Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RtCW) on FreeBSD

Last modified: 2021/05/07

: Fig.: Return to Castle Wolfenstein on FreeBSD 9.2 (64 bit) with Nvidia BLOB driver and Nvidia Distance Fog enabled

Several first-person shooter games are available through the FreeBSD ports collection. One of them is Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RtCW), the successor of Wolfenstein 3D. The port is based on the Linux version and requires the Linux binary compatibility layer for FreeBSD to run.

Instead of the Linux port, we can compile a native FreeBSD client for RtCW. The source code is hosted on Gitorious (mirror). Clone the repository with:

$ git clone https://gitorious.org/rtcw/rtcw-freebsd.git

Installation

You will need GCC and gmake to compile the source code. In the main directory, simply run:

$ gmake

The game binaries are written to the directory build/ afterwards. The RtCW game data has to be copied to the directory main/. Unfortunately, the game data can’t be taken from the CD directly. You either have to use Wine or VirtualBox to install RtCW and then copy the following files to main/:

mp_pak0.pk3
mp_pak1.pk3
mp_pak2.pk3
pak0.pk3
sp_pak1.pk3
sp_pak2.pk3

Start the game by running wolfsp.amd64 (on FreeBSD x86-64).

Wide Screen

Like other games with id Tech engine, RtCW can be played in wide screen mode by altering the aspect ratio of the screen in the configuration file. To run the game in 1920×1200, change the following parameters in ~/.wolf/main/wolfconfig.cfg:

seta cg_fov "106.27"
seta r_customheight "1200"
seta r_customwidth "1920"
seta r_mode "-1"

The field of view variable cg_fov should be set to 106.27 for 16:9 and 100.39 for 16:10. If the game crashes at some scenes, for instance, at the ropeway sequence, the aspect ratio can be set to 4:3 temporary as a workaround.