Aleph One - An Enhanced Marathon 2 Game Engine

The games of Marathon were a first-person action sci-fi trilogy created by Bungie originally for Mac OS. The three games in the series Marathon (1994), Marathon 2 (1995) and Marathon Infinity (1996), they are widely considered precursors to Halo.

Just before being acquired by Microsoft in 2000, Bungie released the source code for Marathon 2 engine and the Open Source marathon project started, resulting in the new engine called Aleph One.

Marathon takes place in the year 2794 aboard a large, multi-generational colony spacecraft called the UESC (Space Council of Earth States) Marathon. The ship was converted from Deimos, one of the two moons of Mars.

The plot of the story sets the player as a security agent and revolves around an invasion of the ship and (to a much lesser extent) a colony in nearby Tau Ceti by hostile aliens.

Aleph One is a free and open source re-implementation of the Marathon 2 gaming system for Macintosh officially.

Aleph One allows us to play Marathon 1, Marathon 2 and Infinity Marathon. In addition, the engine has the ability to reproduce customizations, fan-made versions of the series, as well as scenarios among other things.

The engine itself is not very demanding and can run on Linux systems with a minimum of 512MB of RAM.

How to install Aleph One on Linux?

This game engine can only be installed by compiling its source code on the system., so it is necessary to have some dependencies installed on the system.

For Those who are users of Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint or any distribution derived from these, we can install these dependencies with:

sudo apt install libboost-all-dev libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev \
libsdl-net1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libspeexdsp-dev libzzip-dev \
libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev

Now we proceed to unload the engine with:

curl -o AlephOne-20150619.tar.bz2 -L http://source.bungie.org/download/source.php

We decompress with:

tar xjvf AlephOne-20150619.tar.bz2

We enter the directory and proceed with the compilation process:

cd AlephOne-20150619
./configure
make
sudo make install

And we can launch the game with:

/usr/local/bin/alephone

In the case of those who are users of Arch Linux, Manjaro, Antergos or any distribution derived from Arch Linux, we can download and compile the engine from the AUR repositories.

We do this by typing the following commands:

sudo pacman -S git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/alephone.git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/alephone-marathon.git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/alephone-marathon2.git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/alephone-infinity.git

Once everything was downloaded from the AUR, now is the time to proceed with the installation. The first step is to build and install the motor itself.

For this we must enter the folder and execute in it:

cd alephone
makepkg -si

Done the construction of the engine, we can install the trilogy of games on the system with the following commands:

cd alephone-marathon
makepkg -si
cd ..
cd alephone-marathon2
makepkg -si
cd ..
cd alephone-infinity
makepkg -si

For In the case of openSUSE we can install the engine by adding a repository to the system, for this we only have to open a terminal and execute in it:

If you are openSUSE Tumbleweed users run the following as root:

zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/games.repo
zypper refresh
zypper install alephone

For what they still use openSUSE Leap 42.3 run the following as root:

zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/openSUSE_Leap_42.3/games.repo
zypper refresh
zypper install alephone

Whereas for openSUSE Leap 15.0 run the following as root:

zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/openSUSE_Leap_15.0/games.repo
zypper refresh
zypper install alephone

Finally, in the case of those who are Fedora users, we can download the necessary dependencies with:

sudo dnf install boost-devel curl-devel ffmpeg-devel gcc-c++ libpng-devel \
SDL-devel SDL_ttf-devel SDL_image-devel SDL_net-devel speexdsp-devel \
zziplib-devel
sudo dnf install libsndfile-devel libvorbis-devel

And we can rely on the openSUSE RPM package, for an easier installation:

wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/demonpig:/Games/openSUSE_Leap_15.0/x86_64/alephone-20150620-lp150.7.1.x86_64.rpm
sudo dnf install alephone-20150620-lp150.7.1.x86_64.rpm -y

Setting up the game files

Before starting the game, it is essential to download the trilogy files, we do this with:

wget https://github.com/Aleph-One-Marathon/alephone/releases/download/release-20150620/Marathon-20150620-Data.zip
wget https://github.com/Aleph-One-Marathon/alephone/releases/download/release-20150620/Marathon2-20150620-Data.zip
wget https://github.com/Aleph-One-Marathon/alephone/releases/download/release-20150620/MarathonInfinity-20150620-Data.zip

Now we must create the directories where these configuration files will be housed:

mkdir -p ~ /Marathon-Games
mkdir -p ~ /Marathon-Games/Marathon-1
mkdir -p ~ /Marathon-Games/Marathon-2
mkdir -p ~ /Marathon-Games/Marathon-Infinity

And finally we unzip with:

unzip -d ~/Marathon-Games/Marathon-1 Marathon-20150620-Data.zip
unzip -d ~/Marathon-Games/Marathon-2 Marathon2-20150620-Data.zip
unzip -d  ~/Marathon-Games/Marathon-Infinity MarathonInfinity-20150620-Data.zip