TuxKart 0.4.0 for Win32

TuxKart is the predecessor to SuperTuxKart, an open-source arcade racing game. Development on the original TuxKart stalled in 2004. The TuxKart website is still online on Sourceforge.

There has never been official Windows support for TuxKart, but it could run if compiled with Cygwin. From the Requirements page:

Right now, TuxKart only runs under Linux - and under Windoze using the CygWin package. I anticipate MSVC/Windoze, MacOS, BSD, BeOS, Solaris and IRIX ports to follow very soon.

Even on a native Linux install, sound is unlikely to work due to TuxKart's usage of the all-but-dead OSS. OSS compatibility exists through ALSA, but I'm unsure how well it would work within a WSL environment.

However, there is good news: PLIB, the gaming library used by TuxKart, supports Windows Multimedia, and ancient-but-somehow-still-hanging-on set of APIs that happens to provide support for sound! This is how sound works with Cygwin, after all. But we can do one better: native Win32 TuxKart using MinGW.

Building

The easy way (Docker)

You'll need the following:

• Docker
• A bash shell
• Linux (native or WSL is fine)

Just run ./build.sh from the cloned repository directory, and wait. Hopefully by the end, you'll have a tuxkart.exe and related directories in the out/ subdirectory.

The harder way

If you can't (or don't want to) use Docker, store-bought MinGW toolchain is fine too.

You'll need:

• A bash shell
• A i686-w64-mingw32 G++ toolchain
• Lots of patience

First, run build.sh without the build steps. This will download and extract the tarballs, and apply the required patches.

NOBUILD=1 ./build.sh

The source trees are now available in ./build. The rest of the steps are normal enough for a MinGW cross-compilation:

# Set a prefix so it doesn't end up in /usr!
prefix=/tmp/tuxkart

cd build/plib-1.8.5-rc1
./configure --host=i686-w64-mingw32 --prefix=$prefix
make && make install

# Ok, now build TuxKart:
cd ../tuxkart-0.4.0
# Static link everything
LDFLAGS="-static-libgcc -static-libstdc++" \
    ./configure --host=i686-w64-mingw32 --prefix=$prefix
make && make install

At this point, the game should be at $prefix/games/tuxkart.exe. The last step is to put all the datafiles in the same place, so tuxkart.exe looks in the right place:

mv $prefix/share/games/tuxkart/* $prefix/games/