I’ll bet there’s dozens of readers out there who have had a similar experience to mine:

Here it is, 2007, and I suddenly had a hankering to play the original classic Quake. Don’t ask me where that came from! The original Quake had that great medieval feel to it. So I rummaged around the old CD bin… couldn’t find it. Must have given it to a friend one time. Well, no problem to download it, right? Well, there’s plenty of torrents for it, alright… but when I got it, I discovered that the original Quake won’t run on Windows XP.

Shucks. Well, no problem, I figured, my Linux box has DOSbox, I’ll try it there. Well, it did run, but either the card on the Linux box can’t handle the advanced OpenGL or else DOSbox just can’t run it fast enough. It was crawling. So I wandered back to Windows. Yes, they make DOSbox for Windows, so - oh the irony! - I downloaded and installed DOSbox for Windows.

Guess what? It ran just as crummy slow on Windows as it did on Linux! And all this time I’ve been scoffing that Windows is better at gaming than Linux… So at this point, I started Googling like mad.

I found out about WinQuake, which is probably what I had on the original CD. But every time I followed the link, it was down. Dozens of leads to WinQuake, all of them leading to a dead server. Aaaand finally…

I found EZQuake. Provided that you have the original Quake map files (pak1.pak, etc.), and Quake installed to C:\Quake\, install EZQuake into that same directory and your problems are over! It looks and feels just like the classic Quake you know and love.

But what about on Linux? Yes, it ran great on Linux, too! Just unpack the tar.gz file and play it from the console in the same directory as your Quake install. Which is not to say that configuring it is easy - on both Windows and Linux I had to tweak options to get it going right. And EZQuake has in fact added a massive amount of options to set. You’ll have to read the manual quite a bit and experiment with settings before you get it dialed in just perfectly. In fact, let’s be honest - I’ve seen programming languages that weren’t as complex as the millions of commands, switches, and options in EZQuake!

But it was worth it, to get classic Quake on a desktop again - just like Mom used to play!

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• Firefox Add-ons - Free lightweight games (Round 2)

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