syndwarsfx

Syndicate Wars Fan Expansion, Open Source remake of the classic Bullfrog game.

This is continuation of a port project created by Unavowed and Gynvael Coldwind.

About

Syndicate Wars Fan Expansion is a port of the 1996 DOS game Syndicate Wars to modern operating systems. In particular, it runs on GNU, Mac OS and Windows, but it should also work on any system supported by the SDL library on the i386 architecture.

The port was created by disassembling the original DOS executable and replacing the DOS-specific parts with platform-independent code, using SDL for input and video display, Vorbis for music and OpenAL for sound.

An executable and some, but not all, neccessary data files are provided with this port. This means that some of game data are not included. To install the SyndWarsFX, you will need to have the original data from either Syndicate Wars CD, or digital distribution.

Community

If you wish to discuss the SyndWarsFX or if you have any problems, you may post to discussion page of the project repo or join Syndicate discord channel. There is also a Google group syndicate-wars-port.

Installation

To install SyndWarsFX, you will need either the original Syndicate Wars CD, or a SW CD image from digital distribution of the game. There were several physical versions released. The multi-lingual european release, as well as american release, were tested and will definitely work; other version were not fully tested. Only releases for PC can be used. Releases from popular digital distribution platforms all include one of the tested images.

The CD version which you use narrows the range of languages available during installation.

Multi-lingual CD contains eng fre ita spa swe,
German release is required to use ger,
Japaneses "SW Premium" release contains eng fre jap, but asian fonts are not supported by the port.

After installing, you can change the language manually by editing config.ini. Some fanmade translations can be actually only enabled this way. However, several media files which are not packaged with SyndWarsFX will stay at the language version chosen during installation, so it still matters.

The steps you need to take for installation vary depending on your operating system.

Installing on GNU or UNIX

If you're installing on GNU or UNIX, you will have to compile from source, and then add the neccessary data files. The steps are:

Insert the Syndicate Wars CD and make sure it is mounted, or mount a SW CD image (e.g. in /media/cdrom).
Choose an installation folder, like /usr/local/share/syndwarsfx (this is the default).
Do util/install -f <SOURCE> -t <TARGET> -l <LANG>, where
- <SOURCE> is the game CD mount path, like /media/cdrom,
- <TARGET> is the destination path, meaning the installation folder you've chosen,
- <LANG> is the installation language, and can be one of: eng fre ger ita spa swe.
The install script will copy files from the CD or mounted CD image, but also will download additional data files from their repositories: gfx, sfx and levels.
Now we finally get to this code repository. Download and unpack the source tarball or clone git repo. You can also try downloading the prebuilt patch release; but that will only work if your Linux environment happens to be compatible to the one where the release patch package was built. Depending on what you've chosen, follow further steps:

Route "a" - compiling the game by yourself.

a. Follow building instructions below to get a compiled executable and configuration files.
a. After the build succeeded, do make prefix=<TARGET> install in the directory where build commands were executed, to copy built files into the <TARGET>/syndwarsfx installation folder you've chosen. If you've built the binary yourself, you already have all the tools neccessary for that install command to work. After installation, verify the folder to make sure you didn't installed these files to syndwarsfx/syndwarsfx/ directory; you can just move them one dir higher if that's the case.

Route "b" - using the prebuilt patch release.

b. Extract the downloaded patch file.
b. Move all extracted files and folders to the selected installation folder. Place them all in one folder, so that sub-olders conf, data, levels and the executable file syndwarsfx are all next to each other.

If all went well, you can now start the game.

Installing on Mac OS X

There is support for creating Mac OS X bundles. While you can just install the game into the UNIX directory structure, using a bundle is a cleaner solution.

Making a Mac OS app bundle

If you build an application bundle, you can install the game by just drag-and-drop into your Applications directory.

You can create the bundle by following these instructions:

Download and unpack the source tarball or clone git repo.
Follow building instructions below to get a compiled executable and configuration files.
After the code is compiled, install the data, as explained in the GNU or UNIX section, to any directory, say ./data (in case you wonder, the CD drive should be mounted under /Volumes/SYN WARS QA 9.0).
Finally, run util/mkbundle ./data (replacing ./data with the directory you installed the data to); this will produce an application bundle named SyndWarsFX.app in the current directory.
If you want there to be a pretty icon for the bundle, copy res/syndwarsfx.icns to SyndWarsFX.app/Contents/Resources.

When all is done, you can start the game.

Installing on Windows

There are two ways to install SyndWarsFX on Windows - either download the installer, or download the source code and compile it by hand. It is recommended to use the installer!

The installer requires either the original Syndicate Wars CD to be present in the CD-ROM drive, or a SW CD image file on disk. The CD image can come from any popular digital distribution platform. The installer will copy the files from the original Syndicate Wars CD or SW CD image, download and install additional data specific to the port, and optionally encode the game music to .ogg files used by the port.

The Syndicate Wars CD or SW CD image is not required to play the game, it is used only during the installation process.

If you've decided on the hand-compilation option, proceed with the following steps:

Insert the Syndicate Wars CD and make sure it is mounted, or mount a SW CD image (so that you get drive letter or path, ie. e:).
Choose an installation folder which ends with project name, like c:\Program Files\syndwarsfx.
Use util/install script to both copy required files from CD and download additional data, and place them all into your chosen installation folder. If you have UNIX or GNU support on your Windows (ie. Linux Windows Subsystem, or MINGW, or MSYS2, or Cygwin), you can just run the script in bash - see Installing on GNU or UNIX for details. If you don't have that, you will have to analyze said script to figure out what should be copied where - detailed instructions are not part of the documentation. As for converting CD music into .ogg, in case of issues disable this function of the script - we will do this separately below.
[optional] Rip the game CD Audio tracks to track_{1,2,3}.ogg (vorbis).
[optional] Create a music directory inside your chosen installation folder, and place the previously encoded .ogg files there.
Now we finally get to this code repository. Download and unpack the source tarball or clone git repo. Or you can instead download the prebuilt patch release. Depending on what you've chosen, follow further steps:

Route "a" - compiling the game by yourself.

a. Follow building instructions below to get a compiled executable and configuration files.
a. After the build succeeded, do make prefix=<TARGET> install in the directory where build commands were executed, to copy built files into the <TARGET>/syndwarsfx installation folder you've chosen. If you've built the binary yourself, you already have all the tools neccessary for that install command to work. After installation, verify the folder to make sure you didn't installed these files to syndwarsfx/syndwarsfx/ directory; you can just move them one dir higher if that's the case.

Route "b" - using the prebuilt patch release.

b. Extract the downloaded patch file.
b. Move all extracted files and folders to the selected installation folder. Place them all in one folder, so that sub-olders conf, data, levels and the executable file syndwarsfx.exe are all next to each other.

You can now start the game.

Starting the game

The original game needed to be started with parameters to play normally. While with SyndWarsFX this is no longer mandatory, the parameters can still be used, and many new ones are actually available. The executable can be run with --help parameter to show a short description of all parameters.

Parameter -w (used in the original game) is not recommended when running on new ha

Syndwarsfx

Install / Use

README