Download and Install The Bub's Brothers

Instructions for release 1.5

On Windows

Download the file called bubbros-1.5-win.zip from the latest release on SourceForge.
Unpack it using WinZip or some equivalent tool.
Run it by double-clicking on the BubBob program with the nice icon.

That's it! If you want very slightly better graphics (translucent bubbles), you may want to consider downloading and installing Pygame. This might also be a tad faster, depending on your hardware. You can choose the sound and display drivers to use in the Display and sound settings link on the main page in BubBob.

Client-only: if you don't want to download the big (11.9MB) release for Windows and are only interested in connecting to a Bub & Bros server that someone else started, you can get the smaller "client only" pack bubbros-1.5-win-clientonly.zip from the release. (This is only recommended if the connexion between you and the Bub & Bros server is high-speed, because your client will download all the graphics and sound from the game server while playing.)

Bug: on Windows XP, it seems that Bub & Bros does not work if installed in a path with spaces in it, like "c:\documents and settings\someuser\Desktop\bubbros". Move it to a path like "c:\games\bubbros".

Bug: on machines that are not connected to a network, BubBob will not start, or (with luck) start very slowly.

On MacOS X

On recent MacOS X distributions, MacPython 2.3.0 is already installed. You must only install Pygame from here. If you cannot find the application PackageManager mentionned in that page, then you don't have a recent distribution. You better have a fast internet connection then, because you should grab and install the big pygame-1.3.4-osx-kitchensink archive.
Download the file called bubbros-1.5.tar.gz from the latest release on SourceForge.
Unpack it (by double-clicking on it).
Optional step: to enable one more cool bonus (the Clock) you have to download the MacOS X version of statesaver.so and put it into the bubbob subdirectory (there is already a statesaver.c file there).
Run it by double-clicking on BubBob.py.

That's it!

Client-only: if you don't want to download the big (11MB) release and the big (35MB) kitchensink and are only interested in connecting to a Bub & Bros server that someone else started, you can get the tiny "client only" pack bubbros-1.5-clientonly.zip from the release. (This is only recommended if the connexion between you and the Bub & Bros server is high-speed, because your client will download all the graphics and sound from the game server while playing.)

Linux (and others X-Window Unix)

You need Python 2.2 or 2.3. It doesn't work with older versions of Python for very good reasons (not just because I was lazy to port it there): the whole game logic is done with generators, a feature only introduced in Python 2.2. Recent distributions come with Python 2.2 or 2.3 preinstalled; otherwise see www.python.org.
Download the source file, either bubbros-1.5.tar.gz or bubbros-1.5.tar.bz2 from the latest release on SourceForge.
Unpack it with tar xfz bubbros-1.5.tar.gz or tar xfj bubbros-1.5.tar.bz2, and then cd bubbros-1.5 to change to this new directory.
Type make to build the two small C extension modules. Regular Python code does not have to be compiled, so this should be fast. However, you will need a -dev installation of Python to do this. If you get an error message, Linux users on PCs can download precompiled versions: statesaver.so (to put in bubbros-1.5/bubbob) and xshm.so (to put in bubbros-1.5/display).
Execute ./BubBob.py to start it. You can also type python BubBob.py.

That's it!

Client-only: if you don't want to download the big release (8.5MB in bz2, 11MB in gz) and are only interested in connecting to a Bub & Bros server that someone else started, you can get the tiny "client only" pack bubbros-1.5-clientonly.zip from the release. (This is only recommended if the connexion between you and the Bub & Bros server is high-speed, because your client will download all the graphics and sound from the game server while playing.)

On iPAQ

Huh?

Yes, it works just fine on a networked iPAQ under Linux :-) (It probably runs just fine almost anywhere, actually.) Here is how you can have a client (display part) on your iPAQ. You need to install Python and the PyGTK bindings using the regular package manager tools, and then all you need is the bubbros-1.5-clientonly.zip from the release.

Start a server on some other machine, and then run the client on the iPAQ with
cd bubbros-1.5/display
python Client.py --display=gtk --zoom=50% servername

Adjust the zoom factor to fit your screen.

If something goes wrong, see the technical documentation.

Armin Rigo and the IMA connection

The Bub's Brothers Home page