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Ravage's Installer for Linux.

Have you checked out Openbox? It is a minimalistic window manager based off of Blackbox (Similar to WindowMaker), and adds some nice refining touches. These include scrolling your mousewheel on a window titlebar to shade up and down with ease, optimization for remote X forwarding (runs very nice remotely from my PS2), actually.. just read the About section on the site for the details.

Have you checked out Openbox? It is a minimalistic window manager based off of Blackbox (Similar to WindowMaker), and adds some nice refining touches. These include scrolling your mousewheel on a window titlebar to shade up and down with ease, optimization for remote X forwarding (runs very nice remotely from my PS2), actually.. just read the About section on the site for the details.

i have yet to find a WM that fits all of my needs. for now i'm using blackbox

Since you're already in the box family, have you tried Openbox?

[The game companies] label [efforts to make older games available through downloads and emulators] piracy that could undercut future efforts to reissue such games in the form of classic compilations or to update them as remakes.

Ok, so the plan is to bring out a collection of old games for the Atari XL or the ZX 81 or the C64 in the future? And there will be enough potential customers so that releasing the game into the public domain (or publishing the code) is a bad move financially??

I don't think so. And even if it was true, how many collections of old (8-Bit) games do you know? And how many follow-ups to a classic game have hit the market and made money?

I guess the real problem is that the old companies do not exist anymore, or have been bought out by other companies. And now nobody in the gaming industry knows or cares who has which rights to those games.

And with regard to 'remakes': the Duke Nukem 3D source code has been published under the GPL. Ports have been created. Will this hurt the sales of DNF? Go figure ;)

I know people have already recommended Quake 1, but you might have been misled by their suggestions of other games alongside it, creating the appearance that Quake has an equal. Honestly, Quake 1 is all you need. No matter whether you prefer gameplay or eyecandy, Quake has the hookup, and an active development community to ensure it stays that way. Hell, run the Team Fortress mod with the DarkPlaces engine and have your cake and eat it!

Just as SDL_image provides additional image loading, SDL_sound provides additional sound loading, SDL_mixer provides a nicer interface to SDL's audio layer, and SDL_ttf and SDL_bmf add font loading interfaces, there are add-ons for primitives (SDL_draw, SDL_gfx, SDL_prim, sge) and GUIs (paraGUI, SDL_gui, wGui, GUIlib, aedGUI).

As you note, SDL is really a simple audio and framebuffer abstraction, and that's all it's ever been intended to be. A quick glance at the SDL library page, however, gives a quick idea of how extensions are kept modular, and how many there are for almost all reasonable applications of SDL.

Or, to put it another way, the tools are there -- but do you really want them in the core if all you're after is a simple framebuffer?

I would recommend pyDance or Stepmania for exercise in a fun, hasslefree and open source flavor.
You just need a dance mat and a PSX2PC adapter to start. You can do it at home, you can start on a slow and easy level and get better while seeing the success in your scores and a half hour can easily get your shirt soaked with sweat.

I wonder if Icculus (Ryan C. Gordon) of Loki fame had anything to do with this?? Oh yes he did.

It shouldn't have been that hard to port the code for the linux client over to mac os, since both architectures are similar. Regardless, good job Icculus :)

Since Loki is defunct you should check out the icculus.org page for more up-to-date information. Not that they have all that much information there either...

To my knowledge it doesn't do any real dependency checking. If the correct libraries are not installed then it just won't work. Since it's really intended for third party software and not core functionality this isn't as big a problem as it could be. After all, it's always possible to use your package manager to grab whatever libraries you're missing manually, and with a resonably up to date system you really shouldn't have to worry about that very often (I've never really had a problem with it). I'll admit that ideally this is something the user shouldn't have to do, but with so many different distributions out there with so many different package managers it's not an easy issue to solve. I know I would never want a tool like this to go installing libraries outside of my package management system, since that kind of defeats the entire purpose of package management.

On the upside there is a corresponding uninstaller and it seems to work just fine. At least I have never had any problems with it.

