Compiling Mesa 2.6 for Quake 2

Two GL libraries come with the Linux Quake2 distribution: lib3dfxgl.so and libMesaGL.so.2.6. The first is an id Software port of the 3Dfx minigl for MS Windows and the second is Mesa 2.6 compiled for Voodoo with Quake optimizations. lib3dfxgl.so is binary only and can do 640x480 tops in GLX mode. The Mesa library could do more but was not compiled to do so. Instructions follow, to compile Mesa 2.6 for higher resolutions to be used with V2 at 800x600, V2s SLI at 1024x768 and Banshee/V3 up to 1280x1024. I don't set it up for more than that because 1280 is a little too slow. Mesa 3.0 and 3.1 don't work quite right with Quake2: textures on moving objects don't show up (people and guns). John Carmack has been reported to say that they will update GLQuake and Quake2 after Quake 3 Arena delivers.

• Get the Mesa 2.6 source
• Untar it with "tar -zxvf Mesa-2.6.tar.gz"
• Edit two files with these changes:
  1. Mesa-2.6/mklib.glide
  2. Mesa-2.6/src/fxmesa1.c
• Compiling: There are a few linux-glide optimizations. You can try all three and benchmark each.
  • "make linux-glide" for Linux w/ 3Dfx Glide driver
  • "make linux-386-glide" for Linux w/ 3Dfx Glide driver, Intel assembly
  • "make linux-386-quake-glide" for Linux w/ 3Dfx for GLQuake, Intel assembly
• As root do a "cp -d lib/libMesaGL.so.*" to the quake2 directory.