sourceforge tarball was a prebuilt binary (at least the one I downloaded).
I saw that the source code is here: https://github.com/sezero/quakespasm/tree/master/Quake
The default Makefile might need some editing for a successful compilation.

Artur

On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 at 13:45, Alan Ianson <agianson@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 15:32:38 +0200
Artur Tamm <artur.tamm.85@gmail.com> wrote:

> did you try to compile quakespasm yourself?

Yes, I emerged 0.94.1 and also the git version (0.95.1) using the quakespasm-9999.ebuild. Both of those are from the gentoo guru repository. I also built 0.95.1 myself from the tarball at the quakespasm sourceforge site but none of those will run for me here. I'm not sure why.