Loki Setup is now maintained by icculus.org. However, I think that any good package scheme (read: RPM, DEB, Portage, or whatever) is better than this if the administrative tools are good.

[...] to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this BSD box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes.

I owned a Dual Pentium Pro 200 running NT4. What's even funnier is I owned it and the poor fool didn't discover I was serving MP3s (with Gnutella protocol) until about two months later! I did this by hiding the crackapp name of my custom gnutella server from the POSIX tasklist and only would serve the MP3s to the Gnutella network while another filetransfer was active by the local user. 1337 cr4x0r h47h 0wn3d j00!

My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times.

That's not uncommon. I own a 486/25 with 4MB of RAM, S3 video, XFree86-3.3.5, and I telnet to my GS140 AlphaServer, issue a "export DISPLAY='192.168.1.66:0.0'," and finish it off with a "darkplaces >/dev/null 2>&1." I get Icculus' DarkPlaces Quake1 engine playing on my 486/25 machine at about 300 frames per second in software rendering, but alas my 486/25 can effectivly only update the X Server display at about 20 frames per second. Still, my 487/25 is playing DarkPlaces twice as fast as your Pentium3/800! That makes my freeBSD 486/25 much faster than your measly Pentium3/800! And with Linux on the GS140, I have a great team-alliance for stability and performance.

You realy need to ditch that M1cr0$l07h W1nd0z3 NT4 in favor of an operating system that can at-least handle more than four CPUs and USB/Firewire, becuase NT4 is sooo-obsolete, same for ActiveDirectory and IIS; just use Apache/FetchMail/ProFTP

or Unreal Touney ?

Gary (-;

Linux Gamers' FAQ

Sadly, no. It will take a lot more than two games to get this gamer anywhere near taking Linux seriously as a gaming platform. I go through more than two games in a week.

Two games?

Strange, here's a list of 282 native linux games. Some free, some commercial.
Still, not as many as I'd like, but more than two. And if you go through 2 a week, that should keep you busy for the next two and a half years, at which time surely more games will be made or ported.

Some trolls have been astroturfing saying that emulation is a bad idea and will prevent anything from ever going native.

I think you may be slightly confused as to what trolling or astroturfing is.

Most people I know that have a dislike for transgaming do so for various legitimate reasons.

Transgaming directly competes with the few companies left that do native ports.
They provide forums for games like, Unreal tournamnet, Return to castle wolfenstien Majesty, and many many others which have native ports.
This has to hurt the efforts of companies like Linux Game Publishing and guys like icculus

And You have to wonder if companies like Epic, Id, and Bioware will continue to spend money on porting games themselves if people can play their games at 80 or 90 percent speed with winex.

BTW, if you want to support native ports for linux, here's a list of 282 free or commercial games out there that don't require winex.

Some trolls have been astroturfing saying that emulation is a bad idea and will prevent anything from ever going native.

I think you may be slightly confused as to what trolling or astroturfing is.

Most people I know that have a dislike for transgaming do so for various legitimate reasons.

Transgaming directly competes with the few companies left that do native ports.
They provide forums for games like, Unreal tournamnet, Return to castle wolfenstien Majesty, and many many others which have native ports.
This has to hurt the efforts of companies like Linux Game Publishing and guys like icculus

And You have to wonder if companies like Epic, Id, and Bioware will continue to spend money on porting games themselves if people can play their games at 80 or 90 percent speed with winex.

BTW, if you want to support native ports for linux, here's a list of 282 free or commercial games out there that don't require winex.

Please.. I just tried this thing out. Sure it's "minimalist", but without Xinerama support, *real* window cycling or any intelligent placement, it's useless to me. Use blackbox or one of it's derivatives (personally I'm a fan of Openbox), turn off window decorations, and you get everything Evil gives you.

Hell, I use it on my 1.3 GHz Athlon... Actually I've been using Openbox for a while now; I like its window placement and sticking a bit better than Blackbox, but since it's based on the same code, it's still nice and fast and still pretty.

