Larry the Dinosaur 3 SDL

This is a (pretty basic) port of the unfinished game Larry the Dinosaur 3 to Linux via SDL.

Is it playable?

Yes, but…

Larry the Dinosaur 3 was never finished, and this version was not polished for release: there are a number of bugs still present, and a few more added during the porting process.

That being said, it's possible to play through most of the levels, and it's still quite a bit of fun!

Is this the same as the 'ld3beta2' version?

No, this version contains some content that wasn't in the 'ld3beta2' version, and vice-versa. The ld3beta2 version is overall more polished, but has fewer levels.

Also note that there are some changes to the levels, and to the music.

What changed during the port to SDL/Linux?

First, a number of non-C++ standards-compliant things were changed to get this to compile on non-MSVC6 compilers. Old Microsoft compilers, for example, did not scope the loop variable to a for-loop properly.

Most of the basic Windows API calls were replaced with equivalent SDL calls. Win32 API types are defined in slx_win32types.h.

In particular, the DirectDraw surfaces were replaces with SDL_Surfaces. A special blit function (SLX_BlitFlipSurface()) is used to work around SDL's lack of support for flipping surfaces horizontally and vertically. Note also that SDL_BlitSurface() is aware of surface palettes, whereas DirectDraw (and the SLX_BlitFlipSurface() function) are not, and just preserve palette indices.

Instead of using page flipping, the SDL version always renders to a "backbuffer" SDL_Surface, and uploads this to an SDL_Texture as a frontbuffer.

For input, Joystick support has been stubbed out (I play with a keyboard). The DirectInput code was totally removed, and SDL_GetKeyboardState() is used for keyboard access. This isn't ideal, but works well-enough for the moment. SDL Scancodes are used (rather than keycodes) to make this easier, and replace the DIK_ values throughout the code.

For sound, FMOD has been replaced with SDL_Mixer. It should still be possible to compile the game against FMOD, if you can find an old enough version, but such old versions are pretty buggy on modern Linux (and quite tricky to get hold of).

Finally, all of the files were renamed, as Linux uses a case-sensitive filesystem.

What's broken?

There are a quite a few known bugs in LD3SDL. Here are some highlights (lowlights?):

• The "no move" key is broken, and hence disabled.
• Level names in saved games may be off-by-one?
• There's no Joystick/Gamepad support.
• There are quite a few hangs/crashes.

How do I compile it?

This port is built with CMake, and should be reasonably straightforward to build.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
cp ld3.x86_64 ..
cd ..
./ld3.x86_64

You'll need SDL2 and SDL2_mixer installed, including the development headers.

(On Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-mixer-dev)

Note that the version of SDL2_mixer you have will need to be compiled with MOD and MP3 support for the sounds and music to load.

Who owns Larry the Dinosaur 3?

Larry the Dinosaur 3 (and all characters, names, indicia, etc) are owned by Joe King.

The SDL port is by David Gow.