How to install the Quake II Ground Zero Mission Pack on Linux and take screenshots

You love iD's Quake II because you were playing the then new First Person Shooters like Doom, Duke Nukem and Quake in the mid 90s. Bringing back Nostalgia on your Linux computer you might just have completed Quake II again after more than 30 years, and yearn for more. Here is where Quake II Mission Packs come into play.

I assume Quake II is already installed on Linux, and you made a backup of your Quake II CD Mission Packs. And not using a CD/DVD drive for the installation. I will use the /tmp directory to deal with (temporary created) files, because you don't need to clean up when done, since Linux clears old files there periodicly or on boot. But feel free to create the files in any other directory.

Here I describe the installation of Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero for Linux. It works pretty much the same way for Quake II Mission Pack - The Reckoning.

Preparations

Suppose you created said backup as ZIP archive with the name QuakeIIMissionPack-GroundZero(USA).zip. When you look into this archive you might see something like

Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA).cue'
Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 01).bin
Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 02).bin
Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 03).bin
Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 04).bin
Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 05).bin
Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 06).bin
Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 07).bin
Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 08).bin
Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 09).bin
Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 10).bin
Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 11).bin

As mentioned I recommend to use /tmp to do the file handling. So

cd /tmp

Now unzip the content there:

unzip "QuakeIIMissionPack-GroundZero(USA).zip"

With the archive up-packed the 11 *.bin files need to become one. Some people recommend to download certain applications to do that. But I wonder why, when cat every Linux distribution since the 90s comes with have it. So go ahead and combine all 11 *.bin files to 1. You can ignore the *.cue file. It's not needed.

cat Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 01).bin Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 02).bin Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 03).bin Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 04).bin Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 05).bin Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 06).bin Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 07).bin Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 08).bin Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 09).bin Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 10).bin Quake II Mission Pack - Ground Zero (USA) (Track 11).bin >> goundzero.bin

You now want to create a CD image. The result will be close to identical to your original CD. For that purpose you can use iat, which also comes with Linux, but most likely needs to be installed using the package manager of the distribution. Once installed, create the final ISO image:

iat goundzero.bin > image.iso

With the ISO image created you know have to choices to install the Mission Pack — use a real CD/DVD drive if you have one, or mount it as virtual file system in Linux. Here I describe the later method.

To mount an image as virtual drive, an otherwise empty directory (technically it doesn't need to be empty; its content will temporarily hidden) is used to display the content of the image. Because in the case of the installation of the Mission Pack it's only needed once, thus it also can be created within the /tmp directory. Go ahead and create it.

mkdir /tmp/pack

Now mount the ISO image on /tmp as root.

sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop /tmp/image.iso /tmp/pack

You get a warning mount: /tmp/pack: WARNING: source write-protected, mounted read-only. which you can ignore. The reason is that an ISO 9660 image can per definition only be read-only.

List the content to be sure it worked.

ls /tmp/pack

You should see something like

AUTORUN.INF  Data  Install  readme.txt  Setup.exe  Splash

In case you only see one file, probably with *.iso at the end, the the creation described of above failed. Try to do it again and pay attention to details.

The installation itself

Quake II on (at least on my) Linux resides at /usr/share/games/quake2/. In there you'll find a directory baseq2, which contains files for the original Quake II game. To install the Ground Zero Mission Pack, also known as rogue, you need to create a new directory with the same name.

sudo mkdir /usr/share/games/quake2/rogue

Now it's just a matter of copying the Ground Zero files into rogue.

sudo cp /tmp/pack/Data/all/pak0.pak /usr/share/games/quake2/rogue

That's all there is, you're done! Unless you also want to watch video clips between the sections of the game. I show you another way how to create a directory while copying.

sudo cp -r /mnt/cdrom/Data/max/rogue/video /usr/share/games/quake2/rogue

The "-r" switch will create all necessary directories when copying files to another destination.

Playtime! To play the Quake II Ground Zero Mission Pack you just type

/usr/share/games/quake2 +set game rogue

Shortcut for screenshots in Quake II

Like in Quake II you can take screenshots. The shortcut is the F12 key. The screenshots location is at ~/.yq2/rogue/scrnshot/ directory on your Linux. Screenshot files carry the names q2_0000.jpg, q2_0001.jpg, q2_0002.jpg, q2_0003.jpg and so on.

Last note. As mentioned the installation of the Quake II Mission Pack The Reckoning works almost identical. Use this howto, but replace rogue with xatrix everywhere.

Enjoy the game!