Linux-native companion tool for Gold Box games

[Manofhart]

Hey everyone, I recently was trying to get the Gold Box games running on my Linux desktop since it's been a long time since I last played them. While the Steam version works perfectly fine with Proton, I was a bit dismayed to find things didn't work so well when when I tried to use Linux native Dosbox with GoldBox Companion. GBC, being a Windows program, can't 'talk' to Dosbox running in Linux, so you have to run both through Wine/Proton.

Now I could just run the whole stack through Steam Proton and be happy, but being a Linux nerd with an expensive Claude subscription, I started digging into all the excellent work others have already done in documenting how all of the games work and trying my hand at seeing if I could do the bare minimum and find my running characters in memory. The end result is nothing special yet, but I can launch the game and read the party with a 2nd terminal floating beside my game window (see screenshot).

Probably the biggest benefit, I built this to work against dosbox-staging (https://www.dosbox-staging.org/), a more modern fork of vanilla DOSBox that comes with some extra niceties such as some really nice looking CRT style graphic shaders and resizable window support. As far as I could tell, Gold Box Companion does not work with this more modern fork, at least I couldn't get it to work.

Long term I'd like to make this more full featured and looking prettier (not sure if I want to build a full GUI or just leave it in the terminal) and implement as many of the niceties that GBC has as I can. I just wanted to check if there would be much interest in a project like this.

[Manofhart]

The tool progressed a little, just making it look a little nicer. Still in the terminal and still just a party HUD so far. I added a layout selector so it can be customized slightly. AFAIK GBC always locks above the Dosbox window and I wanted something I could float off to the side, see screenshots for a couple different layouts.

Next up working on displaying conditions and effects. Currently i just know where the poisoned and unconscious flags are so i need to figure out what all the rest are. These might differ by game so might be a bit of work. After that I plan on starting to add some of the more useful hacks that will need memory and save game hacking. Curious on what hacks from GBC people find the most useful. The hacked 'Fix' command is probably my vote, I remember using that alot to get rid of level drain in PoR as I couldn't be bothered to cure it properly.

[ProphetSword]

Looks like a good start.  Not sure how many folks are using Linux to run FRUA or the other Gold-Box games, but there might be some and you never know who might find this thread in the future.

Is there a link to the work or is it not ready to be released yet? (I don't see a link is why I'm asking, but I could have missed it).

Are you planning to have the mapping tools like GBC does?  That's the most essential part of the tool to me.  I love uncovering the map a piece at a time.

Great work so far.

[Manofhart]

Right now it's just a few hours work for the proof of concept, so the codes a bit of a mess. I'm going to work on cleaning it up and I'll drop the source link and a first build hopefully this weekend. Fully open source so anyone can fork it or do what they want with it.

Definitely want to add mapping tools! I don't think the terminal is going to be robust enough for that though so it'll likely wait until I can start on a proper GUI.

[ProphetSword]

Either way, I'm sure folks who use Linux will be happy to have a native tool they can use.

[basswipe]

I've been using Linux (currently Ubuntu MATE 24.04) as my daily driver for the last 16 years.

For me I have everything running in a fairly simple manner. Wine and DosBox should be installed of course.

I got all my copies of the GB games including FRUA at the GOG website. I then use the native Linux GOG client MiniGalaxy to download and install games. You can play games through MiniGalaxy but I prefer using a Wine frontend which in my case is WineGui to launch games,this also allows me to easily add a shortcut that points toward the executable file needed to launch GBC just as I would with any of the games. Within GBC you can find Frua Module Manager and add a shortcut to it's executable in WineGui and have instant access to all FRUA modules and adding a module is a one click deal.

[Manofhart]

Yeah, running the whole thing through Wine works. I started writing this because I wanted to learn Rust, and this gave me a reason to. GBC also doesn't attach to DOSBox Staging which is what I prefer to use, so that was a big part of why I started this.

[malcyon]

I am working on an automapper and character editor for the Commodore 64 version of the game. Mostly because I want to play the C64 version, and no one seems to have made a tool for it. Mine uses Python and QT, runs on Linux or Windows, and connects to the VICE emulator.

I would like to be able to import a DOS save so that it's playable on the C64, and also export a C64 save to an Amiga, so that you could import your C64 characters into an Amiga version of Pools of Darkness.

It works pretty well so far, though it still has a lot of bugs. It's still in heavy development at the moment. I'll make a more official post when it's more ready.

https://github.com/malcyon/wish