There was a distro I tried out not long ago that let you play Solitaire while it installed... I can't recall if it was Lycoris or what, but I'm sure it's on my list.

If you liked DDR, then you'll probably like to check out pyDDR, a DDR clone written in Python and PyGame. It's got a buttload of dependencies but other than that it looks beautiful.

If you liked DDR, then you'll probably like to check out pyDDR, a DDR clone written in Python and PyGame. It's got a buttload of dependencies but other than that it looks beautiful.

If you liked DDR, then you'll probably like to check out pyDDR, a DDR clone written in Python and PyGame. It's got a buttload of dependencies but other than that it looks beautiful.

If you liked DDR, then you'll probably like to check out pyDDR, a DDR clone written in Python and PyGame. It's got a buttload of dependencies but other than that it looks beautiful.

"Speed optimization has _never_ in my 5 years of using VC++ produced bad code..."

You make a fairly bold claim that the VC optimizer does not mangle code, especially after proving your limited experience. For a simple example go see the SMPEG mpeg decoder. The core audio decoding functions must be compiled with VC's global optimizations off or it will bork bork bork.

It's very sad that after 10 years, I can finally play the original Sam & Max: Hit the Road under Linux using an emulator that LucasArts doesn't approve of (ScummVM), yet now that they is releasing a new game and has the opportunity to support multiple platforms they're only offering it for Windows! *Sigh* I guess I'll just have to hope that someone at Icculus ports it, or WineX supports it...Does anybody know of a way to let LucasArts know that I'd like a Linux port?

> Want Linux Games? Transgaming [transgaming.com]

Nice try :p
you'll find Linux games here and here
Transgaming offers a way to running Windowsgames on linux
and I think the transgaming referrer competition ended some time ago :p

For news on this and a bunch of other ports to Linux and OS X, go directly to the source: the .plan of Ryan Gordon (AKA icculus). Former Loki employee, personally responsible for over half of the Linux ports of commercial games which have come out since Loki's demise. How the guy manages to do it all, I'll never know.

The Linux client at Bioware's webpage requires you to first install the files with the windows installer and replace some files, not sure which ones.
If you don't bother all this you can download a graphical GTK+ installer from here, make sure you have support for Joilet.

I believe Epic made the case against another Linux release when they revealed the server connection stats a while back. See the post here. Sure, there are quite a few good reasons that the numbers may be artificially low, but that's a completely different subject.

Hopefully the folks at icculus.org can come up with a way to play Unreal II using Unreal 2003 as they did with Unreal, Unreal Gold, and Return to Na Pali

I believe Epic made the case against another Linux release when they revealed the server connection stats a while back. See the post here. Sure, there are quite a few good reasons that the numbers may be artificially low, but that's a completely different subject.

Hopefully the folks at icculus.org can come up with a way to play Unreal II using Unreal 2003 as they did with Unreal, Unreal Gold, and Return to Na Pali

I believe Epic made the case against another Linux release when they revealed the server connection stats a while back. See the post here. Sure, there are quite a few good reasons that the numbers may be artificially low, but that's a completely different subject.

Hopefully the folks at icculus.org can come up with a way to play Unreal II using Unreal 2003 as they did with Unreal, Unreal Gold, and Return to Na Pali

vbslacker is a half complete attempt to get VB working in Linux. Currently has no active maintainer (icculus is rather busy). Feel free to try and help out if you can.

TTYQuake
TTY UT
and the TTY UT movies
Movies!
Which work in Cygwin, very cool watch.

Plus the method used by TTY UT will work for ANY SDL-based Linux app, so matrix in ASCII
xterm -fn micro -geometry 240x150 -e aaxine -driver slang -width 240 \
-height 150 dvd://01.1 dvd://02.0 dvd://02.1 dvd://02.2 dvd://02.3 \
dvd://02.4 dvd://02.5 dvd://02.6 dvd://03.0 dvd://03.1 dvd://03.2
(so the pages says, never tried, must fix my linux install at some point :)

TTYQuake
TTY UT
and the TTY UT movies
Movies!
Which work in Cygwin, very cool watch.

