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At the moment, The Ur-Quan Masters doesn’t work on AMD64. This is a shame, because I just found it and realised Star Control II was the game that I had played on my friend-down-the-road’s computer so many years ago.

Attempting to fix this by forcing the install of the 32-bit version of uqm doesn’t work, because for some reason then apt won’t recognise that it is installed and complain that uqm-content has unmet dependencies. So here’s the official recommendation from me:

1. Install uqm normally with the package manager.
2. Download the i386 .debs, extract them and overwrite the binary files from uqm (there are two of them).
3. Install ia32-libs-sdl for the 32-bit versions of the libraries it depends on.

… and it should work perfectly. If you want voice-overs and music (yes!), head to the UQM download page, and download the second two files listed under “Content” (you already have the first). These are in fact just renamed zip files, so unzip them to /usr/share/games/uqm/content/ and you’re good to go.

And the game? Excellent. This is much better than the last game I bought—Civilization IV.