Baldur’s Gate 2 and Icewind Dale on the PS3

I recently discovered a recreation of Bioware’s Infinity Engine which runs Baldur’s Gate 2, IceWind Dale 1 and 2, and Planescape Torment. The project, named GemRB (”Game engine made (with) (pre)Rendered Background”), is still in alpha and the games aren’t fully playable, but it looks promising!

With a little work and some help from the GemRB discussion forum I was able to get it running on the PS3 under Yellow Dog Linux 6. Here are some screenshots of Icewind Dale running on my system using gemRB:

There were no performance issues on the PS3 — the game appears to run at full speed. The sound effects are perfect, but I have not yet been able to get the music to play. There isn’t much to do in the games at this time since a number of features haven’t been implement yet, but it’s great to see an engine for these games running on the PS3.

For more information, check out the GemRB wiki and the Sourceforge project homepage. The GemRB discussion forum can be found here.

If you want to try it yourself, be sure to grab the latest source from SVN. Here’s a basic howto:

1. Open a terminal window and create a folder where you’d like to download the source. For example, I use a build folder in my home directory:

mkdir build

2. Change to your new folder and download the source with this command:

cd build

svn co https://gemrb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gemrb/gemrb/trunk gemrb

3. Change to the gemrb source folder and run autogen.sh to prepare for compilation:

cd gemrb

./autogen.sh

You may need to install additional libraries on your system — the configure script should point these out.

4. Run make and make install. This will compile gemRB and install it in a GemRB folder in your home directory. You can run both commands on one line like so:

make && make install

5. Change to your new ~/GemRB folder and edit GemRB.cfg.sample. To set it up for Icewind Dale, I made the following changes and saved it as GemRB.cfg in the ~/GemRB folder:

GameType=iwdGameName=Icewind Dale   

GamePath=/media/apricorn/gatedata/icewind/   

CD1=/media/apricorn/diskimages/icewind1/   

CD2=/media/apricorn/diskimages/icewind2/cd2/   

PluginsPath=./plugins/   

EndianSwitch=1

The GamePath is a folder where I copied a complete install of Icewind Dale from a Windows PC (you can install Icewind Dale on Windows via QEMU if necessary), and the CD1 and CD2 folders are where I copied all the files from the two install CDs. The EndianSwitch=1 is necessary for game to run properly on the PS3.

6. Finally, run gemrb. I had to “hide” the music folder from gemrb because it crashed when attempting to play the music at the title screen. Also on my system I don’t have a /dev/dsp — it is /dev/dsp1 instead, so I made a symbolic link to /dev/dsp1.

Renaming the music folder:

mv /media/apricorn/gatedata/icewind/music /media/apricorn/gatedata/icewind/music.bak

Making a link to /dev/dsp1:

sudo ln -s /dev/dsp1 /dev/dsp

Starting gemrb:

cd ~/GemRB

./gemrb