Plus the method used by TTY UT will work for ANY SDL-based Linux app, so matrix in ASCII
xterm -fn micro -geometry 240x150 -e aaxine -driver slang -width 240 \
-height 150 dvd://01.1 dvd://02.0 dvd://02.1 dvd://02.2 dvd://02.3 \
dvd://02.4 dvd://02.5 dvd://02.6 dvd://03.0 dvd://03.1 dvd://03.2
(so the pages says, never tried, must fix my linux install at some point :)

While more games/quality software is the first step, the second step is to promote linux distros that are stupid-easy to setup, with games and drivers that are stupid-easy to install.

The demise of windows won't come until the average user feels comfortable taking a step up from windowz to something else. The problem I see is that for the average user, anything involving a command line and editing random config files is two steps up.

Honestly, I can walk my mom through a win98 install over the phone. I'd never want to consider trying the same with most linux distros, except maybe RH or Mandrake.

While nvidia has made some huge strides with their latest drivers, until we see that same sort of "stupid easy" on everything else, I don't see linux exploding into mainstream use. But at the same time, with the maturity we've seen in just the last few years, I don't think it really will be that much longer before it does explode - Especially with the work people like Ryan Gordon are doing. ;)

Yuck. Try openbox. It's light, customisable, and has creamy antialiasing.

Some friends and I already ported David Rosen's incredible Black Shades to Linux. Which is reasonably similar to my last port, Orbital Eunuchs Sniper.

Some friends and I already ported David Rosen's incredible Black Shades to Linux. Which is reasonably similar to my last port, Orbital Eunuchs Sniper.

I'm missing [An original Duke Nukem CD to get the configuration files and game data]. Anybody have a working binary they can put up for download?

Sure, it's abandoware. You can download Duke Nukem 3D from here (it's only a 16MB download), and what's in my opinion very interesting is that there's even a link to the Linux port on that website! Well, I guess abandonware really is about libre software, after all. I think it's a good sign for the whole Open Source community.

Like this one?

Actually, it was done with the BUILD engine, which is at http://www.icculus.org/BUILD/ . Looks like they have several of them working, including both Redneck Rampage and Redneck Rampage Rides Again.

Actually, it was done with the BUILD engine, which is at http://www.icculus.org/BUILD/ . Looks like they have several of them working, including both Redneck Rampage and Redneck Rampage Rides Again.

It looks like it could be possible, as the icculus guys used SDL to do this. SDL works on OS X right? It's possible but I won't say it will be easy as I don't know how much of the code is x86 asm./

I'd like it too.. and you can go to here and download it. Port its i386 asm to PowerPC and build it. It'd be considerably less work than porting Duke3D itself over.

Rather than graphics and other stuff, the asm code would be the big deal, and it doesn't appear to be too substantial.

You'd still need to convert the "AudioLib" to SDL or CoreAudio, but that should be doable too.

The hard work has already been done. In fact, there is a Duke3D port in progress at Icculus.org. The game is playable currently under Linux, even in hires modes (which the original game did not support). There is still a lot of polishing to do and mouse support doesn't work, but being able to play the game within 36 hours of the source release is a good thing.

Check out Transfusion
And The BUILD port project

Also, the BUILD BUILD engine has already been ported to Win32 and Linux, so getting Duke3D working should be straight forward.

Just wanted to point out to everyone (it's been mentioned before in some replys, but what the heck) that there are *TWO* unofficial Linux data installers available here and here. All you need are your installation CDs. No Windows partition required.

After installing the data, you're then going to need some form of Wine (the latest Wine worked for me). You then add the following to the end of ~/.wine/system.reg:

[Software//Bioware//NWN//Neverwinter] 1048122278
"Location"="X://nwn"

With drive X (or what have you) set up to point to wherever the nwn data directory is.

Finally you download and run the standalone patch using Wine.

-Colin

Go here for an installer for Linux, so you don't need an existing Windows Intall: http://icculus.org/~ravage/nwn/