I decided to try to find out if it was possible to run the old Sierra adventure games on linux, I seem to recall reading something a few years ago about it.

A bit of googling turned up "freesci", with a page here.

I found a few other pages about running the Sierra games, and eventually found a reference to Sarien, which I found here.

I looked, and found that an old version of Sarien is available as a debian package, but it's only in unstable, here.

I'm running testing on my laptop, rather than unstable, so I couldn't install it using apt. I downloaded it from the web page, and then used dpkg to install it.

It didn't have dependencies on any other packages, so that was nice, and it just installed without complaint.

It runs, and displays a loading screen, but I didn't have any sierra game files handy to try running a game.

I tried installing freesci, it also has an unstable debian package, here.

I downloaded and tried using dpkg to install it as before, but this didn't work, because freesci requires libdirectfb-0.9-22 (newer than the version I installed wheh trying to get Ultimate Stunts to compile the other day).

This was another unstable package, so I installed that manually. I tried installing freesci again, but now it needed a newer libgii0 package than I had installed, and it required libgii0-target-x

I downloaded both, and tried to install libgii0-target-x, but it complained that libgii0 was not configured.

I put them both on the dpkg line, and that worked, they both went in together.

I then tried to install freesci yet again, but then it needed a libggi target.

I downloaded and installed libggi-target-x, then was finally able to install freesci.

I ran it, and got:

FreeSCI 0.3.4c Copyright (C) 1999, 2000-2003
 Dmitry Jemerov, Christopher T. Lansdown, Sergey Lapin, Rickard Lind,
 Carl Muckenhoupt, Christoph Reichenbach, Magnus Reftel, Lars Skovlund,
 Rink Springer, Petr Vyhnak, Solomon Peachy, Matt Hargett, Alex Angas,
 Walter van Niftrik, Ruediger Hanke, Rainer Canavan
This program is free software. You can copy and/or modify it freely
according to the terms of the GNU general public license, v2.0
or any later version, at your option.
It comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
Loading resources...
Resmgr: Could not retreive a resource list!
No resources found in '/u01/downloads'.
Aborting...

I put the Space Quest IV cd I found the other day while rebuilding my other linux box in the drive, changed to that path, and tried running it, but then it just crashed.

I also tried running the demos off the cd, but these too just crashed.

Hmm, doesn't look too good.

I did a bit of browsing, and found this article, and from the look of the screenshots, it's more geared towards the early games, that were almost AGI spec, like Space Quest 3, and Leisure Suit Larry 3.

I guess I'll have to find my CDs with the games on them (or, god forbid, the floppies), or boot up the machine I built with a TV out card in it for playing old DOS games, which I think has them all on it.