm from the excaliburworld.net hotline server, in folder emrx/Latest Beta Release. Install the Aleph One and EMR RPMs, for instance by executing this command:

rpm -Uvh AlephOne-20040417-1-i384.rpm EMR-20040623-1-noarch.rpm

If you have any old Excalibur preferences files in ~/.alephone, delete them. If you have any saved games, they may not work properly.

To play Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge, run /usr/bin/emr. Depending on your Linux distribution and desktop environment, there may also be a menu item for EMR in your Games menu.
Installation on Windows:
Get the Aleph One zip archive from http://source.bungie.org. The current version is AlephOne-Windows-20040417.zip; I have not tried EMR with any earlier versions. Get EMR-20040623.zip from the excaliburworld.net hotline server, in folder emrx/Latest Beta Release (or you can download it from the Mac Guild server). Unzip the two archives, and move all of their contents into the same folder: you should end up with a folder containing alephone.exe, "Morgana Map", a Scripts folder, etc.

If you have any old Excalibur preferences files in the Prefs folder in the folder containing Aleph One, delete them. If you have any saved games, they may not work properly.

To play Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge, launch alephone.exe.