[[!meta title="ZSNES on AMD64 Ubuntu"]]
[[!meta date="2010-10-06"]]
[[!meta author="rohieb"]]
[[!meta license="CC-BY-SA 3.0"]]
[[!flattrthing id=80701]]

**[ Update, 2013-10:** This post post is not up to date anymore. On newer
Debians (since 7.0/wheezy) and Ubuntus (at least since 12.04, Precise Pangolin),
you should be able to install zsnes out of the box: `sudo apt-get install
zsnes:i386`. For details see the MultiArch documentation for
[Debian][MultiArchDebian] and [Ubuntu][MultiArchUbuntu]. **]**

[MultiArchDebian]: https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/
[MultiArchUbuntu]: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MultiArch

Before I bought my current hardware, I was working on a 32-bit-based
system, and I really appreciated ZSNES as an SNES emulator. But
unfortunately, my new hardware was an AMD64 system, and there is
currently no ZSNES package for 64-bit Ubuntu or Debian :( So I decided
to google a bit about the issue, but it took me until now (a year later)
to get ZSNES finally working on my machine. The problem is, if you build
ZSNES on a 64-bit machine, all the application does is segfault at
start, and if you [try to compile for 32-bit systems][0], you get errors
about missing 32-bit libs (in particular, configure does not find a
suitable `libsdl`). Instead, if you just take the binary which was
compiled on a 32-bit system, and install the `ia32-libs` package,
everything seems to work—at least I was able to play a few levels of
Super Mario World succesfully :-) 

[0]: http://board.zsnes.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=118067&sid=dd9a2a54d9178eb5009c33586aea703c#p118067

So here was my idea: take the 32-bit package from the Ubuntu repository,
and just change the Architecture control field, and by this fool dpkg :P
And as it turned out, this idea worked great. You can get the Debian
package here if you want, it *should* work for Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid,
as well as for Debian testing (**but** I only tested it on Lucid, so
there is no warranty here—but I’m happy to hear if it works :-)):

* [zsnes_1.510-2.2ubuntu3~ppa1_amd64.deb][2]
* SHA1: `716bbd37267b477ef02961a7727212619309b83f`
* MD5: `452ea5230ad17df1dee649ab4cc6c8c0`

[2]: http://rohieb.name/stuff/zsnes_1.510-2.2ubuntu3~ppa1_amd64.deb

## How to Reproduce It
For the curious people reading here, here is what I actually did:

1.  `wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/z/zsnes/zsnes_1.510-2.2ubuntu3_i386.deb`
2.  `ar x zsnes_1.510-2.2ubuntu3_i386.deb`
3.  `tar xzf data.tar.gz`
4.  Edit `usr/share/applications/zsnes.desktop` and added `-ad sdl` to the
    `Exec:` field, otherwise it would just segfault on the first run:

        Exec=zsnes -ad sdl

5.  Edit `usr/share/doc/zsnes/changelog.Debian.gz` and added a new
    changelog entry for the version (just copy one of the previous
    entries and adapt it)
6.  `tar xzf control.tar.gz`
7.  Edit the `control` file, changed the `Version:` and `Architecture:`
    field to `amd64`, added the `ia32-libs` dependency, and set myself as
    maintainer:

        Package: zsnes
        Version: 1.510-2.2ubuntu3~ppa1
        Architecture: amd64
        Maintainer: Roland Hieber <foobar@example.org>
        Installed-Size: 4160
        Depends: ia32-libs, libao2 (>= 0.8.8), libc6 (>= 2.4), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1),
          libgl1-mesa-glx | libgl1, libpng12-0 (>= 1.2.13-4),
          libsdl1.2debian (>= 1.2.10-1), libstdc++6 (>= 4.1.1), zlib1g (>= 1:1.2.2.3)
        [...]

8.  Change the `md5sums` file for the right values for
    `usr/share/applications/zsnes.desktop` and
    `usr/share/doc/zsnes/changelog.Debian.gz` (I used the `md5sum`
    command and copy-pasted it)
9.  `tar czf control.tar.gz control md5sums postrm postinst`
0.  `tar czf data.tar.gz usr/`
1.  `ar r zsnes_1.510-2.2ubuntu3~ppa1_amd64.deb debian-binary
    control.tar.gz data.tar.gz`

I’m afraid that I can’t put the package into [my PPA][3], Launchpad only
accepts source packages for uploads, and builds the binary packages
itself, both for i386 and AMD64. This approach can not be used here,
since we needed the i386 binary for AMD64.

[3]: https://launchpad.net/~rohieb/+archive/ppa

[[!tag Debian hacking howto Ubuntu workaround Linux packaging
    Ubuntu_Jaunty Ubuntu_Karmic ZSNES]]