To whom it may concern, FYI, FWIW, etc...

The native Loki port on Ubuntu 20.04, patched (4.0a):
The statically linked executable: works out of the box (needs OSS emulation for sound)
The dynamically linked executable: works out of the box with the Loki Compat libs (see its README)

Seemingly the only advantage of the latter is the possibility to make it use ALSA to output sound instead of OSS which seems to be the only option with the former (need to get PulseAudio as the default ALSA device out of the way).

Both have the problem of using SDL1 which upon going fullscreen will put those with a modern multi-monitor setup in a world of pain.
To use the sdl-compat shim with it (and have a pain-free fullscreen experience) see https://github.com/libsdl-org/sdl12-compat/issues/176#issuecomment-1114446221
YMMV obviously.

Thanks for supporting Alpha Centauri in play.it! I stopped running Windows at home years ago and never though I'd get to play Alpha Centauri. Around the turn of the millennium I bought the game for Windows 98, but life was too busy and I never got around to enjoying it. Now there's another chance.

If it wasn't for your scripts and your post here I wouldn't have purchased the game from GOG today. Thanks for helping a random person have a nice Saturday. :-)

Cheers and best wishes,

Well it worked okay for the first hour, but as I've learned the game a bit and started clicking menus faster the game now freezes with 100% CPU usage if I'm not careful.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. If I ever resurrect my windows VM I'll give it an another go.

Do you run the game on top of the real old SDL 1.2 library, or the sdl12-compat wrapper for SDL 2 that current distributions are starting to ship instead?

The people maintaining sdl12-compat are very reactive and already fixed several bugs I reported related to Alpha Centauri, so maybe your freezes could be fixed too (or have already been fixed, if you are not running the latest sdl12-compat).

Sorry I took so long to reply. I ended up installing windows XP in a virtual machine and played the whole game there. The base OS was still Linux of course.