Playing DOOM on Linux

I was in a nostalgic mood and bought Ultimate Doom and Doom II + Final Doom from GOG. There was even a discount in the beginning of January. I searched SBo for a way to play the game and it seems to offer quite a lot of options. After some reading and tries, I decided that the best option for me is prboom-plus. So, here’s what I did:

Extract the game contents. You need the IWAD (*.WAD) files from the original game data. This turned out to be more difficult than I thought. I was not able to do it with cabextract, or 7zip and in the end I just fired up my virtual machine with Windows XP, installed the game there and copied the necessary files. I is stupid, I know…

Install prboom-plus from SBo. Use the link from above.

Place the IWAD files to their proper place. This is /usr/share/games/doom/. In my case these were DOOM.WAD, DOOM2.WAD, PLUTONIA.WAD and TNT.WAD. Running just prboom-plus will use DOOM.WAD by default. To start the game using another IWAD, you should specify it like this:

prboom-plus -iwad '/usr/share/games/doom/DOOM2.WAD'

Therefore, I prepared these .desktop files for the four IWAD files:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Doom
Exec=prboom-plus -iwad '/usr/share/games/doom/DOOM.WAD'
Icon=DoomII
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Categories=Game;
StartupNotify=false

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Doom II
Exec=prboom-plus -iwad '/usr/share/games/doom/DOOM2.WAD'
Icon=DoomII
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Categories=Game;
StartupNotify=false

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Doom Plutonia
Exec=prboom-plus -iwad '/usr/share/games/doom/PLUTONIA.WAD'
Icon=DoomII
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Categories=Game;
StartupNotify=false

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Doom TNT
Exec=prboom-plus -iwad '/usr/share/games/doom/TNT.WAD'
Icon=DoomII
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Categories=Game;
StartupNotify=false

These should go to ~/.local/share/applications/. The icon (DoomII) comes from WindowMaker and its full path is /usr/share/pixmaps/DoomII.xpm.

Prboom-plus offers quite a lot of options, among which is FHD:

Great!